#1.1 - Two Poems by Matthew Rohrer
AN EVENING OF EZRA POUND
“Pound, you bastard!”
-Gerald Stern
I regret appearing
at an evening of Ezra Pound.
I regret that it’s searchable.
I regret our names together.
I don’t regret how I was
kind of mean to the people there
by making them feel uncomfortable
at the fancy dinner afterwards
and some of them let’s face it
didn’t even recognize
Walt Whitman on a button
on my coat, that says it all.
I regret not speaking that evening about
what an asshole he was
how clearly that comes through
how it was the foundation of his poetics.
I regret using “anal rape”
in my bid to make them
uncomfortable at the dinner afterwards.
I do not regret the look on the face
of the famous professor
as I said “anal rape” then tented
my fingers and blithely
slipped it into the conversation
the conversation about the locking up
of Ezra Pound.
I do not regret going to the restroom to run my hands
over my face and text S. that I needed
to escape.
I regret not escaping
through the kitchen---how
fine an act that would be.
I regret leaving my bag at the table
preventing my escape through the kitchen
through the steam and the flames
into the silent alley.
I regret saying his name.
I regret saying his name after
my pinky promise with D.
that we would never say
his name again.
***
POEM FOR LEWIS WARSH
The talk on the playground
is do we let our
kids take the city bus
home from school and why would we
I think we enjoy sitting on the benches
in shallow and repetitive conversation
shifting when the shade shifts
and bad men hang around
4th avenue the construction sites
attract them I’m just repeating
what the moms say
I’m not listening that closely
I’m trying to work out
how Wordsworth got so square
could it happen to me?
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Matthew Rohrer is the author of ten books of poems, most recently THE SKY CONTAINS THE PLANS, to be published by Wave Books in April 2020. He was a co-founder of Fence and Fence Books and lives in Brooklyn. He teaches writing at NYU, where he won a Golden Dozens teaching award.
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#1.2 - Four Poems by Megan Volpert
Sophomore is fainting. First time was in the bathroom before lunch, then in the kitchen at home. There is a cardiologist and neurologist who don't know what it is yet. But it's definitely something, so she can't do the cross country meet this weekend. She'll just sit around worrying about how it went with the other kid she heard of last year. He was fainting and then had a big surgery. He was in a bubble and had to miss an entire semester. That would suck and she doesn't want to be that brave. She tells all this to Teacher in an email.
Sophomore is walking. She conducts herself with dignity in the hallway. Her father is an important man. That's all Teacher knows, as their paths have never crossed in a class. But Teacher notices if it's been awhile since Sophomore came down the hall. There was that time Teacher saw a boy try to hold her hand and Sophomore brushed it away with such a coolness that Teacher knew immediately Sophomore would mostly succeed in defending herself in this life. And the very next day, that same boy came down the hall with some other girl, while Sophomore was nowhere in sight.
Sophomore is pissed. At the mall where she rats most weekends it's winter break now and the Santa stuff is back. They put boards over the fountain at the intersection beyond the food court and Sophomore misses the chill vibe of the lights and flowing water. She reads a lot of books there, except around Christmas. Teacher sees her there sometimes and wants to tell her to go read at the big box bookstore in the plaza down the street. But it's too close to the school and Teacher remembers what it's like to know you better not go home, but you can't stay here.
Sophomore is staring. In fact, she is engaged in a staring contest with the girl next to her and the two of them begin to giggle at increasing volumes. Teacher can no longer tolerate their disruption and when she realizes what the girls are doing, Teacher pauses her instructions so the class can observe the conclusion of the staring contest. These are her kids, but she's not their mother. Both girls grow redder in the face and Sophomore's unblinking eyes overflow with tears. Neither of them are declared winner and the class cheers before getting back to work.
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Megan Volpert is the author of many books on popular culture, including two Lambda Literary Award finalists, a Georgia Author of the Year finalist and an American Library Association honoree. Her newest work is Boss Broad (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019). She has been teaching high school English in Atlanta for over a decade and was 2014 Teacher of the Year. She writes for PopMatters and has edited anthologies of philosophical essays on the music of Tom Petty and the television series RuPaul’s Drag Race.
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#1.3 Three Poems by Emily Wallis Hughes
Can We
Snow. Snow. Or rather, can we
still write about snow, and the bay
laurel trees in the snow. I made
pies out of those bay laurels.
A month of pies, stacked!
upon my blue gingham
tablecloth. Stay here, please.
***
Vintner
I buried our
ox’s skull under
the oldest grapevine
on the agate beach
I cried
for you to cry
***
What is the Shape
A pleasure-shaped child
cut childhood
into a fern. What is
the shape of mendacity?
I don’t believe
in the future anymore
though I understand the concept
on the page and I still
save tomato seeds for
the next planting season.
I’ll know the shape of it
when this afternoon
peaches.
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Emily Wallis Hughes grew up in Agua Caliente, California, a small town in the Sonoma Valley. These poems are from I Return to the Vivarium, a manuscript in-progress. She is the author of Sugar Factory (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), which includes a series of twelve paintings by Sarah Riggs in conversation with her poems. She teaches creative writing as an adjunct instructor at Rutgers—New Brunswick and is the editor of Elecment at Fence.
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#1.4 Two Poems by Addie Tsai
Emergency Exit
I take one hand and push it away.
It is a boomerang or a toddler: it pushes back.
I have a confession to make.
When the jacket that belongs to the white woman who sits next to me
in the emergency exit row oozes a few inches across my right thigh,
I don’t say a word.
I glare at the freckles on her face.
I fume at the stitches while imagining what they’d look like
if I snagged them with my jagged fingernail.
I rub the fingernail against the pillow of my fingertip.
I picture another white woman’s freckles, my mother’s,
from a different time, when I was young enough to want them,
because it would have meant I would be a little more like her,
a little less visible, a little more of what the world wanted.
But she hated them, she always said. Wished she could have
surgically remove them. For her, they marked her as blemished.
For me, they marked me as everyone else.
I can’t imagine my mother thinking I was anything like her
the day she used the word Oriental on the phone to me.
Please don’t say that, I said, my body small but my voice
just a bit bigger. Big enough.
I had three of them. I’ll call them whatever I want.
Her words extinguished my voice like a candle
in an otherwise lightless room.
Please get your jacket out of my space
were words I found myself unable to utter.
Her jacket was black, but its presence was whiter than its owner.
Or, perhaps I should say that its expansion knew no bounds
which is another way of saying what it means to share space
with a person who is white but I assume believes themselves otherwise.
When she left her seat to walk to the bathroom, I closed my hand into a fist.
I punched the perfectly taut line of stitches like the mouths
of all those others who came before, when I didn’t have a voice.
The jacket kept coming back.
So did she, eventually.
My little fist lost steam, and so I looked out the window.
I longed for the mountains to swallow me up,
like a mouth, but without words to contain me,
or a body to eradicate the barrier between us.
***
when I say we were raised by wolves
when I say we were raised by wolves / I mean to say / Baba was our wolf
and we were the naked / infants / nestled in the grass / our cry a mute horn /
for we inhaled / each from each / mouth from mouth / in this way / we
seem comforted / by the two / in a different version / another story / us twinfants /
strain / against the strips / of wicker / folded into a shape / our bodies can hold
when I say wolves raised us / I mean to say / for the most part / even though
there was a brother / sometimes / we as twins / we as two /
mouth / hand / foot / whimper / need / want / mouth / hole / duct
one two body / two one bodies / we wanted / just the one / and then the one
besides the one / to be the mother / or father / to whom to conjoin
when I say wolves / when I say twins / I don’t mean to say / that one
about the boys / left to evaporate / or vanish / or be engulfed by /
the river / the basket / the kin / the kingdom
our mother / not the virgin / but her freckles / as though dipped
in branches / our father / as though god / of our skin
our god / did threaten a fire / a house / and us in it / unless we remained
his possessions / our virgin / left us / to a god / of fire / and hand as weapon
masqueraded / as love /
like a beast / he broke apart / teeth to flesh / spit nourishment into one
then two / mouths / without language
no mother / no suckling / he broke apart / teeth to flesh / when our rebel
teeth / refused / to break through skin /
fake pearls / for the family photos / fake mother / too
no language / our own / except the looks / between two /
between two / even she / would try her hardest
to consume the one into
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Addie Tsai teaches courses in literature, creative writing, dance, and humanities at Houston Community College. She collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. Addie holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. Her writing has been published in Banango Street, The Offing, The Collagist, The Feminist Wire, Nat. Brut., and elsewhere. She is the Nonfiction Editor at The Grief Diaries, Associate Fiction Editor at Anomaly, and Senior Associate Editor in Poetry at The Flexible Persona. She is the author of the queer Asian young adult novel Dear Twin.
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#1.5 Two Poems by Su Prevost
AT THE LAKE
Dogs tussle around
my orange skirt.
I’m a flying spoon,
a magnetized lover
of airborne silence.
Leaves tremble like
grounded wings . You
ask the water what
you’re worth, then
go home to your
crying mirror.
***
DURING THE VIRUS
Teenagers lean into the open belly of Lake Pontchartrain.
Receive, open, receive.
Their trash flies over the water and the slanted trees
in the the windless air.
You pass them and scold. Don’t you care? Your dog
moves towards the alligator in the sun, their mouth
open and heated in submission. You gave up revelations
for Lent . This is just one picture of you inside what
you love.
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“I began with the nighttime imagination of river life propelled by the tugboat horns that escorted me into me into sleep. I began with bedside prayers— ‘If I should die before I wake.’ This blend seeded my soul in the temporal. Raised in the working class village of Old Jefferson, a suburb of New Orleans, I always hungered for an exit door into the mystery of the both the city and the swamp.” —-Su Prevost
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#1.6 A Poem by Ashunda Norris
On Watching Surviving R. Kelly
you understand nothing if you do not have to imagine your own abuse replay every time another blk girl opens her mouth upturned & over complete, I'm the yarn spilled beneath the mole no one bothered to gaze upon the blk girl weeps I see myself a tender excuse barked at to be grateful for having him not some other chump unproud of yanking bikinis smacking fat asses at a pool party I'm excluded from leon was too old for me with my realm bursting stars face either way I'm not whole no more who really wants to deal perhaps it's more pressing to accentuate that when people ask how things are going they don't really want to know be bugged down in my sad mania disguised as rage ________________________________________________________________________________________
Ashunda Norris is a fierce feminist, filmmaker, poet and teacher living in Los Angeles. Her honors include fellowships from Cave Canem, the New York State Summer Writer's Institute and a residency at The Lemon Tree House. Ashunda’s film work has screened internationally, including Nairobi, Kenya and Kampala, Uganda. A proud alumna of Howard University and Paine College, the artist also holds MFAs in Poetry and Screenwriting. Ashunda’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in La Presa, The Adroit Journal, Bayou Magazine, Huffington Post, and elsewhere. You can find her online at ashunda.com
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#1.7 Two Poems by Patricia Killelea
POEM TO BE READ SHORTLY BEFORE MY REINCARNATION
Next life, I want to be the animal who comes across her reflection in the waters & doesn't stop to wonder whether or not it is beautiful
Or next life I'll perch in the ash, try on black feathers & catch the falling leaves so I can glue them all back to the branches
Maybe next life I'll become the white ghost deer crossing ice sheets all winter to reach the promise of spring on the other side
Or next life, I'll find a way to use my whole body to speak in vibrations, like a spider or a cicada & I'll make candlelights flicker just to let you know I'm still around
Next life, I'll definitely have hooves made of agate & I'll train my eyes to travel by birchlight, or I'll swim from the stars all the way back to the river where I was born
It shouldn't be too hard to find me again
Because in the next life, I'll become the first moth to finally reach the moon, the first flake of snow to melt on your tongue Will you meet me there too
will you glow there beside me, will you become the waters I gaze into, or the ash
Will I find you again in the falling leaves, or in the flicker, next life.
***
IF YOU REALLY LOVE THIS WORLD
There will be no more biting of tongues, no burying of embers— Let everything burn.
Tonight I am the mirror talking backwards. The house of light drinking itself.
Trailing behind me are all the women who came before me, who folded their names for loss into paper cranes & made me swallow each one
so I could speak the language of heartbreak & papercuts before I was even born.
If poems can save the world (they can't) I ask these words to show me how to step
into the same river twice without breaking the water in two, how to lie down and let a life scab over without pausing to preen the wound.
Tonight, my mothers going all the way back are saying If you really love this world, you'll take a match to it, and all our paper cranes unfold, taking to sky as ashes.
There is more burning in the distance that we can't see. And there is more to this story than daughters carving offerings from outrage.
The women in our family going all the way back, they were right about one thing.
Perhaps the sun needs human blood after all.
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Patricia Killelea is the author of two books of poems: Counterglow (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2019) and Other Suns (Swan Scythe Press, 2011). She is also a digital media artist, whose poetry films have been screened & shortlisted at Ó Bhéal International Poetry Film Festival, longlisted at Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, and featured at Moving Poems, Atticus Review, and Poetry Film Live. She teaches English at Northern Michigan University and is Poetry Editor at Passages North.
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#1.8 A Poem by Charlotte Covey
elegy while running
brown eyes. red strands. your hair always up. a snicker dancing on the edge of your purpled lips. drinking margaritas and lighting cigarettes on the back steps of the brewery, of the dive bar, of anywhere in particular. you, slipping down alleyways, glancing back at me, grin glowing your face while the smoke curled around your leather shoulders.
you started smoking at twenty-one. i want to hurt myself slowly, said with marlboro red shivering in your hand, in the night air, not all at once. i learned at your knee. you were one year and eight days older, and we made it seem like it mattered, the way they do with twins, the first two minutes ahead of the other.
i met you in the summer. late august, beer on breath, two women sitting on the concrete, face to face, criss-cross applesauce. the slits on our wrists grinned that pink-white of new skin, mirroring each other in full moon light.
each night that i slinked up the steps, half-drunk and breathless, i would start to cry. you would roll your eyes and slip the Choose Your Adventure book from your shelf. even then, we didn’t get the happy endings.
you never liked moving fast. i won’t chase you, half-laugh, half exasperation, ashing in puddles while i sprinted down virginia avenue, down tamarac, the greens, and wherever else we found ourselves at three a.m. slow down, you’d say when you found me, my head leaning in the dumpster, over an open window. let’s just sit for a while.
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Charlotte Covey is from St. Mary's County, Maryland. She currently lives in St. Louis, and she earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Missouri -St. Louis in Spring 2018. She has poetry published or forthcoming in journals such as The Normal School, Salamander Review, CALYX Journal, the minnesota review, Potomac Review, and Puerto del Sol, among others. She is currently a contributing editor for River Styx and teaches poetry for the MFA in Writing program at Lindenwood University.
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#1.9 Three Poems by Laura Mullen
I Dream She Is Me or I Am Her
Head in a circle of flames Tongues long yellow petals “I’ve already said this” A target the center of Somebody’s sad vicious Imaginary life at least The rest is silence By which I mean to say
The betraying body Has already been erased
Now I am fixed forever As the Spokescow for this White dream tower of Ivory and ice I amputated Decorate as warning or Admonishment Hoof It In a Hurry she would seem To say They will devour Every inch of you except The end that can talk
***
Cowism
Because if someone’s chasing you around the pasture With a knife If someone’s loading you into a trailer with the other Cows with a knife If someone’s driving you all to the abattoir Where someone will stick a knife into your guts And your neck and twist If you’re slipping down on the concrete floor The floor thick with offal and excrement and blood Or you’re waiting to be the next one slaughtered Screaming and pissing yourself in fright If someone’s cutting off your head With a sharp knife on the way To mapping the flayed corpse for further cuts You don’t turn around and say “Give it up I was a truck star for the Diary Industry and I was labeled ‘promising’ too sometimes or ‘best’ And I was a cute blond girl once and I grew up In a heart gallery” You don’t you just Don’t
***
Verticow
You fall in love with a cow Pretending to be a woman And end up with a woman Pretending to be a cow It doesn’t matter at all it’s all Dead meat by the end Of the movie anyway And your fear of heights Has been cured completely
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Laura Mullen is the author of eight books and the McElveen Professor of English at LSU. Recognitions for her poetry include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award. Recent poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Ritual and Capital, and Bettering American Poetry. She was the 2018 Arons poet at Tulane and affiliate faculty at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas. Her translation of Veronique Pittolo's Hero was published by Black Square Editions in 2019.
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#1.10 A Poem by Colleen Rothman
Lily of the Ergo
And she says, “We wanted to be near the park,” with a shrug and a bite of omelet, as though it’s preference, not budget, that fosters this privileged proximity, mere happenstance that your own family’s a bus ride away, and once she’s settled, you’ll endure all thirty stops to meet her at the farmers’ market, with a few bucks to spare—on a quart of peaches, maybe, a jar of artisanal pickles, one Nutella crepe—because things are tight like they’ve never been, not since your courthouse wedding with the red-sauce Italian dinner for twenty-six that you charged to your credit card, paid off long after redeeming the points for a new camping tent, not once comparing your honeymoon under the Door County stars to hers in Bali, their every blessed moment catalogued on a site you’ve since abandoned, but then came Lily, your sweet, perfect Lily, and yet, expensive Lily, Lily of the UPPAbaby, Lily of the Stokke, Lily of the hypoallergenic Honest everything, in case her skin was sensitive like yours, and yes, you could have exercised maternal restraint, scoured Craigslist for hand-me-downs like your other furniture, but even before the birth, you worried about the long hours and the long commute and the long distance from any other family to love and kiss and cuddle her for chest naps, so you spent extra to make those first few months easier, and here you are, in debt up to your nose ring, the price to pay for your babyworn bundle, Lily of the Ergo, asleep at home as you sit here with the owner of a condo un-self-consciously described as industrial boho, situated adjacent to nature she’ll hardly ever enter, over brunch at a bistro you didn’t want to admit you can’t afford, despite your days winning the bread, as they say, so you order an upscale McMuffin with a glass of water—still, not sparkling—though you know what she’ll assume when you don’t ask for a mimosa, and it’s not that you’re opposed to a second, you’re willing to shoulder the burden in light of the declining birth rate that’s befuddling economists, but another Lily would bankrupt you, and your landlord’s already pissed you added another person to the lease, one he can hear through shared walls, shrieking at eight and ten and twelve and two and four, so predictable you could set your watch to her, Lily of the Rolex, and come September you’re sure he’ll raise your rent, so you’ve been fantasy-scrolling Zillow, dreaming of a place near the park, where you could picnic by the lake on the blanket from your registry that you only ever unfold in what pre-Lily used to be your dining room and make clover crowns to plant atop the soft swirl of her hair and on the way home pop in at your favorite coffee shop, and then you see the asking and laugh and laugh and laugh until you cry before you search your childhood zip code, where for the same price you could own a former plantation, a different sort of problematic, but you find yourself smoothing the tension with words that relax her tight smile into something genuine, and she remains unaware of the depths of your difference as you query every detail, certainly sympathetic to the challenges of busybody doormen, of snooty elevator neighbors, of dog ownership eighteen floors in the sky, as though you were not at all jealous, even though it will take years, and two raises, and a move far away from this city by the lake, closer to home, where things are not cheap but more within reach, before you will mean them.
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Colleen Rothman's writing has appeared, or will soon, in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Literary Hub, The Kenyon Review Online, The Adroit Journal, Hobart, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. She lives in New Orleans, where she is working on a novel. Learn more at colleenrothman.com.
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