A Trans Landscape Elegy

By Nathan Erwin

for L

i. Good morning, little Lithosphere.
Wake up, it’s a cool air slippage kind-of-day.                       Coriolis wind
deflects the god of AA meetings & rushes into the foyer
as you leave for school.
Your mother is still refusing to look at your body, to say your true names.

In the Chemung Valley, where she carried you to term, the wind comes westward,
falls on the rich-pastured earth, wraps the beeches and their loamy soil
with a woodland roar.
Brother, this is a silent holy war.                                          Your mother insists
you are just like her – in body, embodying, in topography, you must grow food
just like her – raise beds, raise bees, reduce runoff.                                 Wake up, all of you:
a fifteen-your-old boy who set his mother’s house on fire. She has you.

Unwind your breath.
Now she doesn’t.
She has you.         No, she doesn’t.

ii. Good twilight, little Lithosphere.
Wake our old, stoned father resting where the crust is the thickest,
his body has grown some thirty miles     deep.
Sigh in a high tenor,
Difference lets you see.   
See.
See.  Chanting again and again, so he hears you.
There are a number of things you are in need of
locked behind your bedroom door,           so head home.
Like a lost cartographer, orient your map to the landscape, line up
fir behind fir,
the storyline of early dark. Did you know even the Tundra Swan pushes its neck
toward human vestiges, toward shelter?

Get home. Find the room where it’s raining in the corner,
with the ritual scroll for birth:
shower in warm milk and herbs, wash your face in burning birchbark.
That’s how 
the fire starts,

just as Spring breaks open,
just as your mother walks in.

Creation Story

By Nathan Erwin

Albuquerque, NM

In the Monzano Mountains, a billy goat
is trying to fuck his mother.
I place the kid
in a separate pen,
while an electromagnetic sky
forges blue warnings somewhere beyond
the divisions of time. And I am afraid
to place my pain on the table
beside the squash & the steaming meat, afraid
of touching the bloody tool of regulation. Sometimes,
I let the kid inside the house.

I asked my mother, do you want to stop
revolving? To break through
the great snowbank of the Milky Way
and starve in the open desert beyond?

This sandstorm is her response.
This wind is inside the goat, inside the soft laws
of nations. There are no necks to break
between us. I open the gate
and lead him back home.
Down in the South Valley,
sands swallow this sprawling desert city.

Guests of the Nation

By Peter Mladinic

L, a poet, was married to a poet,
more recognized but not as good as she.
We rendezvoused at the beach one day,
and after a few hours
she followed me to my parents’ house,
not close but not terribly far from the beach.

An early summer night.
My mother laid out a meal of cold cuts:
ham, salami, baloney,
cheeses and bread. A light supper.
L was preoccupied, worried really.

Her car was low on gas and the latch
to her tank wouldn’t open.
The talk was all L’s predicament
at the table in the dining area
back from the kitchen.

Two windows faced a back yard.
Light came through the windows as L
ate a little and worried so her trouble
became my parents’ more so than mine.
My father got some device, not a crowbar
or anything, to damage her tank.

Out front of the house my father worked
the device, my mother looking over his
shoulder, L also looking, and I detached,
but out in the street as they were.
Finally he pried open the latch.

L followed me in my car to the nearest
gas station, then a few miles to a circle
where she got onto a highway
that led towards her parents’ home
where she’d been staying, while her poet
husband was off on a series of readings.

Not too long after this latch incident L
died in an auto accident, a one-car fatality.
She hit a tree.  A few years later my
parents died, my mother at the start of the year,
my father at the end.  I was teaching
Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation.”

Bonaparte narrates the story.
Like Belcher and Hawkins, prisoners
suddenly executed, lifeless in a bog,
L and my parents, so intent
to get the latch opened, know all
about everything, everything or nothing.

Bike Rider

By Kenneth Pobo

When Harold Fizzlebotts rides
his bike to town, always taking
the same streets, he’s perplexed
on Tuesday when the final street
leads not to the Dollar Store

but to Heaven, a nervous place
like rapids before a waterfall. Angels
slide over the edge,
wings soaking wet.
On the shore Harold talks with
a decaying tree
limb which fell off in a storm--now
it remembers better days.
Harold remembers better days too.
Like when he flew balsa planes
in his back yard. By the time he
turned thirteen, those planes had
flown off or died in terrible
waste baskets. Sometimes he dreams

of Heaven—a sound of a badminton
birdie sailing over the net.

Saturday in Costa Rica

By Tess Congo

According to the clock in the kitchen, it’s Saturday.
The cat pucks the condom wrapper across
bedroom granite. The New Yorker

I’d become, not yet risen from sea foam, listens
to your voice on the balcony, how it softens
into deerskin. Time splashes like headlights

in our faces, how suddenly you could love me.
I wanted to learn what that meant—to love 
you. Back flat on the kitchen linoleum, 

you smiled like a canoe upon broken water.
I sunk my ear to your sternum, listening
for fists against the screen door. 

The cat breaks a water glass in the bedroom, 
and a year later, I’ll walk like a lioness, smiling
over glass shards.