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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

California Stars My daughters carry sage in their handswhen the dawn is a field of peacocks. My daughters tie blue-eyed grass in their hairwhen Marina del Rey is a picnic of poppies. My daughters bring Catalina Island Buffaloin their pockets when Coyote Creek is fullwith spring. My daughters hide prickly pearsin their clavicles when Laguna Lakewears the surrounding desert like a shawl. My daughters speak in the language of sunflowerswhen Box Canyon closes its coffin of secrets. My daughters sing with mountain violet breathwhen stars light up the sky behind a forest of angels. Natalie Marino is a poet and physician. Her work appears in Atlas and Alice, Gigantic Sequins, Isele…

Seed self another paradox:if you join the ground,you join the sky.lying on the groundthe hands cup under the surfacefor palmfuls of earthand the hair becomes a kind of root system you can both commune with a fellowcreature and see the whole of the heavens your heart opens like a bean-claspand the relevance ofthe human form fadesas green leaf matter unfurls the deeper you reach,the nearer the sun. All ashen It was a field rotmottled throughoutand stinging from the theftit is a field pickled in soursop metal shops the bodies walking on ithalf don’t remember the ones underuntil the haunt breath of the longwalkingmanages to whisper throughto one Draw near the…

Lemon Tree Season The front yard lemon tree is a dying clock, its hours dragging. Its sickness breaks my habits. Every day one summer in my child-home I go out back to kill the fist-thick lemon tree spider. I throw rocks at its web. Next day it’s there again. and I kill it again. A spider monkey perches on that lemon tree and eats blackberries from the vine below. Some neighbor owned that monkey. Now the monkey owns itself. A red-winged parrot screams from the top of the front yard tree, not ten feet from the top of my head. Standing beneath the monkey, I am a boy. Beneath the…

Beta   for the death of my daughter’s father   If only she could hear it now in yourreal voice again, instead of in the same old message she keeps pressing to her ear, keeps playing on her cell-phone – that sweet name you’d call her by, repeat in every call. If only she could hear it as she did when it was still a tossed-off term, a small Urdu word you’d slip into your English between your quick hello, your rushed goodbye. If only she could hear it when it meant nothing more than “child,” when it would slide so lightly from your Pakistani accent. When it was just…

Aye! And what then? I am taking applications for the Position ofColeridge in My Life. The job is part-timebut the hours are quixotic. The candidateshould be a strong meanderer and terriblygood friend, with an ear for iambics.Of course, this person should be a betterpoet than I am but wear it lightly. I willkeep the amulet that guards against envyin my left palm at all times. It is chalcedony,the chameleon of mendacious minerals.Own a walking stick, nothing too hoary.Candidate must know someone from Porlockand enjoy a good potluck. Loquacityrequired, as is a penchant for great birds.Appropriate anxiety concerning water-sports.Pay is meager but the benefits are mostlyimaginary. Office in a measureless cavern.…