Category: Poetry

Travis Mossotti

Inside the cold of January where my daughter plays soccer in a converted warehouse—the old loading dock permanently shut behind the goal where the goalie waits for the play to start up again, knees bent and ready—and the other team has driven a long way from the outskirts of outer-outer ring suburbs built on old dirt farms where every constructed thing down to the Dollar Stores and Amazon distribution centers seems fixed with Elmer’s glue atop tornado prone fields, and their parents watch the game as seriously as hedge fund managers might watch the Bloomberg ticker. In the minds of these parents, the ref is crooked, but I know he’s just the guy working the concession stand on other nights who probably has other things on his mind (like the pilot light of his furnace) and good for him, I think. Although the parents on my daughter’s team are not thinking about the game, they watch, hoping their daughters don’t get injured in any meaningful way. Like me, they’re thinking about brushing up on their French before a trip to Paris this spring and calculating which prep school will offer the highest yield. A little girl in the crowd, maybe seven years old, from the other team is not watching her big sister play, but she’s singing the refrain to a song she knows by heart—loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to be disruptive—and her voice is okay and I’m thinking how she might be a young Adele in the making. With the right training and sufficient ambition and lucky breaks—I mean talent can come from anywhere, right? I don’t mean to look down my nose at them. At the words they say and how poorly they take the loss and how long their trip home must feel with their daughters’ disappointment hued like the inside of a red rose that will never open. How that little girl with the voice will keep practicing the notes she knows might help her escape and what her escape might look like: Vegas, five shows per week? The well-oiled roulette wheels on the casino floors spinning in unison as the little ivory balls start to dance back and forth between red and black.     

Sandra Meek

Almanac

Lampblack sparks

arrant stars, flak’s

avatars. A bat’s

a hatchway: gang-

plank. Wand.

At stalls, hands

hack what

flaps, a day’s

catch; a palm’s

wan map charms

data drawn

as dash—what

was strand,

swarms.

Bluff

Truth unspun,

untruths spun

murmur trust

us. But

drums trump

susurrus.

Whipstitch

Silk lining

twilight rips,

night’s nihilist

vigil civil’s

rising bright

splits, twilling

with light its

miring mist;

still, midnight

is sizing

mind in binding

stitch: wind-

circling in -mill’s

kniving twists.

Eyeteeth

Eggshells nestled

between trestles, we

were bells steepled

between vespers; then,

fever beget fewer, melt

beset meld: lest let’s

beget less, helter-

skelter we sheltered; wed

beget web, the deepest

velvet tether.

Lockdown

World of blossoms

blown

to two rooms, two doors

to doom:

moot, now, who

to whom;

who’s cork, who

monsoon.

*The accompanying song is composed and performed by the band StarWound.

StarWound

StarWound is a sophisti-pop trio based in Athens, Greece. Their music blends a cabaret ambience with elements of EDM and synth rock. They have released three albums: Miles to Walk (2015), So Wrong (2018), and What Do You See? (2024). Their lyrics—shaped by the philosophical and social concerns of contemporary life—combine realism with poetic expression. Their recent project “Interiors” took them to the USA, where they collaborated with contemporary poets and performed at major American universities across 13 states. The songs of their first three tours will be released by the end of 2026.

Charlotte Pence

ODE TO IRON

It swings our doors.

unlocks our homes,

scuttles our oxygen.

Yet, we don’t think to thank it.

Only when it breaks,

blows, bleeds do we

know what we’ve loved

and simply haven’t called

by name—like the red

bird at the feeder.

Not ours, never ours.

And isn’t that why we point

and ask whoever is near,

Do you know what it’s called?

It isn’t the name we want

but to slash the theoretical

line known as the horizon,

break forth a new ocean

that flows like red,

and that softens the iron

between us.

MISJUDGMENTS

As a child, did you also

find yourself hiding

too long, too often,

in closet or clavicle, above

portico, below patella,

happily cobwebbed

under bed and attic hole?

And did you also, before

the thrush and toilet flush,

before the robin’s chirp

and coffee pot growl,

believe your mother would

enjoy it if you imprisoned yourself

behind the skinny dining-chair legs,

determined never to be found?

Underneath the white tablecloth,

you became a liminal being:

the space between

someone’s daughter

and someone’s lost daughter,

delighting too long

in your mother’s cries,

your name changing,

chambering, pulsing anew

as she pumped it each time.

And not that you knew who

was Demeter, you witnessed

a mother’s grief that day, delighting

as Greek gods do, in spinning

a moment like a China plate

on their fingertips,

marveling how swiftly life can go

from good to crash.

                                   How quickly

her relief ripped around when you

jumped out, laughing. How

the hug you had imagined

slapped your face. How you

couldn’t blame her, not

even then. How, you knew,

you’d do it again.

Anna Leonard

I’m thinking about Will, who I didn’t know well,

Will who killed himself seven or eight years ago,

I’m thinking about his car in Seashore State Park,

Will’s car parked in the woods somewhere by the bay

and the poor soul who recognized him as human,

calcium white against all that green or perhaps

blueing like cyanotype, and I’m considering

the quality of sound the water might’ve made

through the window, if the window was open,

and whether a note was on Will’s chest

or in the passenger or if he thought about me ever,

me who knew Will only from a distance

in the middle school cafeteria, Will who

will only have existed for seventeen years forever

and the water, if proximity to that pulsing wound of earth

made of dying a kindness, if death is a kindness,

and I’m making Will about myself,

who I also didn’t know well, myself who,

seven or eight years ago, was a child, too,

who learned then that children could die alone,

that many of us will die alone, alone

but for the gargling, the wet, the water, the will.

Kelle Groom

for Michael Burkard (1947-2024)

After you died,

you had a dinner party

in a garden at night

Our table for four

down wide stone steps

Green leaves starred

with flowers it was too

dark to see them living

around us but I could

feel them breathing in

our breathing out

that tenderness only

our table lit   ourselves

circled around it you

across from me

Two friends of yours   men

on either side

You’d cooked a dish

with truffles which

was funny as in life my

life with you you

couldn’t really cook

once spooning tuna

from a tin into soup

on the stove trying

to get some protein in

Even in the afterlife

your guests picky

eaters   one man & I

both had items on our

plates we couldn’t eat

& you bowed your

head in laughter

waves of it shaking

so hard it shut

your eyes & you said

that the man & I

could give each other

what we didn’t want

You’d figured out

the entire dilemma &

were so delighted

As when we wanted

to open the Entire Dilemma

Bakery with each cookie

named for a poet

the round shortbread

with a chocolate thumbprint

in the center: the Neruda

poet after poet

deciding what their cookie

would be it seemed we

could just imagine a thing

& it might appear

the happiest I’ve ever

seen you: head bent

eyes down shoulders shaking

body letting go laughing

& laughing look up

I want to say look up.

Chelsea Rathburn

Poem I Wish to Title with the Species Name of My Least Favorite Palmetto Bug but Can’t Because There Are So Many Candidates; or, Another Invasion

The inspector says the name’s a misnomer,

that the great bugs of my childhood were not,

in fact, the Florida woods roaches that dwell

in the fans of cabbage palms and saw palmettos

(uniformly dark, slow-moving, emitting

a foul smell) but American cockroaches

(brown-bodied, tan head), and those are different still

from the smoky-brown cockroaches creeping across

my present-tense living room floor in the mornings.

And still “palmetto bugs” were what we called them,

little winged bombs of misery that dropped

into our beds or rustled behind cupboards

or scuttled into cracks at a beam of light

or, worse, flew at the lamp or the hand on the switch.

At Palmetto High, our unofficial mascot

paraded the halls in poorly painted murals:

think smiling blue cartoon palmetto bug

as Mozart to designate the music wing;

palmetto bug beside a bust of Shakespeare

and holding a feathered quill; palmetto bug

astride a spinning globe. You get the idea.

If I say the phrase “palmetto bug” enough,

do you think it could lose all meaning, the way

so many swarmed from the bottom row of lockers

in the girls’ side of the gym that after a while

we gave up screaming? They became a kind of static

we ignored. Yet the isolated bug—

the sudden intrusion on a wall or ceiling

in a place I should feel safe—still makes me quake

and call for my husband who doesn’t understand

my helpless terror, that I am a child again

in Miami, slipping bare feet into shoes and meeting

the dry armored back with my soft skin.

The cold click of toe against wing. The scramble

of those legs like filaments across my foot,

and my foot trapped inside. Or the wet smear

of their crushing. I learned to check my sneakers,

to tap, then shake them out. A friend tells me

she attended a dinner party where a roach

dropped onto a guest’s salad plate, and I think

of this story every time I host. Each month

the guy who sprays blames the weather—too hot,

too cool, too much rain, not enough—so we’ve called

his boss, who checks the crawl space and the attic

and finds no scurrying, no sign of nests.

“They really don’t like living in houses,”

he tells us. “They’re just passing through.”

He smiles as if this settles everything,

as if the walls that look so safe and solid

weren’t permeable and crawling in the dark.

“Another Day in Paradise,”

my father said without a trace of irony

each time my family drove to Miami Beach

or Coconut Grove or beneath the outstretched arms

of banyan trees on the old canopy roads,

the roads he’d driven since high school. He’d lift

one hand—or both—off of the steering wheel

to gesture at whatever we were passing:

blue bay, cruise ships or pleasure boats, sunlight

on a white bridge, a perfect specimen

of palm. Despite the heat, the traffic, the car-

jackings and home invasions, he says it still:

“Another day in Paradise.” He can’t

imagine better.

                             “All good things come to an end,”

the owner of a sandwich-and-cupcake shop told me

when I said I was sorry his place was closing.

Then he caught himself: “Except Paradise.

That has no end.” He was so pleased by the thought

he repeated it and walked off, whistling.

This was the small town where we’d moved for work,

the bakery the only decent place to eat

for miles. We never felt at home living there,

though I’m not sure there’s anywhere I’d feel

at home. Isn’t that why I travel, always

looking for something to make me want to stay?

The baker’s whistle, my father’s sweeping hand—

maybe what I envy is their certainty.

Ana Prundaru

four stitches, five, the skin closes like an envelope.

a mole is lifted from the mouth of scars.

don’t speak of shaking on the operating table, only how

manatees roll over, propeller peeled and silvered with scars.

forget your back before skin tags and

lipomas that bloom like red clover in a snag of scars.

instead remember the tourists, one set scattering

for the next to arrive, tide charts marking scars.

press the hollows in the tub and think of harrowing waters

manatees sink into, how gentle they are under those scars.

Jill McCabe Johnson

At the touch tanks the intern
           urged us to feel
the lumpy sea slug clinging
           to the tank’s slick walls, to poke

its mossy black flesh.
           See how soft he is?
We dipped our hands in the water,
           pressed fingertips to pliant skin,

and it was soft! They’re safe
           from predators here in the tanks.
The intern instructed us to place
           our fingers between the spikes

of a sea urchin the size of a small peach
           and wait. The quills pinched
as spineless feelers pushed
           to expel our own intruding feelers

           the way sometimes I hold you tight
to measure if I should let you in close,
           to gauge if I can push you away.

Jacklin Farley

I will always love you, Burt Reynolds, even

whilst clinging to the foot of the stairs leading

into this now empty country parlor, in this now

vacant farmhouse just outside the county limits

of your well-intentioned, home-grown-American,

damned near stupid conservative small town. I will

always love you in the silence of ceiling fans once

turning in every room because of the utility bill

that I always paid on time with good money, and

I will always love in the dissipated cloud of fussy

and fat hens that were once pecking worms from

my backyard, so rich with dirt. And I will always

love you just as I am now – with my enormous tits

and neon blonde wig beehived up to high heaven –

and from the unfathomable depths of my steel blue

-cut eye creese and snatched suede pioneer dress

although you know better than anyone in the state

that I have always made due loving you in less. And

as I will always love you falls from my Pepto-pink

Barbie doll lips, I thrust away the urge to touch you

as I have many times before in the night, because now

more than ever I wish I could just suckle you, your

obnoxiously chiseled mustached face, and just plum

forget about the mass of good, working girls – my girls –

now hurdling on Greyhound buses towards every major

US city on the map with open legs all because some

morally corrupt televangelist with a bad bowl cut made

you out to be less of man. But I will always love you,

because once upon a time, I thought you were more. Men

before you have always found ways to point to my ruin

and yet still invented cruel and unusual methods of soiling

me better than I ever could on my own. Even the script

says that when I finally stop singing I will always love you,

you will ask me into your sheriff’s cruiser and I must go

off with you, because the only way the whore is rectified

is when she becomes the wife. I will always love you, but

I wonder what else you’d do if you really loved me like

I thought you did. I hope you would let me keep my name.

Damn the sun, let’s just go. My friend Dee said. So we sprinted, the sweat-soaked air pressing our skin as if a rag in our mother’s hand. This heart hammers. This small heart made to collapse. All I want is to lie like the grasses. But she embraces me with her eyes, arms pumping, I won’t let anything happen to you. Love comes in unexpected pairs. I’m a head and a half taller. Her hair flows along both sides of her shoulders. Parentheses. Pantheress? I am hairless and large. A whale breaching the surface, fins flipping. Fat & light on his feet. Another offered once. I’ve known what it means to swim in shame. To lower my lashes at words placed on the crest of my belly. What is flesh but our ancestors rising from the surface of our skin? My family is built wide and low. The better to submerge. But they made me this floating creature breaching the blue. I have swum so fast, fins peeling, that I smelled the pepper of my elders’ clap from wide, low savannas. I believed my eyes were black until I saw the sun in my reflection. A panther can run as fast as she likes; I only crave the depths.

The men next to me at work won’t stop
rattling on about the one-child policy, how desperately
China needed it, how necessary it was for economic sociologic
environmental psychological progress, humanity requires
logical advancement, this was the most effective protocol.
They carry on as if I weren’t close enough to see the spit
contracting from their mouths, two only children,
childless sons whose mothers cried,
relieved when the ultrasound projected undeveloped
shadows pointing the right way, relieved at securing
their value, which is an uncoded way to say,
their safety. The birth rate dropped 3x in just 20
years, did you hear, it’s only 1.4 kids per person now, as if anyone
could give birth, as if the 1.4 did not mean
a full son & four-tenths of a daughter, as if second
children were not occasionally allowed if the first
was female, or severely disabled, or dead, as if
my mother did not confess to me, crying
that her firstborn would have been
a son had he not swum away, as if I did not feel
like my life were a clearance aisle consolation prize,
as if. Behind me, my boss slams shut
her laptop, retorts while leaving, You don’t know
the suffering people went through. The men don’t
slip a beat. I shrink smaller
behind my monitor, remember
Féng Jiànméi, how at 23, she chose to give
another life, how at 7 months, she was forced
into a van, blindfolded, to sign away nothing
she didn't already know, that when her child arrived
still, she knew it was from the two long needles
they sharpened through her abdomen. I’m at that stage
of perceived womanhood where once a month,
someone asks me my intentions for the future: will you
ever want a child? I gently remind them of our ongoing
ecological catastrophe, & who could forget, our astronomical
inflation. Me? A mom? … In this economy?
But really, I never want to suffer
another life with my genes. I’m terrified of the possibility
of the egg coalescing into a daughter, of having
to teach her why her body will feel like a beautiful
layered cake, one the rest of the world
will gaze & feast upon, one that she might
never learn to taste.

Vincent Antonio Rendoni

I witnessed something beautiful, friends

One day,

on my father’s monthly visit
to give his father
some money

Abuelo,

who kicked him out at sixteen
who didn’t believe in touch or mercy

caught his son limping

& put away the contempt fathers have for sons
& suspended the law of machismo reached for the rusted Texaco box
with the antiseptic, tweezers & gauze
slapped his knee
& called to his son’s feet,
& began working his way
through the skin & blood
of a used car salesman’s ingrown toenail

& never thought, not even once

as he cut through the keratin
cleaning & washing the lowest part
of working folk
that this is something
a man has to think about.

Donald Platt

Accessible primarily by canoe, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, in northeast Minnesota . . . extends 150 miles along the U.S.-Canada border, covering approximately 1,098,000 acres . . .
— Explore Minnesota

I want to go

to the Boundary Waters, canoe its one thousand lakes,

hundreds of miles

of rivers. So many places I’ve never been. I’d like to see sunset

reflected in Tuscarora

Lake, when it’s so still you cannot tell the difference

between sky on fire

and water on fire. Rosanne and I could paddle together

in our red canoe

to the very middle of the lake. Her hair would outshine sunset.

One loon would call

to another loon with its otherworldly wail from across

wide water.

That’s all I want to hear. But Rosanne, who has been to the Boundary

Waters and back,

tells me gently, firmly, matter-of-factly—in the voice

I love more

than any other woman’s voice—that no, I will never go as far

as Tuscarora

Lake. My body with its nerve pain, unable to walk anymore

without its rollator,

would not be able to do even one long portage.

She’s right, of course.

And even if I were to canoe that cold, aquifer-fed water

so clear I can see

twenty feet down to the rocky bottom, always another

waterway is waiting.

Night calls me with its unanswerable cry. Death’s loon

cries out

to me to come, come. Canoe to him alone across

dark, starlit water

where the moon now rises. Keep him company upon those other

boundaryless waters.

Allison Field Bell

Yesterday at the kitchen sink, my lover told me again
how I can’t do it right—load the dishwasher, wash the cast iron.
No soap, no scrubbing. My hands submerged in water, scalding.

Today, I’d rather be a fish. Scales, gills, unblinking eyes. Curl
around the toxic tentacles of that blooming mass: the anemone.
Brilliant orange and white stripes against the rainbow of reef.

None of that anxiety that dwells in the stomach, hollows it out, drops
it to the knees. The way my lover yelled when I panicked—
shook and shimmied. Too much, too much.

Too much pressure from the weight of water above,
but not feeling the ear-popping ascent from the depths of
the sandy floor. Water crushing bones. A whole sea of it to live in.

I’d like to be a shark. A predator. Free in my own kingdom.
Beast so ancient, so full of its own history, so full of its
own instinct. So full. So unlike the way I am. Sitting on the edge

of the bed now, my lover beyond a slammed door. I wonder
what it is to escape something. Where it is I could go. Beyond
the twist of whitewater, the shallow sand shelf to the deep

underbelly of sea, cold dark infinite. Bliss, all that water, swimming.