Letter to Theo

By Sam Ross

Two fighters

sparring under

the park’s biggest hawthorn.

The brow of the smaller split,

red swathe growing wider.

Their violence is

a simulation. And it isn’t.

A Rottweiler

leashed to the tree watches

footwork as if trying

to discern practice

from the real thing,

as if wondering whether

to show allegiance,

pull back the dark curtain

of her lips, join the attack.

But it is evening,

training is over

and when she is untied

she softens, the pink band

of her tongue moving over

the expression of a man

embarrassed of being hurt,

insisting he isn’t, not really.

I think of it later

reading Vincent’s letters

to his brother, his description

of the asylum in San Remy:

walls papered grey-green,

chestnut tapestry slung over

the chair’s worn arm,

a field’s gold ripples

far outside the cell and finally

curtains framing

a barred window:

virescent, flimsy, marked

in a pattern

of faint red roses.

The School of the Future Looks Just Like the Past

By Jiordan Castle

only now bright index cards tetris the windows—teen dreams taped up: Graduate. Get my braces off. Fall in love. Pass gym. Today when I passed by a group of kids stirred the breeze with obscenities, meaning summer had arrived. Like the summer I was thirteen below the ferris wheel at my hometown Y. A boy I hadn’t seen since grade school said nothing before he ignited his lighter against the hard curve of my chin in a broken circle we called our friends. You remember—Whack-a-Mole, the squirt gun game, the claw machine. The belly-up goldfish in a plastic bag. The spark & his grin, a ring toss.

Kawabata has no twin in logic and the poem must be less than knowledge.

By Lena Walker

Like eating hot rice in a downpour,

ducks growing fat on crackers,

calling a fist a lake.

Who doesn’t want to be loved

not for their tenderness,

but for their false teeth?

Who doesn’t envy

the diligence of cattle egret?

Look, here is the blue dress I wore

in that other life.

Here is the mail left unopened.

Here is the flourish of books

unordered on the shelf.

Here is the oval fruit

I eat myself sick on.

after drag

By eae Benioff

priorly a non-compartment

for storage things like rage

rent the non-soul

zoned between the bladder

& gomorrah, & without coordinates

slipped between the fingers like phylacteries

to hypothesize a memory:

in those days, i yearned by rubbing two wishes

on a circle, passion entered my heart through

a vestigial organ, whose somber grating crackled like a radio

into the greater dark, i was thoughtful & happy, preconditions

for the greatest sadness i would know, it spread before me

like a field whose parameters were endless, it was a blessing

without any other likeness, it heaved against my position & i, likewise,

observed my heft.

Essay on Beauty

By Hannah Matheson

i.

“Maudlin” appears in Late Middle English,

deriving originally (read: “sin”)

from the Latin magdalena.

What use are the transitional fossils

of our language? The half-lives

of words in circulation?

Well, let’s say Mary represents

a case study in hunger,

hers and theirs, which together

beget blame. Did you dare

to want the thing grieved?

Did you drink holy wine and wail

at his tomb? We thwart

your desire and we

detest you for it 

ii.

I’ve been telling people

you remind me of someone

as a means of conveying

you are unknown to me but

also a kind of homecoming

I thought it was adjacent to grace,

to recognize someone in someone

else, but the other day it was said

to me, and I hated it: the accusation

of being iterable. And then I hated

that I hated it. How about that,

all of us dying to be original?

iii.

Oh god                another

book cover I’ve got my hair grease

all over; another (self)argument

about pubes, whether I should or

shouldn’t pay literal money

to have a hot tongue

of wax uproot the time

I spent growing older,

capable of nudity.

If I hate beauty, its spliced

tape, why do I wallow

when I feel unbeautiful?

Possibly we hate Mary because

she was wanted, because when she lost

what she wanted she wanted

to cry. If I pretend to exist

outside this economy plotting

aesthetic against desire

in order to determine price,

I lie. Like her, weep

to mourn perished principles

or consummate a pitiful

performance. My mouth waters

after beauty, because, yes, I still want

you to look at me and love me

as is, to long for me specifically

like this. For ex. when I was

approaching pubescence

my mother was horrified by my stomach

had never heard of a happy trail

but I found it lovely, like

stepping stones in a lazy

river, dough-soft morass

of my belly. Would I want

to be more aerodynamic,

less labyrinthine? The truth is

I’m partial to this body composed

of pathways, corridors: birth canal,

esophagus, aorta, etcetera.

A poet I know once said he’s so tired

of hearing the word “body” 

in poems and I agree,

but what stands in for the

physical fact of the body?

Alternate corpora:

a butter sculpture,

a bloodbag, a hive

of apologies.

iv.

This etymology of appetite

ends in profligate tears,

whorish sadness.

v.

Oh       once again

I have wearied the hem of this morning 

God     how do you trust

life to be more than a mouth

opening and closing?

from Umbels

By Iris Cushing

In the winter, there were days in which

I never stepped outside. Enclosure

in nourishment and texture. Kitchen,

soft bed, warm water, wood carried up

from the basement to the fireplace.

A day when, your node newly rooted

in me, I couldn’t get my car out

of the snow piled beside the road.

Now the turn from night to day becomes

porous. The windows always open.

When it rains, your father and I take

off our clothes and run in the high grass.

Our skin lets the world into your house.