Introduced by Heather Sellers Florida-based poet Avni Vyas is intellectually playful, wildly associative, mythic, and often very funny. She has a particular gift for putting things that don’t ordinarily belong together into the same imaginative field: science and mythology, Florida wildlife and Hindu gods, pop culture and metaphysics, eros and botany, jokes and profound loss. “The Goddess Saraswati in Chemistry Class” is essentially a poem about the failure of these categories. The speaker is sixteen, caught between scientific taxonomy and erotic perception, and the poem keeps collapsing the two. Biology isn’t just biology. A teacher isn’t just a teacher. A flower isn’t just a flower. Scientific observation isn’t separate from erotic observation.…

Driving to the South Rim (for C.) Ponderosa, you said, when I asked what kind— those pines off 180 West near Flagstaff dying from the bottom up. A brush fire, you said— see how it charred one side of the road, as opposed to a tree fire roaring over the canopy— then we top the rise and everything on both sides is gone: pine, aspen, trees we can’t name, skeletal remains, and just like that, who we are is reconfigured, 50-ish miles from the South Rim, our last-minute diversion after a cancelled flight, when milky-white windmills come into view, a foreign sight to this lifelong Floridian, and I’d like to…

Poem Ending in a Psalm And then I see the gardeners’ heap of mulch      as tall as a sapling olive tree,  wide as a creek bed,      a mountain of leavings at the head of the near row        in the lemon orchard—    mowed clover, wood chips, sticks and stems, oak leaves, sweetgrass,        anything, all that lives,      cut but green    how fresh— breathing still,        sweating a bit,          settling into earth’s disappearing act.    The bees take note and light down.      Somehow, they know         today they are the guests,      blank verse and drone,  salve and song.    We’ve harmed them— yet today    they are flesh,          rosehips, attar,      essence, and we are their children    climbing through…

Seven Summers   That summer someone stole my sister’s horned toad which lived with its eggs in a mayonnaise jar.   That summer a preacher shouted salvation every night for a week from a tent pitched outside a supermarket.   That summer the last case of polio in our neighborhood came to a four year old boy.   That summer a man walked every afternoon in front of the used car lot and held a sign with a giant lemon on it.   That summer I got a ride with Stu Rivers and his pharmacist father to our baseball games in a maroon convertible Riviera.   That summer we put Mercurochrome on our scraped knees and…

My mother’s button box is history in fasteners of every ilk, a rattled mess inside a fruitcake tin, its words long scraped away. Still taped inside its dented lid–the razor blade my mother used to rescue what she could as we outgrew our clothes. She freed white buttons from worn-out shirts, and kept them straight by stringing them like beads on swags of colored thread. Among the many strands of white are two large purple buttons from the overalls she sewed for me by hand when I was four, and tarnished buttons stamped with anchors from my brother’s sailor coat. Here, a scattering of unmatched pearls, sliced from single gloves…

Persephone as a Moat The first touch was a whispered voice hissing     stay back. On my back he took me. Me: a soft spell, an under garment, a shallow end. Endings and beginnings, endings and beginning— a quiet chant, hidden beneath breath. Breathe slowly through the night, again. Again, reverse course– pretend to smile, stay alive. Alive but not    alive (always    hiding). Hiding from a man is not the same as hiding from a God. God who made me now unmake me. Me: a moat, hair falling in a circle around my feet. Meriwether Clarke’s poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, The Boiler, Seneca Review,…

Sioux Falls I have to take what the machine tells me on faith, that this is in fact a large city in South Dakota and that they have restaurants there I recognize, and the people believe more or less what I do having been born at more or less at the same time, but the children of Sioux Falls know better, and in their fantastical games of make believe that requires no machine, only the vastness and whimsy of minds still delighted by their own self invention, pretend I am here, in the backyard of the Maryland house where old friends live who have never left, with their family of…

Loose Change I see you on this train.I can recite your spiel by heart.You said the same thing yesterday.Last week, last month, last year.You said it four summers ago whenI first boarded this Q Train.     “My name is Lamont.     I just lost my mom.” You’re preparing your soliloquy.I mouth your words like a cinephileReciting a film they’ve seen 100 times.(Me? Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.)     My name is Lamont.     I just lost my mom.”You’re digging in the wrong place.Your ballcap sags empty. I promise I don’t think you’re malingering.But tell: How far back can just go?Is it true? Grief can be that dense?A black hole distorting light, time,Destroying any distinction betweenFour months or…

Woodcutters from Fiery Ships At the diner, elders discussed them in various tones. Some whispered, as if there’d been a scandal. Others spoke bluntly to stanch the listener’s desire to dismiss the tales. The young debunked the legends, claimed they’d dispatched a woodcutter with a punt to the rump. In a pub the clientele went silent when I asked. I was told they were closing, yet the establishment was full. Later, we sat on the verandah, sipping saké, formulating half-serious haiku about the wind and the dark spruces. We gazed to the distance. Then we saw the glow. I thought the moon would be birthed from the horizon, but a…

Grief Pastoral The morning after your departure, I found a keythe size of my middle nail, that I hung at my neck,a copper ring that I slipped on my smallest finger,a half-shell, white, that I placed in my pocket. Wearing this armor from the dirt, I aimedto go forward strong, swinging from the hipas I plow through. But this road keeps twisting.After each blind corner is a new bale of grief. Fresh cut, they’re not placed the way I love,precisely, in a shorn field, nor stacked high in the pole barnto climb once and feel victorious. These are askewand heavy, bounced from a truck’s back, a hundred pounds apiece held…