GREEN BLIND. Sea grapes draped on split-rail fence, a cart track to the settlers’ graveyard. Chipped, unnamed baby graves, black with mold, old lichen, those phrases like fire lanes through language—I love you—black hole left by stone thrown into otherwise intact algal mat. Kate Colby

“a cart track to the / settlers’ graveyard. // Chipped, unnamed / baby graves, black // with mold, old lichen, / those phrases like fire // lanes through language / —I love you— // black hole left by / stone thrown” —Kate Colby, “Green Blind”

Five Poems by Charles Kell Five original poems from the renowned poet Charles Kell.

“My father hit my mother / and I didn’t run away. / Father beat my mother and I sat / there listening carefully. / G.I. Joes, in my room, on a December Saturday.” —Charles Kell, “Saturday Blues” www.poetriesinenglish.com/five-poems.h...

THE UNDERPASS. I walked into an underpass at fourteen. It was summer and the trees were hot with sun when I went into the concrete shade, where the river moved under the bridge. Pigeons flew between the cement rafters and I must have stayed for a long time because when I came out on the other side, it was dim. It was evening. A black wind paced at my shoulders. The moon had risen, and an elm stood in its new pitch of light. In the underpass, this is what happened: I was raped, I lost part of my body, my family died, I killed three of my children. That the moon is here, that I’m able to see it is testament. Christine Garren

“I must have stayed for a long time / because when I came out on the other side, it was dim. It was evening. / A black wind paced at my shoulders. The moon had risen, and an elm stood / in its new pitch of light” —Christine Garren, “The Underpass” @uchicagopress.bsky.social

Iris There is a train inside this iris:

“A darkened porthole lit by the white, angular face // Of an old woman, or perhaps the boy beside her in the stuffy, / Hot compartment. Her hair is silver, & sweeps // Back off her forehead, onto her cold and bruised shoulders.” —David St. John, “Iris” poets.org/poem/iris

“Who doesn’t want to be visited by the dead, who doesn’t want / their dead father to rise like a cabbage moth from the zucchini bed? // This is something better not shared in public” —Martha Silano, “Don’t Make Me Grab You by the Rostrum” @eldiagram.bsky.social thediagram.com/26_1/silano....

Balsamic Confession

The same thing that torments us as writers (namely, the relative invisibility of our audience) is the same thing that protects us from the crippling self-consciousness of being watched by the Panopticon.

DARKNESS FELL but did not break, so it is at least as good as the space-age materials that accompanied our astronauts to the moon where they gazed down like God in His infinite boredom and wondered what their wives were doing. Unlike darkness, Corning Ware breaks easily. And when it does, someone usually says, “You clumsy bitch. Do you think I’m made out of money?” And someone usually replies, “I don’t think of you at all, you pitiful bastard.” Lord, how this poem is suddenly freighted with sadness, though it began in the gloaming and the bare lamplit arms of a cliché inspired by you in the kitchen weeping silently into all that broken glass. Ron Koertge

“the space-age materials that accompanied / our astronauts to the moon where they gazed / down like God in His infinite boredom / and wondered what their wives were doing.” —Ron Koertge, “Darkness Fell” @uarkpress.bsky.social

“I was a psychic for a long time before I started taking meds. I saw through things. After meds, I realized I was just another empath in a Denny’s, sinking onion rings in ranch dressing” —Richard Siken, “Mind Control” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social conjunctions.com/articles/cal...

David Trinidad — Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose The Poems Attributed to Him May Be by Different Poets He lived in the time of Alexander the Great, to whose death he alludes. His extant poems are chiefly about country life and hunting. He is often...

“his writing is elegant, he tells a story well, and his polemical passages occasionally attain an unmatchable level of entertaining vitriol.” —David Trinidad, “The Poems Attributed to Him May Be by Different Poets” @alliumjournal.bsky.social @upittpress.bsky.social allium.colum.edu/fall-2022-po...

SPICE NIGHT. It was your best friend’s birthday, 9:00 and late July. By the time I got there wearing shorts and a T-shirt everyone was pretty spiced on Corona and Lite. What’s-his-name Ramirez started telling jokes about German Shepherds and Girl Scouts and then someone hurt a knee trying to somersault and play volleyball with only the light of the moon and oh yeah Joe Herder drove his ’64 Cadillac right over the grass. I think you had a date but you were sitting with me on the grass and I didn’t feel guilty, in fact I was worrying about the time because the night would end soon and I had come just to

see you. The moon was drenching the Balcones Fault Flood Basin with a pollen, a spice, it happens every twelve years, and that’s when you put your hand on my knee and that’s when Ramirez started telling a series of dead baby jokes. Even Joe Herder and his crowd were getting tired of the bad jokes because they started telling stories about smuggling heroin and grass up from Mexico and I looked down and your hand was still on my knee and they were talking about gunrunning, Mayan treasures, and doing time, and the Hilton in downtown San Salvador as if they were modern day spice pirates instead of Alamo Heights kids who had been given the moon

and suddenly the sky had changed and I realized that the moon was using its comic sensibility to fool around, to make a joke, just by being round and fat, it played up, it complemented the spice of the lawn, a punchy waltz with the blunt edges of the grass, without really thinking we were moving our toes, our teeth, in time. So there we were in the yard with our hands on each other’s knees, watching the party, watching the crowd, and of course the moon. I was tired but didn’t want to leave so I asked you about the time your high school class went camping at Big Bend and you made a joke

about people who ask a lot of questions and then we left the grass and went into Mrs. Schue’s house and down the hall where there was a spice cabinet filled with, what else, hundreds of unlabeled jars of spices. We opened all the bottles and played a game, our sweaty knees shining in the dark. I guessed caraway, tarragon, and lemon grass; you guessed others as we closed our eyes and inhaled the bottled moons. Outside the volleyball game continued and the jokes. We knew we had found that spice cabinet just in time. Knees. Spice. Jokes. Moon. Grass. Time. Forever and ever. Amen. Catherine Bowman

“your hand was still on my knee / and they were talking about gunrunning, Mayan treasures, and doing time, / and the Hilton in downtown San Salvador as if they were modern day spice / pirates instead of Alamo Heights kids” —Catherine Bowman, “Spice Night”

JUDAS HAUSFRAU. Judas Hausfrau. The wife of Lot. I do not let well-enough alone. I do not care to. But you already know this. Unmapped, I am the lay you called Strange Land, your risk and periphery, all borderline. And yet, I am the exact edge I’m on. Verge, lip. Hell’s Jezebels. I serve you well. But the night matron will make her rounds. And I will put my hands down

holes they oughtn’t go in. Sweet little gleaming thing, all spittle and spunk. Christ, it is never enough: Covens of bedroom men, convening. A swarm of drones. Mounts of lancers, hussars, horsemen. A sea of weeping men with hard-ons, hard, hard upon me. Pick a card—it’s always the queen. Sir, I owe you nothing. My dowries are collapsed. I’m the ghost your wedding photo snapped into clean halves. A knock-off joypop

good for a tumble or two. Mrs. You, my white dress shines as black as the night. I do not fight it. On the eve of scars and jags. I am chrism in the mouth. Schlaf, Traum. I wear ropes around my neck and watch my back. I cellar the coins. I purse the salt. I am tall in my sins. Don’t you forget it. This target is tainted. Square up and take your aim. The stained satin. The Satan. Jill Alexander Essbaum

“Sir, I owe you nothing. / My dowries // are collapsed. I’m the ghost / your wedding photo snapped / into clean halves.” —Jill Alexander Essbaum, “Judas Hausfrau”

Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 17 — Green Linden Press

“It was humped in the greenery like a rabbit / in the rain. It seemed to be covered in a fine / gray fur. I saw its taste buds and nearly fainted. / Think of me what you will. I am no soldier / of the sensual world.” —Diane Seuss, “Tongue Sandwich” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-dian...

Every single thing in it is true. The next day after the piece ran, the current Headmaster passed me in the hall, and said, “Interesting article, Simeon.” I smiled widely and said, “Yes, wasn’t it?” sixthfinch.com/berry1.html

Thanks to @rhmacdonald.bsky.social for including me in another awesome issue! My poem is about me telling the Hartford Courant that my prep school was the creature of the landed gentry.

Sometimes you read a poem that’s like a tiny little scattered campfire of New American food, with a lean-to of caramelized carrots over a cube of striated meat and a perimeter glyph of a red wine reduction. And you wonder why you even bothered to show up for these 13.5 calories.

MY MAYAKOVSKY. I walk through Moscow in my yellow shirt. I stagger in my sallow shirt through dusky Moscow, brick lilies blossoming the length of its grey parkways. I rest a pistol on my temple. Nothing happens. I, in my scandalous yellow, have traversed the length of grey, dirt-lovely Moscow, past the odors of rifle-fire and fresh bread, slamming my fist against the lacquer of my chamber's red armoire until my knuckles bleed. With my red hand, I trace the many letters of my name over my chest. My knuckles blister as I gently rest, on my armoire, my pistol, storing my luck in one of its six chambers, but which one? My lifetime, darling, stay with me forever. Dear lifetime, I can't bear you any longer. I telegram inferior poets the good news of their departure and my repertoire, then skid past mists of mink and nimbuses in squirrel over the glacial streets of wintry Moscow. Lifetime the length of a papercut. Of a parade of soldiers through the snow. Length of my chamber

in the housing tower. Length of my Soviet Union, of a song that can't remember how to end itself. I rest the trigger on my frontmost teeth; the barrel feels cold against the barrel of my throat. You bound and gagged me, passionate, cold lover. Lifetime the brevity of our encounter. Down with your love, I wrote in each boudoir. Down with your art, I wired the Hermitage. I told the officer, Down with your social order. Down with your worshiping, I whispered to my mother. Down with my faith in you, Creator, who dismembers and sews me back together every hour. I telegram inferior poets to inquire why readers love and understand them better. Down with your hair, Maria. Down with your hair, Lily Brik. I hide my shirt in a wool suit and march my polished boots through Moscow, brandishing my heart's four chambers, skewered, on a rapier. I rest a pistol on my temple. Fire. Michael Dumanis

“I stagger in my sallow shirt through dusky Moscow, / brick lilies blossoming the length of its grey parkways. / I rest a pistol on my temple. Nothing happens.” — @michaeldumanis.bsky.social, “My Mayakovsky” @umasspress.bsky.social

BELT. (If you're not 18 please hang up now). Late night in the unease of a Missouri trailer park where no one is native, in the common darkness of the displaced, I sit on the kitchen floor, whispering to him. My robe open in the delicate light of an open refrigerator. My step-mother asleep on the living room couch. I listen to the man on the telephone say I am nothing between my legs but a woman and a poor excuse. I say nothing violently, and at his order say “Thank you,

yes.” (I remember my father’s shoulders, the broad ironed bed of his back, spiders under his arms. He showed me what setting the table meant, giggling bent over the basin, singing soprano.) Every father has a belt, the man tells me, for boys who should have been girls. “17,” I tell the truth. “No, I’ve never done that,” I lie. Thank you. Yes. Thomas A. Loudermilk

“in the common darkness of the displaced, // I sit on the kitchen floor, whispering to him. My robe open // in the delicate light of an open refrigerator.” —Thomas A. Loudermilk, “Bed”

“A child who is stung by twelve wasps / will have a better understanding of time” —Matthew Rohrer, “The World Just Before the at Ease” www.nowculture.com/2008/rohrer.htm

VALENTINE. I hope your father built a treehouse in the soft shade below the creek. I hope it glimmered there, between two poplars. I hope you stood at your mother’s sleeve while she fixed madeleines for breakfast. It was Easter. All six of your aunts adored you. For your country project you picked Tunisia because of its peanut shape. Which was your first rock show? Mine was Milli Vanilli. I hope you licked the ends of your colored pencils. Also, that you carried a Trapper Keeper. The first time a girl touched you, I hope you had graham crumbs on your mouth. I hope she wore her brother’s hunting coat, latchless. Do you also dislike beets? I hope so. I hope you’re reading all the classics, like Moby Dick. When the preacher climbs the ladder made of ropes? That’s the best. I did that once, at an amusement park. I believe the stars get brighter when it’s cold. Do you like riding in convertibles? I like riding in convertibles. I like how sunflowers turn themselves into big radios. I used

to live where canola oil’s from. I used to eat fried zucchini flowers and tomato salad. What do you like for breakfast? Do you listen to BBC News? When you make someone a sandwich, I hope you trim the casings from each slice of salami. No one likes to eat those. I try to think of what you’ll need from Walgreens. Maybe you’ve got contacts. In which case, you can just use my solution. What diseases run in your family? Will we have to worry about strokes? I’ll probably live to be quite old. I hope you’ll let me lay out your pajamas. Not every day, but sometimes. Will you eat bran patties for breakfast then? What about those S-cookies? Those come from Sicily. I’ve seen them in the shops. I’ve seen women in gold slingbacks on the bus. That’s OK, but I hope we’ll have our own car. I know a church with a dark ceiling. The Normans built it. It’s sad until you drop coins into this special lamp: clink, clink. After that, it’s different, see. Kiki Petrosino

“I hope you licked the ends of your colored / pencils. Also, that you carried a Trapper Keeper. The first time a girl / touched you, I hope you had graham crumbs on your mouth. I hope / she wore her brother’s hunting coat” —Kiki Petrosino, “Valentine” @sarabandebooks.bsky.social

SWELL. Svelte with eventual sex, who could help but gorge herself on low violet leaning everywhere? The shine and shifting slate of the sky murmurs its irresistible confession: I am more than blue if you are the violent imprint. I am swollen, vexed endlessly and only finite against your bodies. This slim stalk of silhouette slides via nimbus down the eyelights without a skirmish. Glossy with sly undoing, blisterlike.

We are disheveled, though too skeptical to abandon our dimpled limbs and fill the insides of slips with mere threat and strap of thunderpeal. We toss freely with fever this mirror desilvered. And break into rain upon finding such umber yielding of frost to febris. This strumpet muscle under your breast describing you minutely, Volupt, volupt. Brenda Shaughnessy

“This strumpet muscle under your breast describing / you minutely, Volupt, volupt.” — @brendashaughnessy.bsky.social, “Swell” @fsgbooks.bsky.social

THE FAMOUS MEN WHO MADE ME. While I made love in the mental hospital with a boy who had a fine-looking face but might have been psychotic, my father taught his protégées to be risqué. I’d stand in the hospital hall while the other hoodlums gathered in a zipper-line for their liquid meds. I'd listen to my father’s stories on the phone and imagine Virginia’s drunkest, most affluent town expanding and contracting like an iris in a discotheque. I was born in that place in 1964 before Mama left and everything fell to shit. Before Mama left and everything fell to shit, Tennessee Williams insulted the whole town by rubbing his pelvis against my father’s guitar while James Dickey and Ned Beatty and an entire citizenry of pot-smoking artists

came in and out of our house like insects gathering for a coup against the humdrum. One or two of them would lift me off the ground so I could smell what being old and famous was like. There are certain things about your life that you should not remember. There are certain things a man should never tell his child. This had to be what my grandmother knew in the late 1950’s. This is what drove her to offer my father a guitar if he’d give my mother back. They stood grimace-to-grimace in the August night until my mother—famous herself for being breathtaking and reckless—came rushing out of the dogwoods and laid her tongue in Daddy’s mouth. For tonight at least, I do not blame my mother for marrying my father,

as I do not blame her for divorcing him. For tonight at least, I could forgive anyone for anything. It’s been almost thirty-six years since I flopped out of Mama in my own lolly-gagging, impertinent way, and I have learned what it took my mother the twelve years of her marriage to learn, and that is that if my father had thought twice about what loving a woman can make happen, I would not be worrying myself now over the wise and famous men who acted as though they wanted me to tell on them—as though I was born to record everything I heard them say or saw them do as if that could help me now or them or you as they die or migrate from place to place or settle down in armchairs

with their good wives beside them and their children safe inside the sleep I was not myself allowed to know. Whenever I suck a man’s cock I think of the famous men my father raised me on. Whenever the man I am sucking is about to come, I think of male accomplishment and lechery and loneliness as if I’m sitting on a bar stool and all around me everyone is dying from wanting to be noticed and loved and kissed and held and praised, which is just wishing for wishing’s own senseless sake, which is just wishing for everything we think our fathers meant for us to know we would never get. Adrian Blevins

“While I made love in the mental hospital with a boy who had a fine-looking face / but might have been psychotic, my father taught his protégées to be risqué” —Adrian Blevins, “The Famous Men Who Made Me” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

“The wind rises or stops / and it means nothing. // I want to be circular; / a pond or a column of smoke/revolving, slowly, its ashes. // I want to turn back and go up / to myself at age 20, / and press five dollars into his hand” —Larry Levis, “Rhododendrons” voetica.com/poem/14705

“she’s stuck wearing the navy suit I chose the last time I styled her, a suit now thirteen years outdated, though fashionable enough when they closed the casket.” —Beth Ann Fennelly, “Two Sisters, One Thinner, One Better Dressed” www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

Short stories are the special forces of fiction. You have to operate at a very high level under severe constraints to make them work.

THE CABINET OF THINGS SWALLOWED. At the medical museum, we fourth-graders crowd around the oddities: the tiny, jarred fetus turning, almost imperceptibly, like the rotation of an infant moon; the model of a syphilitic eye, sagging like the cut fig my father pushed around his plate at breakfast as he read this morning’s paper. Betsy Wilcox follows me from exhibit to exhibit. When she sees the human horn display—a taut, wax face with a stalk like a Black Locust limb sprouting from the forehead—she grabs a fistful of my shirt and buries her face in my chest. The glass cases of the museum showcase the horror of what our bodies can become. Betsy trails me closely, as we pass the hundreds of fleshy pounds of the world’s largest colon, curled and asleep like some biblical slug. We come to a wooden cabinet with long, thin drawers. The sign reads: “Things Swallowed.” I slide out the top

drawer to find what I expected: wheat pennies, safety pins, suit buttons, all ranked and filed and labeled with faded script. I close that drawer and open the next. It holds larger treasures: threaded needles, thimbles fuzzed over with rust, fan-shaped seashells, a book of matches from a New York bar. The items are bigger in each new drawer. The next has a woman’s black glove with gold thread tracing the wrist, a light bulb, and a silver pocket watch, still ticking like a tiny robin’s heart. The next: a gold collection plate from a Presbyterian church, a red-glazed salt cellar. I pull open the second-to-last drawer, where there is a single claw hammer. The head is dull black; the handle’s wood is wrapped with the stains of fingerprints. There is one drawer left. “Don’t,” Betsy says, as I reach for the handle. And in her wide, wet eyes, I can barely see the reflection of the cloud-white marble I swallowed on my fourth birthday. Ryan Teitman

“the oddities: the tiny, jarred fetus turning, almost imperceptibly, like the rotation of an infant moon; the model of a syphilitic eye, sagging like the cut fig my father pushed around his plate” —Ryan Teitman, “The Cabinet of Things Swallowed” @boa-editions.bsky.social

“It’s time for lunch, it’s sushi takeout / Do not sink in a heap, John Keats / You are tubercular and five-foot-one” —Camille Guthrie, “My Boyfriend, John Keats” @atlengthmag.bsky.social atlengthmag.com/my-boyfriend...

“began to curse and shake their fists and spit / at Jeff Gordon, who didn’t even know they were there. You say // well, that’s NASCAR for you, but it’s as bad or worse when / the subject is Irish politics” —David Kirby, “She’s Not There” @onlypoemsmag.bsky.social onlypoems.com/poems/david-...

A MACHINE. Hey, I am learning what it means to ride condemned. I may be breaking up. I am doing 85 outside the kingdom Of heaven, under the overpass and passed over, The past is over and I’m over the past. My odometer Is broken, can you help me? When you get this messAge, I may be a half-ton crush, a half tone of mist And mystery, maybe trooper bait with the ambulance Ambling somewhere, or a dial of holy stations, a bandAge of clamor and spooling, a dash and semaphore, A pupil of motion on my way to be buried or planted or Crammed or creamed, treading light and water or tread and trepidation, maybe. Hey, I am backfiring along a road Through the future with “I am alive” skidding across my tongue, When you get this message, will you sigh, My lover is gone? Terrance Hayes

“The past is over and I’m over the past. My odometer // Is broken, can you help me? When you get this mess- / Age, I may be a half-ton crush, a half tone of mist // And mystery, maybe trooper bait with the ambulance / Ambling somewhere” —Terrance Hayes, “A. Machine”

I SLEPT WITH THE SINGING NUN. The nuns called them “tasks”: I will not talk in class. 100 times on the blackboard. White chalk on black slate, the black-and-white habits of nuns: sacrifice, abstention. I heard rumors about The Singing Nun—another one-hit wonder. I would like to be a one-hit wonder. She sang in Latin, that’s why I liked her. I like prayer because I like losing myself. I was an altar boy smoking behind the church. She was good. It was good. All my lies are good.

I will not talk in tongues. 100 times in chalk. Erase the board, young man. I want to talk in tongues, the dust raised by clapping erasers. When I helped the priest with communion, the pale fluttering tongues of nuns turned me on. I love juice, whatever form or shape it takes. I love the Holy Spirit just for the concept. I love you baby I love you. I have my hand up in the back row. Call on me. Call on me. Jim Daniels

“I was an altar boy smoking / behind the church. She was good. / It was good. All my lies are good. // I will not talk in tongues / 100 times in chalk. / Erase the board, young man.” —Jim Daniels, “I Slept with the Singing Nun” @upittpress.bsky.social