-
Denise Duhamel
Poem in Which I Married Young and Stayed in My Hometown I never became a poet because, well, who has time?It was a kiddish, indulgent dream—I know that now.Each morning I read The Academy of American Poets’poem-a-day in my inbox, and honestly, I only understandabout a third of them. I hate pretense and obscuremythology almost as much as I hated being married.I was a restless bride and soon started catting around.My husband divorced me when other wives called methe town slut. But in their whispers I heard a tingeof envy. I let my husband have the kids. I know—what kind of mother does that? A motherwho thought she wanted to…
-
Sharon Venezio
Notes for My Mother’s Caregiver Remember to take off her glasses when she’s sleeping Her wounds need to be cleaned daily Rotate her body every four hours She likes milk in her tea She shouldn’t eat alone Cut her food for her At risk for aspiration Put on her glasses in the morning He fixed the fox on me means she doesn’t trust you Go to her, touch her, talk to her face Comfort is up to us Dying should be quiet She thinks you’re an imposter She thinks you stole her purse This is her…
-
Gus Hernandez
Nocturne The kind where the horses have been hitched to the trees.Where the granary door’s been locked and the moneystashed in the box in the wall. If it’s free,my grandfather used to say, I will takeeven a punch to the face. I think that’s a misquote,but that’s what I do these days. I mess with the syntax—livein the belongings—of the dead. My mother goesto bed, and I’m left to turn the locks in the house, to sitin the kitchen and survey what’s left on the table.I know there is no way to safeguard what we have.No bolt that will hold. My grandfather couldn’thave seen himself growing old. His fortune at…
-
Jacob Strautmann
The Garden Boston is the middle of my life.The thatched roof over the middle of my lifeAnd the fire turning in the middle of my life Are yours. To be cold there in our cornerBedroom—the evening whir of an electric heaterThat can’t forstall the inevitable Nor’easters like violins, Anxiety lickingHer length by the clock, Orion and his clubPassing silently over— With promises deep and as far away as spring,Where the pink bulb of a hot water bottle you placeBetween us heats us like a coal Drawn from the bed of heat itself: to be coldAnd find warmth, a wall blank in the early morningThe sprig of moonrise…
-
Garrett Stack
Good Friday It’s almost Easter herein Elsewhere and the machinesare doing all the work: washing, sweeping, heating still while I haunt my homeuseless as a second thought.I will never reach the end of this novel. I will fail to emptythe diaper pail. I will eat lunch standingover the sink and it will taste like nothing at all. Even the excursionsare broken. The highway turnsand clovers over and under and over. At the filling stationwhile the car fills itselfI will pass once more on the opportunity to wipethe beetles from my windshieldin favor of staring south and if a stranger were to ask me just…
-
Brendan Walsh
qualia to describe orange in relationto other orange things, saya sunset and a mango, monk’srobe and a gull’s beak, doesn’t reveal anything to someonewho has never seen orange.i can’t explain how i think,only that I think, and it is awful. just as no one will tell you,definitively, where in the brainconsciousness lives, only that it does,and that it goes away too, though they also can’t tell you this for sure.our great mystery is not an answer,but how to keep going despitethe answer’s inadequacy. and no, the answer is not orange.it isn’t a symbol. it doesn’t wrap upneat and gorgeous—an image, a hope,a gasp at the egret spearing minnows. we’re missing…
-
Daniel Thomas
In the Harbor Masts tinted by the setting sunboats rock beside docksquiet as a herdsettling down for the night. Lulled asleep by lapping wavesthe tide’s soft creepthe boats are horsestethered to moonlight dreaming of grassy fieldsclear pondswind-filled manessoft earth beneath cloven hooves. They are dream creatureslost in dreams of their owninside the dark harbor—the whole world floating. Daniel Thomas’s second poetry book, Leaving the Base Camp at Dawn, was published in 2022. His first collection, Deep Pockets, won a 2018 Catholic Press Award. He has published poems in many journals, including Southern Poetry Review, Nimrod, Poetry Ireland Review, The Bitter Oleander, Atlanta Review, and others. More info at danielthomaspoetry.com.
-
Michael Meyerhofer
Revelations I remember how startled I was –not by the dog’s teethgleaming like pearls in the dark,nor even his low growlthat set my bones quiveringas though I were beingasked yet again to explainmy limp and missing half-ear,what went on in the nurse’s officeonce they locked the door. But no, this was a porchbuttressed in snowdrifts,back from watching Christ hangnaked before a sea of jackets,when a gigantic black labwho’d never gnawed anythingbut Frisbees all of a suddenset to tear my face off,flexing nails my tiny knucklescould not have countered. That frame of stillnesslike a gun after it’s cocked –then my grandmother shoved mebehind her, turning her bodyinto my shield-wall,and though I…
-
Lupita Eyde-Tucker
Mi Telenovela After school, after almuerzo each day, boredom’s sequela:Gisella and I turn on the TV, watch back-to-back telenovelas. Babies switched at birth: the peon’s orphan son for the stillborn, well-borngirl. La fuerza del destino. Our mothers are always found in telenovelas. Puerto Ricans, Argentinians, Venezuelans, and Mexicans speak Spanishdifferently. Accents I adopted by watching telenovelas. Gisella, our fifteen-year-old maid, watches from the kitchen,cooking up a ceviche of dreams they force feed us in telenovelas. The poor girl who leaves el campo for la ciudad, for an upgrade on life.The stapled storyline of the classic Latin American telenovela. Teach me how to seduce a man. Obligate him to marry me.I…
-
Jessica Jacobs
Perseverance Prayer “There is no one who has not their hour and no thing that has not its place.” —Pirkei Avot, 4:3 Be it rug or couch or bed, the dog can’t help but turn and turn and turn again before lying down, his angle always a little off, the vantage never quite as desired. Still the ritual persists. Yet once in a prairie gone tall with summer, high grass whispering with afternoon breeze, he began—one, two, three times around—and the stalks found new joints with each of his orbits, swaying, kneeling, prostrating away from him into a massive golden wreath, an ideal bed. A pursuit others call pointless is…
