POETRY

MAY 2025

$6.95 USA
$9.95 CAN
£7.95 UK
POETRY
MAY 2025

Founded in Chicago in 1912

Volume 226, Number 2
CONTENTS

POEMS

ADRIAN MATEJK A 103 Editor’s Note

STEFANIA GOMEZ 104 Wreck
Redwork
SASHA PEARL 106 Trucking
Deep Thoughts at Ulta Beauty
JOSHUA BENNETT 108 Physical Education
We
PAISLEY REKDAL 110 Ending Song
ROSS WHITE 112 Crossing
MICHELLE PHƯƠNG HỒ 113 Bone Symphony
SARAH GHAZAL ALI 120 Slow Violence
PAUL TRAN 121 A Force of Nature
ROWAN WILDE RIGGS 124 poem.
poem.
VONA GROARKE 126 Infinity Pool
TIFFANY HSIEH 127 Ah-gong’s Funeral
DAN BEACHY- QUICK 128 Orfeo
K ATE PARTRIDGE 132 Woof, This Heat
Petition for Reintroduction
DANIEL HALPERN 136 Street Food
HERMELINDA HERNANDEZ 137 I-765
MONJARAS

JOHN MULCARE 140 Working with Jimmy Above a Drop Ceiling

HEIDI WILLIAMSON 142 Work Ethic
OMOTARA JAMES 143 On Intimacy
When the Seed Spans the Length of the Fruit
ZHANG XIAN 148 ަ୩Ր䦛фྑԍঈԆԥ૖
TR. BY SHANGYANG FANG Departure
XIN QIJI 150 ᇷЈᅦ
TR. BY SHANGYANG FANG Self-Portrait as the Mountain
LAUREN RUSSELL 153 When Untouched
MITCHELL GLAZIER 154 The Closet Weeper
The Gazing Ball
BRITTANY PERHAM 157 Still
Triolet with a Line by Sylvia Plath
Pair
OLGA LIVSHIN 162 War. Day 294
MARTHA SILANO 163 Is This My Last Ferry Trip?
Self-Elegies

NOT TOO HARD TO MASTER

CHASE BERGGRUN 169 “A slow and difficult process that verged on the
ridiculous”: On Erasure
Writing Prompt
From “R E D”

CONTRIBUTORS 180
EDITORIAL

ADRIAN MATEJK A Editor-in-Chief

LINDSAY GARBUTT Senior Editor
HOLLY AMOS Managing Editor
IVÁN PÉREZ Assistant Editor
JEREMY LYBARGER Prose Editor
SHOSHANA OLIDORT Prose Editor

READERS

HADARA BAR-NADAV
ROB COLGATE
JAY GAO
I.S. JONES
TREVOR KETNER

MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS AND CREATIVE

FRED SASAKI Creative Director and Exhibitions Co-curator

MEREDITH RIEMERSMA Communications Manager
LIZ O’CONNELL-THOMPSON Media Manager

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

KERI CASCIO Vice President of Information Technology

ERIN WATSON Product Manager
JANET CHEUNG Web Producer
MEG FORAJTER Permissions Coordinator

FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION

JENNY CASTELLER Chief Operating Officer

YOLANDA DAVIS Human Resources Director
CHRIS GUZAITIS Director of Grants and Awards
WHITNEY HALLBERG Business and Circulation Manager
TOM ETHERINGTON Accounting Manager
NEVERTHA BROOKS Staff Accountant
ORLANDO ABARCA Facilities Assistant
REBECA JURADO Grants and Awards Assistant

PROGRAMS AND ENGAGEMENT

YDALMI NORIEGA Vice President of Programs and Engagement

K ATHERINE LITWIN Library Director and Exhibitions Co-curator
ITZEL BLANCAS Community Programs Manager
NOA FIELDS Public Programs Manager
JUSTINE HAK A Education Programs Manager
MAGGIE QUEENEY Library Adult Programs Manager
JONATHAN ANTOS Guest Experience Associate
ANGELICA FLORES Education Programs Assistant
EVALENA FRIEDMAN Library Assistant
MICHAEL KEATING Guest Experience Representative
SARA MERCURIO Cataloging Intern
OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT

MICHELLE T. BOONE President and CEO

REBECCA SWORD Senior Administrative Assistant

TRUSTEES

MICHELLE T. BOONE President

GWENDOLYN PERRY DAVIS Chair
CAMILLE GALLOGLY BACON
JOHN BRACKEN
JOSEPH BROCATO
FABIOLA DELGADO
MICHAEL FASSNACHT
DEBORAH GILLESPIE
MARGUERITE GRIFFIN
DEEPA GUPTA
ERIC HERMAN
ANDY JACOBS
PARNESHIA JONES
MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH
BEATA D. KIRR
STUART MILLER
LINDSEY PECKINPAUGH
GREGORY THOMPSON
LYNNE THOMPSON
MARIO TRETO JR.

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Poetry, May 2025, Volume 226, Number 2
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POEMS
Adrian Matejka

Editor’s Note

When I was a kid, my parents always had jazz on the record player. Before
I could read I could recognize Dexter Gordon’s One Flight Up by its opening
keys, Kenny Drew’s heavy hands setting the tone. In that apartment, saxo-
phones arpeggioed and trumpets did their brass things from early afternoon
until past my bedtime. Jazz was the soundtrack for everything—cleaning,
napping, cooking, building Legos, it didn’t matter. The music was so
ubiquitous that my biological father tried to name me “Yusef ” after the great
windsman Yusef Lateef. My mother had other ideas, and she won out.
My favorite jazz musician then (and now) was Miles Davis, whose bril-
liance and funky attitude was central to nearly every major jazz movement
of the twentieth century. He moved through the world with the same swing
as his trumpet lines and was always, as one of his record titles proclaimed,
Miles Ahead. His music communicated something otherwise inexpressible to
me. At the same time, the man himself was notoriously grouchy and difficult
to work with. He was often misunderstood and he didn’t care, once telling a
reporter “If you understood everything I said, you’d be me.”
“Miscommunication” has the Latin root “communicare,” which can mean
either “common” or “shared,” and in poetry, I imagine “shared” speaks to
everyone involved—both poet and reader offering their understandings and
confusions in equal value. After all, a poem is not an argument or a debate.
It’s more of a secular communion amplifying our common experiences like
the back and forth between musicians and listeners. All art, but especially
poetry, strives for communication and understanding, for a way—whether
through image, music, or memory—to create a space where everyone
involved becomes an individualized part of the collective.
Communication is central to the poets in this May issue, including Paisley
Rekdal, whose poem “Ending Song” puzzles over the ways we reimagine
words like luck and blessing to fit our own emotional schemas. Or Omotara
James’s “On Intimacy,” where the “mutual and reciprocal disappointments”
between two family members are beyond language. Or Dan Beachy-Quick’s
“Orfeo” reimagining Orpheus’s underworld, where AM radio provides the
soundtrack “As you sing along—.” He might as well have been talking about
poetry’s necessary musicality.
It’s not easy to make English sound good with all of its harsh consonants
and confusing cognates. But swing is as central to poetic communication as
image or lyric. Like musicians, it is the obligation of poets to find the mysti-
cal arrangements of language that tune up both the ear and the heart. That’s
where the real sharing and conversation happens. But it requires commit-
ment. As the great Indianapolis poet Etheridge Knight wrote, “Making jazz
swing in/Seventeen syllables AIN’T/No square poet’s job.”

ADRIAN MATEJK A 103

Stefania Gomez

Wreck

Firemen cut the car open like a cake but when

they reached through the windshield to pull me out
they instead grabbed handfuls of confetti.
After the last of that came the poultry—
the rubber chickens and ducks that moaned
in a chorus as they were scooped into the men’s arms
as if they dreaded for their lives to be saved.
Then came the great men of history—Caesar,
Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ben Franklin,
together with their wives, who they led carefully
to be sure their skirts didn’t catch
on the jagged glass. Then my boyfriend was pulled out, shrugging.
Then came the mast of a tall ship,
practically as much timber as the woods
off the road the car had flipped into. The firemen took turns
trying to stand it up like a tree, and, laughing, posed for a photo
next to it. Then they pulled out my youth,
at which point they became self-conscious
about their prior merriment and a silence fell.
They pulled out heaven and hell
but couldn’t get a good handle on either.
Couldn’t manage fear but they did
pull out my plans for the future, one by one,
admiring how they shone like coins.
Really, so much was salvaged
that when they stuffed the last
thing they could fit into the ambulance
and shut the door without me,
I could hardly blame them. Sorry, no more room,
they said. Oh no, I don’t mind, don’t for a moment worry
that I mind, I said. With all that
in the car with me, I was starting to think I’d never be alone.

STEFANIA GOMEZ 104

Redwork

In the sunless hour before day I hear the man I want

to love just how I’d want him. He’ll never let a single,

single danger, no unasked-for thing my way. Mornings break

against the body I’ve made do with. An A-line dress

found secondhand, its designer celebrated last decade,

label sheared in alteration. I re-sew its silhouette

to flatter these shifting dimensions—hips, breasts. Silent,

I bet on imprecise measurements, I prick my fingers

raw. In days past, women sent away for stitching patterns—

STATE BIRD, HORSESHOE, YOUNG GIRL

WIELDING MOP—all to be sewn in the same scarlet thread.

The finished quilt top a neat grid of empty symbols,

another woman’s memories—BOY WITH PIG,

CIRCUS ACT, PEAR. Such specificity, the makers

can almost never be identified. This is the only alchemy.

What we have is even less than what we make.

In the dark, our faces shed old light.

A single, single, single thing.

STEFANIA GOMEZ 105

Sasha Pearl

Trucking

I’m in Shartlesville
Eating air-chilled wings in the sleeper cab
I took the contract because the devil called me exciting
It really pumped me up even though I know it’s part of his regular pitch
for paris hilton cookware
I’m parked behind miniature roadside america
The billboards here are breathtaking
I wept into my filet-o-fish
all missing persons drive white pontiacs
But I exceeded the boundaries of my lane and got tasered
In my heart there is a giant boom crane lifting a 2 ton pack of advil
At the chrome shop they are introducing some new products out of season
I thought of you
I thought of US dining out on my brain trust
Living out my henchmen/captive sub/dom fantasy

SASHA PEARL 106

Deep Thoughts at Ulta Beauty

I went to Ulta Beauty to buy perfume

I was horny and I wanted the universe inside my nose
The lit shelves and raised hair
Press a sensual towering cloud
Swells and pitches of blood
This one smells like observation deck
This one smells like Florida toilet
Stinky zoo
Albino gator
There was no tester for Ariana Grande’s “thank u next” signature scent
I Googled its reviews:
“Smells like sexy pickles and pears”
We had everything on earth
Pupae, larvae, tiger moths
Stick bugs and shrimp plants and giant millipedes, jellyfish
And what did we make
Dell computer oxycodone maxi dresses
Water beds, the PT Cruiser
P90X, MK ULTRA, bitcoin, body rock, nation states
We could have had manta rays
But we wanted Boone’s Farm apple wine
I’m depressed
I’m depressed by mankind’s infinite reach

SASHA PEARL 107

 Joshua Bennett

Physical Education

For the sake of argument, let’s say

the day my father outlawed all contact
between backhand and face, back
-side and belt, stiletto cast like a harpoon

across the living room’s auburn length

and the protagonist running toward the opposite
door, was a Thursday. And let’s say the logic
of his claim went that if he & everyone else

in the house could hit me then, while I was still small,

I would one day grow to be a bomb like so many
brothers he’d seen held up & buried for tempers
flaring in open air. A beating now would be a book

-mark in my memory’s eye; a black mark on the calendar

I kept inside; a day he would be made to meet me
in the square. Every little boy’s brain keeps score. And who
among us hasn’t been held, helpless, before? At the feet

of mercy or underneath them. From that day forward,

I was counters to every command, a conflagration
of untamed language, now detached from a program
of corporal might. The lesson took. I was tall as a man

the next time my father and I shook the house with

our rage and shame. We breathed like dancers,
and allowed our hostility to take its form,
my teenage fists honed in the outside world

where no one loves you enough

to let the boy back up when he loses,
grant him a moment to shake the dust,
knuckle up, try his luck, again.

JOSHUA BENNETT 108

We

The money of the mind is attention, maybe.

Which is not, initially, where I thought I’d begin,
but we’re already here now, using the language
of care and economy, though God-talk was truly
my first way in. Sustained attention is how we approach
a flesh and blood experience of the Divine I say to the
therapist nodding her head, only moments after
we disagree over whether her dress is coral or yellow
-based red, as opposed, of course, to a blue-based
red, like the square on her tartan scarf. My jacket
is the color of snow on television. My eyes
are as brown as my father’s when he lifted a stranger
off the ground he saw through the driver’s side window
beating a woman on Broadway. I am almost the age now
he was then, and am still studying the difference between
what a man proclaims in speech and what he says with his
body. Tomorrow marks another year on Earth for his third
son, and he is a father now, with a boy he is trying to teach
the benefits of apprehension. Who instead prefers to walk
on his hands, leap from the playground slide, climb
on countertops to watch TV from another room entirely.
Where does my influence, my aspiration, end and the child
begin? Who refashions the cosmos with his laughter.

JOSHUA BENNETT 109

Paisley Rekdal

Ending Song

You’d never call the branches

arms, though in certain
lights don’t pine and man
look like hands

conjoined where bark

meets flesh, where man
holds pine to saw
away the rotted limbs

he knows must fall?

And if you’d never call
it luck when you watch him
slip and break his back,

won’t you learn to call it

blessing later, to supple
the muscles of his
cracking hips, tear

into the edges of his pain

till they dissolve
up through your arms and you
can’t feel the difference

of your bodies?
What else to call
a point of rupture
but a join, where you

become another aspect

of the break: we wound
so as to save, we hurt
so as to heal—

What else to know

of loss but how
a man’s breast might cool
beneath your fingers,

PAISLEY REKDAL 110

whatever tenderness
that’s left no end
to passion but
its branching out. Oh

wasn’t that the point

of love: to join the end
to its beginning, save
some semblance of a whole

by splitting it to half?
Wasn’t that the hope
with which he sounded out
the weakened wood

before he cut, the care

with which you bound
the fallen branches up
once he let them go?

PAISLEY REKDAL 111

Ross White

Crossing

I’m not the first man to lose his father

slowly, not the first to wonder
when I walk in the room if the watery light
in his eyes means son or stranger.
Some days, I think he’s lashed to a mast
only he can see, trapped there to weather
the final season without giving in
to its song. Some days, he points at the clock
like he’s late for a meeting at the bank.
What wide horizon awaits him
when he stares at the gray wall for hours?
Does he see the story of his youth,
hour by hour, dollar by dollar,
unfurl like hieroglyphics along temple stone?
Or does he admire the imperfections
in the paint—the chip, the humble bubble
along the drywall that would not smooth?
But I do not ask him: I cannot
find the gangplank I would use to board
that ship, cannot find the sextant
to chart the stars he now sails by.
When I rock my head between my knees
or knead my brow, I’m not suffering
some way the old masters hadn’t catalogued
by quill and lamplight, not rolling
a new boulder up the eternal hill.
This is the port from which we all wave goodbye.
I feed him chicken and rice,
rub lotion on his bruising limbs.
When I leave, I tell him how long it will be
before I see him next, knowing time,
for him, is not a line, but a tide.

ROSS WHITE 112

Michelle Phương Hồ

Bone Symphony

On my windowsill, there are insects whose skeletal remains

remain intact. Fruit flies or gnats, I can’t tell. They make a small
pile of themselves, and I let them stay.

By sundown, I am two inches off the ground, and my hearing

impeccable. There remains a small shelf inside my brain
where the racket lands. Owl. Talons digging into a cushion
of sound. My eardrums, shaking.

For a while, two great blue herons hung around my neck.

A yoke of beauty. A beak was missing. The burden
deciphering these signs.

Further south: a flock of large geese flying so low, I can see

their breast feathers ruffing in the wind. Wingspan
of a hundred feet.

MICHELLE PHƯƠNG HỒ 113

How I prefer to keep my suffering private.
How I keep my likelihood of surviving in a gray suede

pouch by the windowsill. Sachets of shallot peels

to drive out the vultures. Stop looking, child,

through the frosted window. Your hot breath makes

the opening clear.

Inside our re-education camps, one inmate

had the foresight to catch a millipede on the ceiling
of his cell, hiding it beneath his bed.

In the morning, he roasted it over a tiny flame.

The texture of tiny crawling.

By sundown,
We only talk about eating, about how to find things to eat.

By sundown,
The food put into the mouth is like one breath
of fresh air, blown—
into a vast empty house.

MICHELLE PHƯƠNG HỒ 114

 It began with a sharp noise

pushing its pin

into the cushion of my brain.

It began with a whirlwind

a teaspoon a stalk of celery

limp spinning

down the garbage disposal

churning

the voice of a prisoner in re-education

came to me, landing

on my shelf. He instructed me to sing
“Silent Night”

whenever I was afraid.

It was the song he was punished for singing.

The guards, fearing
what it could mean.

He said he would sing it

with me.

When the guards entered

and took their clubs to my shelves
I was ready, I was singing all is calm,
all is bright
and quickly,

I ladled porridge into their barrels

just like my grandfather taught me so their violence
would burst into rice.

A messier night than expected. But the voice,

I let stay.

MICHELLE PHƯƠNG HỒ 115

It was a stately church a public memorial
for the visible losses

gathered the citizens

into small sachets by the stained glass

I scattered sat weeping

all over the water feather-like

felt like veils

rippling off the eyes of my dead

with each intake fresh

cue the funeral

for my brain was beginning

to sound the good news

MICHELLE PHƯƠNG HỒ 116

Two eyes blinking open in the night.

My rescue, arriving like that.

My friends say weeping after being humiliated lasts about eight hours.

A brass cymbal, dizzying still.

In a migrant shelter in El Paso, I meet a man named Miguel, from Juárez.

He tells me that during an immigration hearing, he presented the bullet
wounds on his chest. That’s insufficient evidence, the judge said.

That’s one bulletproof vest, Your Honor.

Miguel lowered his polo shirt, tucking it back into his pants.

I lowered my head.

May the body’s testimony be enough.

May Your Honor reap the whirlwind of clanging symbols.

May my words return: tiny, crawling

into a vast empty house.

MICHELLE PHƯƠNG HỒ 117

Now I think : We are too far gone in the tectonics of the American rhyme
scheme for our symbols to remain stable. Now the sheep : disguised in
wolf ’s clothing. The saw : a paddle. The shelter : a grave. The mother who
tried to rescue me almost killed me. The savior : a toddler. The toddler :
a king. A yellow flag with three red stripes : a soiled rag to wipe down the
camp latrines. Now, on walks to the local pond, the one animal I look for is
the great blue heron—a sign I have made up to mean there is hope for me.

In the end, I see my father, gaunt, trousers hanging loosely from a thin frame.
He stands waving a yellow handkerchief at the dock of our future home,
where I am sound asleep on the forest floor, footsteps all around me. Here,
sheep and wolves once slept beside each other, my father tells me. I imagine
ivory wool resting against slick, dark fur. This was the earth’s first poem.

MICHELLE PHƯƠNG HỒ 118

Making my way home
is the only ritual I know.

Making a small pile

of my dead on the windowsill

I cup my hands against

the glass like

children do, blowing hot air

into the skeletal frames.

Each prisoner’s singing

so clear

inside the funeral, I stood

with them

a tiny flame

MICHELLE PHƯƠNG HỒ 119

Sarah Ghazal Ali

Slow Violence

The man that I love rinses our recyclables.

The first man to love me

bears the face of his father,

whom he loved, who loved

his country, who left it,

bereft of all but anger.

I pray toward Mecca in a shirt

sewn by someone who wasn’t paid,

a woman, the hands of many

women with whom I might share

a last name, an adjacent complexion,

a greater susceptibility to diabetes.

The first man to love me says

immigration is like natural selection.

The peppered moth darkened

when trees covered by lichen blackened.

There is a symbolic difference

between distance and direction.

I contaminate my life by living it.

SARAH GHAZAL ALI 120

Paul Tran

A Force of Nature

Mixed greens. Purple onions. Banana

Peppers. Tomatoes. Avocados. Mayonnaise. Pepper. Sourdough.
A stranger knows

Your mother’s order, has seen her

From the other side of the glass where she is always
Right and a number one

Priority. Someone asked

How she was doing, how they could help her.
Chained in whose dungeon

Were you—whose good boy were you

Pretending to be—when she said please and may and I and have
For the first time? A stranger heard

The anticipating delight

In her voice you have nearly forgotten. Do you feel that
Knife in your back

Twisting, digging in? You betrayed yourself

For nothing. In exchange for her heels shuffling, scuffing
The linoleum, rising slowly

On her tiptoes like a newborn gull, divinely astonished

By the brine, that ax of air
Hacking, swinging in from the sea

As she leans in tempted, a tempest.

You got to live a life of the mind. Are you happy with yourself?
You gave up her hands, radiant

Bells in the highest tower of her monastery, trembling

As she reaches to receive this moment
Made just for her

Because she asked, because she had

Paid the price: unzipping her coin purse for exactly
Seventy-five cents, counting—

PAUL TRAN 121

Thirty two sense fifty fifty five send sexy five saints
Okay seven seventy won seventy true seventy tree seventy poor
Seventy five sands tank you—

Placing everything she had left to her name

In a stranger’s hands.
You thought your hunger mattered

More than hers, you were more important to history

Than your mother? The fuck?
She knows you hated her

Spaghetti—pack of noodles
Boiled, drained, dressed in ketchup
Hoarded from Burger King. Like a crown, you wear a stapled scar

From the previous millennium, playing hide and seek

In a hamper, finding yourself
And freeing yourself—

Tumbling over—
Shattering all over the kitchen that took her entire Sunday to clean—
Blood everywhere, you blamed her for not being there

The first time and the second.

Your mother has not once not been the only one
Rubbing eucalyptus oil into your back

With a nickel. Her eyes holding back

The signs she saw, like useless currency, oceans eternally separate.
A mother. A daughter. You and her

Both bowed before the bodhisattva

Every night of your childhood
To ask no more please don’t make me don’t bring me back

Here. Bound by debt, near death

As two bats in the branches of a beech in July, finding a way
Back to the cave, you and she are alike

PAUL TRAN 122

In manner, mannerism, taste for a man
Who regards you less than muck
Stuck to his boot, kicking and kicking you. She knows

You insist she doesn’t know that you used her

Charcoal and Twisted Rose, smudging and scrubbing your face
As her car pulled in. Fuchsia

In Paris. She knew he hurt you. Irreverence. Because

She couldn’t do a thing,
She set you free. You’re the sparrow

Her eye is on. You tell her you love her. She lets you lie
Every single time. You only love you
The way she loved

Only herself, until she loved you.

In her car—key, ignition, engine murmuring low—
She chuckles, blushes

With complete incredulity, embarrassed

By her own incredible laughter.
She couldn’t believe herself. She amazed herself. Who else will?

PAUL TRAN 123

Rowan Wilde Riggs

poem.

constellations of dimwitted substrate

twinkle like formless apparitions.
i keep walking forward
so your radiance
can come into focus.

ROWAN WILDE RIGGS 124

poem.

A ball of yarn is attempting to unravel my wits.

It rolls over vistas that trample our view of each other.
It seems to infinitely carry on like it will envelope the world.
I jump up to stop it with my knitted sock.

ROWAN WILDE RIGGS 125

Vona Groarke

Infinity Pool

I had it in the night, the image,

but lacked the energy or will
to magic my body through
my own fourth wall and lower
myself, spit-spot, into the page.

But I saw, I just about recall,

a blue rectangle not quite blank
held up against blue sky, blue sea
so you weren’t supposed to tell
the edge, the stitching, or the seams.

And I am folding it now, this pool,

corner to corner, line to line,
so as to carry about with me
its deep blue scrap of lie.

But carrying folded water

isn’t feasible. You know that.

VONA GROARKE 126

Tiffany Hsieh

Ah-gong’s Funeral

I was a forty-one-year-old rabbit

that year, which was said to be unlucky
for the rabbits to go face-to-face
with death. The monks prepared some
dried grass for me to keep bad luck away.
During the part where everyone went
to a back room to kneel and cry
in front of the coffin, I was asked
to go outside to avoid looking death
in the eye. But I heard the crying.
It was loud and sounded almost wild.
That was how the hired mourners
cried for you and with you in case
the dead’s own family couldn’t
find tears in them to say goodbye.
Or maybe it was so nobody could
hear you cry. But I heard it either way.
I heard the wild cries of the snakes,
rats, pigs, sheep, dragons and others.
For once, everyone was in harmony.

TIFFANY HSIEH 127

Dan Beachy-Quick

Orfeo

I created more loss where I meant to make less.

Created more debt where I meant to make depth.
Created more death. Mind is
the subject of the mind, but the poem becomes a
flower or a tree. Ask the wind. Ask
the wind that wrote this poem. Cirrus scarf
blowing through the endless blue its song
about a neck, a pulse, the inner gem, that stone.
Ask the wind that curls around the house’s eaves
with a moan. Erotic or—. Forlorn—.
It’s hard to know. It’s hard to know the difference
between Echo & Narcissus. You say the words
you say but you know—. They’ve already been said—.
Your mouth’s diamond mine. Filled with coal.

I tuned the radio to the AM dial call letters YHWH.

A bride drags her veil behind her in the dust
between the olive trees in the orchard, leaving no
footprints but a sinuous line. News
from paradise at the top of the hour. Traffic
updates in spring. & every fall
a test of the emergency broadcast system
that lasts all season long. But it was winter, then.
& the station played Sappho—. Not the words—.
But the silences—. More comforting
than any song—. Because you know the words
& can’t get them wrong—. As you sing—.
As you sing along—.

DAN BEACHY- QUICK 128

I heard the music that turned the m upside down
insisting the letter was a w—. STET,
STET in red yelled out the editors in the underworld.
But done with crying by the river, done
with begging the boatman to take me back where
I’d been, I let the wind
do my thinking for me. You
must know the roots of the willow
to bend the branch into a lyre. Or a liar—.
Which you bend yourself into becoming—.
Once you’ve cut your roots
& wandered free. “Free.” “Free verse.”
The universe is deliberate sings the cosmic eros—.

The song is over before it’s begun—.

This is one of the things you learn
in your music lessons.
When your teacher is a muse—. Or museum—.
& the myth is a mouth inside your mouth
you don’t know how to coax open.
Millet-seed or mustard—. Pollen smeared on a stone—.
Or honey in the honeycomb—.
Bloodless offerings that appease the gods
seldom satisfy the ghosts. Shades
stuttering in the dark cave hoping a tooth will bite
the tongue, or a thorn
prick the thumb. A drop of blood—.
Is that too much to ask—. A little sacrifice—. The letter a—.

DAN BEACHY- QUICK 129

A life—. The verb to read in the old tongue means “to know
again.” An ant crawls across the keyboard
looking for a way in—. Culvert of the letter o
for countless years led to the river in the labyrinthine cave
but leads to another culvert now. Water
so still it’s a mirror but look in and you see nothing
it is so dark. You have to ask where are you
to know if you’re there. & the shift key that makes the little o
call down a god in pain—. & the space bar
that adds to the unthinkable blank a different agony.
Not a blank face—. But a vibration in the void—.
An indefinite article sung out with the force of the solar wind
might bring to you anything you sing of—. A moon—.
A name—. Have you ever looked the letter a in the face—.

No—. Neither have I—. Some light

on some face shines & so the face is seen. Rabbit
in the moon that once a month is once again
your lost wife. Mind
& strife—. & the paring knife—.
Cutting the apple in two & in two again—.
A process you can repeat until the slice is so thin
you see through it. An apple that is an eye—.
An I—. Not knowledge exactly—. Not good,
not bad—. A lens of a kind
that lets you see a thought blow through the mind
as wind blows through a tree. Easy in summer
with leaves full & green. But winter
splays the nerve against the sky—. & the dove

DAN BEACHY- QUICK 130

cooing a home in the empty air—. & the cloud
gathering the morning darkly within it—.
Tells you the snow you sang out for so long ago
has come—. Not a blizzard—.
A dusting that turns the willow branch white—.
White as the hem of a wedding dress—.
Hymen carried a sputtering torch across the heavens
praying sleep would arrive. Sleep that knows
no pain—. Sleep that blooms the stone-
cold seed buried in the dumb loam of the sad mind.
The mind is the subject
of the mind. It’s cute to think there’s an otherwise.
You have to find a word containing “wise”
to find a way to be wise. & then sing it—. Otherwise—.

DAN BEACHY- QUICK 131

Kate Partridge

Woof, This Heat

The dentist is now the same

age as me, which is troubling,
mostly because of what I
have and have not done
with my life, emphasized

overhead by the pop

star our age whose music
keeps time as the dentist
shakes his head and laments
the incredible heat. “Woof,”

he says, “this heat,” and I

remember that while I hate
dentists generally, as
a profession (I’m sorry),
I love this one, and want to

keep him close for

observation, the way
it’s possible to love and hate
at once birds or old
country songs—like the one

my daughter and I listened to

one morning on the drive
to school, five minutes, which
affected her so deeply that
her teacher asked

the trouble before she even

crossed the threshold, and
the child, pointing at me,
revealed: “I didn’t like her
music.” What a wonder

that among the worst things

that has ever happened
in her life is Loretta Lynn.
The other day a boy down

K ATE PARTRIDGE 132

the street carried over for
an introduction one of
the ducks he keeps (I like
that phrase, like they
have somewhere else
they need to go). He ferried

the duck through the air

on his forearms and presented
her, announcing, as the duck
entered, her given name:
Bikini. (Sometimes, he

added, called Keen.) Keen

indeed was this bird, who held
so perfectly still to receive
the little child’s rough pets.
Not like me, in the corner

at a party, all flapping and

fluttering hands—this bird
so calm, unbothered by
the indignity of taking bodily
form at all. These three,

a portrait of grace: one

with a beak, thinking
nothing of it; another,
grants his finest treasure
for display. The third, in

stripes and patterns both,

reaches open-palmed toward
the strange being directly
before her, a vision of how,
without worry, one can be.

K ATE PARTRIDGE 133

Petition for Reintroduction

I don’t want to get emails from

the wolf people anymore, but
they know where I am—have known
precisely where for five years.

The saying to trot out here is I don’t know

how this happened, but it did, and
I do: in line before a show at the little Boulder
theater, approached, I took off

my gloves to sign my wobbly hand

to the clipboard. All my vegan
friends thought it was a good idea.
They’ve given their lives such

serious thought, and I don’t know shit

about wolves—never introduced
in the first place, let alone reintroduced,
which is what the wolf people

were advocating for. A coyote, sure, or

foxes, of course, despite the terrifying
screams. One night in Dublin, thick with
beer, I saw a silent fox waiting

on the stairs, beneath a plaque for Jonathan

Swift. The fox felt more like him,
Jonathan, than the death masks, more
honest than all the cathedral’s crap

about sharing his bedtime lamp with

his good friend Stella. I hope they were
good friends, joined at the wick; I do
hope wildness flickered at their tips.

For me, this has been the ideal: the roots

deeply sown, a solid grip from
the earth held fast so the branches fly
free. The limbs daring a little more

K ATE PARTRIDGE 134

in their bloom. I do hope the wolves hear
the aspens beneath whispering
their return. It has begun. (I read the emails.)
I like to imagine the wolves, now,

at the fringes of an alpine meadow,

recognized by the blue and purple
buds, the latent snow. The water beneath
them diverted by a ridge: two paths

toward different halves of the world. The people

downstream debate their habits, if
we’ll like when we all meet. The wolves simply
go, signatures beneath their feet.

K ATE PARTRIDGE 135

Daniel Halpern

Street Food

The redolence of rose and new road.

The attar of grass, recently cut.
The fish-whiff of anchovy.
The spinning NYC glizzys in a tank of murky water.
The famous Coney Island corn dog on a pale wooden stick.
The black mud of Slovakia, drinking Tatratea, Borovička, Slivovica, Zlatý
Bažant.
The misted pastry shop windows of Vienna.
The rød pølse in Copenhagen’s main square, Rådhuspladsen.
The grilled weisswurst of East Berlin.
The straw baskets of washed-rind cheese of the Piedmont.
The spill of Barolo, tar and roses.
The shelled seafood from the Venetian lagoon.
The delicate, damp fish of Lima in lime and cilantro.
The numbing citrus of mock peppercorns from Chengdu.
The tang of fermented pickle.
The ginger off boiling wok oil.
The blue smoke of lamb at night on the braziers of Tangier.
The steam of Ramadan harira at midnight in Tangier’s Socco Grande.
The sfenj rolling in boiling oil, morning in Fez, powdered sugar.
The finale of everything that coheres.

DANIEL HALPERN 136

Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras

I-765

Other Names Used

Audio of wat
er: prisoners in
side my body

Why do I treat my life as a secondary citizen

Audio o
f eviden
ce: whit
e silence
lost in dust

I’m simply trying to survive in this cycle of society

Audio of
labels: g
reedy angry de
ported c
ounselors

A knife I need and audio of permits: in them a fire

Audio
of blac
k circle
s: aban
donme
nt issu
es

Hyper real but my body pushes against the blue

HERMELINDA HERNANDEZ MONJARAS 137

 Other information

8. Alien Registration Number (A-Number) (if any)

A- N T I G R A V I T Y

13.b. Provide your Social Security number (SSN) (if known)

A N T I S O C I A L

HERMELINDA HERNANDEZ MONJARAS 138

 18.a. Country
A corporeal ghost subject to a time capsule

19.b. S
tate/Pr
ovince
Breath of Birt
h
widow
ed with
the sub
lunary
of Oax
aca

th
18.a. Cou
ntry quator dea
ghost subject to an e
al
A corpore

19.a. Villa
ge of Birth
Chapoline
s flor de ve
neno wild
rábano

tutters
y o f Bir th it’s my door that s
ntr be
19.c. Cou es or may
b le ed in g continu nt dialect
e
Th in a differe

HERMELINDA HERNANDEZ MONJARAS 139

John Mulcare

Working with Jimmy Above a Drop Ceiling

We inhaled slag wool in the throat

of a Tennessee summer, installing cheap

can lights, like capping off gapped teeth,

to illuminate an emptied-out dentist office.

Back and forth we passed saws and drills.

Each of us balancing on top of ladders,

I listened to his slurs bleed into conspiracy

theories. I listened to how his mind split

the country into a wound we could not suture.

For four days my right hand had echoed

with a phantom pain, like a dog bite,

from where I touched a live wire. I recoiled

at everything: the sound of his voice

like a screw being stripped, the slightest lean

in the ladder beneath me. When we had finished,

covered in sweat, dusted in particle matter,

quiet except for the interstate running

like a generator outside, beneath the gaudy lights

we’d just installed, he took off his shirt, lifted

his arm, and pointed to where a bullet had entered

and never exited. He asked, maybe jokingly,

if I wanted to touch it. And if not for fear,

if not for thinking there could exist some lesson

in understanding what is familiar yet foreign,

I touched—with the foolish caution the casing

could again ignite and continue etching out

JOHN MULCARE 140

its phosphorescent history—the marred skin,
like a small country, beneath his shoulder.

JOHN MULCARE 141

Heidi Williamson

Work Ethic

You’re fifteen and nowhere in a town on the edge

of pitiful lands stripped of fruit. The burger van’s
onion stink slicks back your Saturday hair, broiled
meat stenches your starched, knee-length work-coat
and the matriarch, a difficult woman, in a pinafore
and blue rinse castigates you young girls with your
lack of work ethic, while the other stallholders admire
your efficacy with a polystyrene cup, the way you can
slice an egg so thinly between beef tomatoes in fresh
crusty rolls that you are not allowed to eat.

For lunch, you may only choose a hot dog, slippery

with fetid water. When your period comes and you
pale: You are making the food look ill, your boss
says and she can’t stomach lily-livered spits. You are
let go. The few pounds you amassed are not enough
for the school trip to France your friends will take.
They’ll come back distant. They will have kisses. They
won’t have Sunday launderette duties and caring for
your sisters and mother because you have a knack for
difficult women. Maybe someday you’ll escape this

town with its ice-cream van drug dealer. Maybe

someday you’ll lose other friends to elsewheres
much worse than France. If you’re lucky, you’ll turn
fifty and linger on the edge of yourself, wondering
at the division between the blessed and used. You’ll
wish for the guts to spill every unpalatable truth. And
while your faith unspools in globules as you swill
the past’s fat-water, you’ll stay desperate at how the
world works, stripping the lands of pitiful fruit.

HEIDI WILLIAMSON 142

Omotara James

On Intimacy

When we meet at the holiday table, we take turns

and great pains not to remind each other
of our mutual and reciprocal disappointments.

Mum looks around for the grandchildren

I would not bear. Her glances ricochet
off the high gloss white lacquer of the tabletop.

I touch my toes to the smooth walnut veneer.

Stare at her, solemnly holding her responsible
for the re-parenting I must do in my adulthood,

if I am to have even a slight chance. White supremacy

would have me believe that forty is too late for a debut.
It’s a debut when the petals are tender.

As long as the stem still sips water. As long as the leaves

suckle at the sunlight. In order to construct a poem
about climate crisis, I’m going to have to discuss how

inhospitable this planet has been to my love life.

Moreover, the research I’ve conducted demonstrates
that with each day, earth becomes less conducive

to nurturing someone with capacity to love me properly.

With generosity. The planet heats with increasing hostility
to their sustained existence. To their soft insistence.

Will actually obliterate them. Sure, I’ve had a lover, or two,

but I’ve found more pleasure gazing past the lankiness of ten
stems of tulips and into my favorite black and white portrait

of Nigerian children in tutus, their arms extending joy

into their abstract, gray environs. I reimagine my childhood
to be full of the kind of beauty that would compel someone

to take a photo of me, my pointed toes filling out the soft

pleather of my first ballet shoes, my small back arched
toward the possibility of heaven. The long green

OMOTARA JAMES 143

of the tulip leaves returns to focus just long enough
to replicate this hallelujah. There is no one on my bed
sitting up with me, or in repose, lovingly parting

the soft folds of my back as I hunch to write this or

imploring me to stop tapping my ashy feet against my
makeshift writing table when I have a perfectly good desk.

No one to persuade me to return to bed with an offer

of thick lotion warmed between two affectionate hands
for a midnight foot rub. But here I go again, distracting

the reader from my point, in favor of love. Okay

reader, do I have to spell it out? Is it not obvious by now?
I am a Black woman. FKA a coloured woman. FKA a negro woman.

FKA a star. If I want freedom, I must travel far

into the future, or far back enough before
it became the fashion to document me out of it.

Although I’ve never been a fan of false idolatry,

I wouldn’t mind finding a woman to worship me.
To gaze into my heavens, the twinkle of my fires

lighting her eyes. Yesterday evening I cut the stems

at an angle so they might gulp their water but not
quench their thirst immediately. I let them linger awhile

on the cold counter before permitting the cheeks

of their plump buds to startle red. The air purifier blasts
on high tonight, the sky is a burnt orange, a strangled violet.

The smoke hawks a phlegm of fog over the Brooklyn light.

My chest rattles with the destruction of Canada’s wildfires.
The sepia sky is as close to beauty as love is to violence.

If the Bush administration had initiated the Kyoto Protocol

in 2001, I might be celebrating my twenty-year anniversary.
I understand my life is of less influence

OMOTARA JAMES 144

than the flower arrangement outside the lobby
of the conference room of Exxon executives
exerting power. I wonder if the administrative assistant

avoids the color red? Instead, many birds of paradise

and peace lilies. Long green stems suggestive of the tropics,
but not the fingers who harvest them. Who sow the seeds.

I tell my mother she has a granddaughter in my cat.

At this, my mother never laughs. I’m trying to recall
the last time her even-toned skin creased with joy.

She doesn’t think I look like her, but every time

I brush by a reflective surface, I see her frowning
back at me. The air inside her house is thick

with undiscussed disgust and the neutral silk flowers

of my childhood. Dear reader, tell me where I should go,
forward or back?

OMOTARA JAMES 145

When the Seed Spans the Length of the Fruit

When Sarah Vaughan pipes from the great American songbook,

I forget time is dragging my body from one shore of grief to another.

My pointed fingernail traces the surface of the mango

bottom to top, presses the point to the body’s softest part.
Incises the yellow-gray skin until I’ve perforated a line

to peel just below the skin where the flesh is thready.

I try not to think of how stringy Carole’s hair was
during the chemo, prefer the strips of pulled flesh

to be as neat as possible. I’m trying not to make this

a poem about death, or about this fruit being the fruit
of my people. In my mouth it’s just a mango.

I tear off the skin for as long as I can resist the first bite.
The afternoon Clara and I fucked sideways
beneath a table while our meal cooled, she smiled

when she said, you don’t fuck like an American.

I paused. What had the largess of my body revealed
to her about my multiplicity? That no matter where I flee,

even inside her arms, my grandmothers’ sorrows follow?

One cast out of the family tree by patriarchy,
the other simply unsatisfied by what this life had to offer.

It’s become increasingly difficult not to make this

a poem about violence. I thrust my teeth into the flesh
every time I close my eyes, my mouth is open. I dive

into it with my tongue, my teeth shredding

the mango, not even half undressed. A gesture less
about desire than appetite: the inability to wait for its

entire nakedness before shoving it into a mouth. Anything

can be a mouth. I can only withstand beauty in pieces.
I gorge on fragments, always requiring something

OMOTARA JAMES 146

between myself and my latent neediness. It’s not the void
if you can’t broach it with your entirety. Do women marry
for love or for documentation that they tried, at least once,

were willing to sacrifice their bodies and minds in service

of being good. A Pisces myself, I leave before I am told
they don’t love me anymore. I leave the moment there’s

no love detected. There is no contract for this,

no instrument or even unit of measurement
beyond a seed.

OMOTARA JAMES 147

Zhang Xian, tr. by Shangyang Fang

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ѵၩը֊ҌՇ࢕䦚‫ل‬ᑬ…ṣቈϼག䦚
ϪТѪ‫׉‬ԝЄє䩟࢖һϤ‫ځٹ‬ϤԳ䦚

ZHANG XIAN, TR. BY SHANGYANG FANG 148

Departure

TO THE TUNE “MU LAN HUA: MAGNOLIA”

Translated from the Chinese

After tonight, what’s left of you is you

moving into my dream. Outside, the horse hooves

stamping the ground, the dust moves.

No sorrowful songs for me unless I am drunk.

I am drunk. Forgive me that I couldn’t bear

to see you off, vanishing with the sun.

Alone with the west wind and the moon.

Alone listening to the pipa sobbing, its pegbox

carved as a phoenix. Listen, crying bird,

to live without this sadness is to see the mountain

without its weight, rivers without depth.

ZHANG XIAN, TR. BY SHANGYANG FANG 149

Xin Qiji, tr. by Shangyang Fang

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ҌϢ‫ٷ‬䩟ԏѧж䦚

XIN QIJI, TR. BY SHANGYANG FANG 150

Self-Portrait as the Mountain

TO THE TUNE “HE XIN LANG: TOASTING THE BRIDEGROOM”

Translated from the Chinese

Now that I am old and those who crossed the mountains and oceans

with me are now parts of the mountains and oceans,

I still call those dirty skeletons: my friends.

My friends, now that my white hair is thirty thousand feet long,

taking up so much room around me, nothing in this life

can’t be concluded with a laugh—all those infatuated dreams

of fruitless desire, years in the military, and my ambition

in politics to serve my nation since youth, all these are like the porridge

dumped into a slop bucket. What can make me happy? What

has ever made me happy? Suddenly, I recognize the blue mountains

as dashing and handsome, didn’t know all the while

the blue mountains thought the same about me. After all, we look similar—

the same wrinkly crags and cliffs, mosses and mustaches,

and now, the same stone-heart we share.

With a pot of wine, I scratch my head at the east side window,

wondering if Tao Yuanming felt the same after he finished his poem

about the halted clouds. What do those politicians

drunk at the left bank of the Yangtze understand about the true nature

XIN QIJI, TR. BY SHANGYANG FANG 151

of drinking—with their feet in sewage, they fish feverish dreams

about fame and money? I turn to holler at the empty landscape,

to startle the clouds and the storm surges.

I don’t feel sorry that I can’t meet those dead

ancient poets. Instead, I feel sorry for them

for not being able to drink with me, a man writ large, unbridled and wild.

Friends, I am understood only by the mountains, your buried bones.

XIN QIJI, TR. BY SHANGYANG FANG 152

Lauren Russell

When Untouched

After Julius Eastman’s “Touch Him When”

Hammock dumping
you onto bruised
grasses, frayed
thoughts droop
sideways, hammering
morning. Slipper-
footed whispers sashay
and whimper. “Nothing,”
she says. A stammer
of caught breaths. Murkier
than bog water.

You wade in, pinching

your hem. To luck
is to cough a chip
in the fog. Pound
the keys of your solitude
with forceps on fieldstones on terracotta
figurines chipping

in dioramas, tripping
on clodhopper faults
—oh gaw-odd—glottal
stopper caught

in the windpipe further

than plum pits and pit-
falls, paint and patience
clamming up, if only she—

a gash
in the dark. On thick

bars of percussive
strings, construction
paper mobiles ding.

LAUREN RUSSELL 153

Mitchell Glazier

The Closet Weeper

Stiletto melon collies, a tinsel mystic streaks our homeplace.

Lantern flies triple from the sleeping hollow

Breeder Beau’s high romance jowl. Here lies the ermine

Childhood, coiled at the taxidermist’s lap.

Nods cure noose.

Marrow jarred with boy lashes.

After the rag, I’ve come to smother

Nicer than the rest of the carnival.

Rhinestone-mooned acrylic nail

Wedged in the mouth of a Coinstar.

Lucite toe tag of the pornographer nimbly

Drawn from a god’s roadside guts-bag. Rosy swine tallow.

So-and-so Stepfather gnaws the wet barbecue

These boyhood Sundays, this sweet by and by.

Mother pulls pantyhose from the dog, her kohled Eye pinned open
At roan hour, listening for the hair.

A priest, nude from the stole down, says all’s well.

Lace your brogues up, folly dear, it’s time.

What else can you do when the sewing kit unfurls

A needle with your nickname.

Whoever you are, what has it meant, this Lion-threaded pillowcase

Muzzling the cemetery boy, toddling on—but harrow and deo deo?

MITCHELL GLAZIER 154

The Gazing Ball

Queenly swans nudge eternity figs

Yellow rose fire

Lit by a ghost breath

I’ve eaten you someplace before

Terrapin venom
Sopping cream suits

Heart-shaped chops
Beautiful, rare novels

Bedlam peacocks
Nip limbs a-rosy

Curtsy
The apricot cross

Absence roughs up
My dead dog in the blood

Of babysitters
Watching trains go by

Faraway, the orphan trots

A pure gold cell

Icing the slaughtered

Lamb cake

Bridal meat dolls

Pulse over the breakfast razor

Little porcelain
Poppet, hand

The tureen of blood

Now to papa

MITCHELL GLAZIER 155

I’m a gentleman
Dressed in pink paper

Ballooned assless chaps

Float the violet quarry

Twin parsley letters rattle

The gun case

O brute may I come in

O brute you may

The poets who offed themselves

Have formed a small country

MITCHELL GLAZIER 156

Brittany Perham

Still

The doctor tells her what she can’t eat

no grains no nuts no beans no sugar a tomato is OK
but no skins no seeds what’s left
my mother says when she calls me
she’s out of the hospital again
think of the thing you love most
and the answer’s no even if you love vegetables
no lettuce no onions nothing cruciferous
don’t even think about broccoli spinach is OK
but only if blended everything’s baby food my mother says
I’m walking around the city eating brownies
I can’t eat another scrambled egg
and ice cream and a Starbucks blended drink
I never liked not even in high school
too sweet too pumpkin too chai no syrup no cider
I don’t want to eat anymore what am I
proving my body is not my mother’s
in the fancy grocery store
I’m eating cookies out of one box reading labels on another
no stevia no sugar alcohols no corn no cassava
no peas is pea protein isolate the same as peas
I don’t know “don’t worry I’m paying for this”
I say to the man who works here before the man can throw me out
my cholesterol will be sky-high in the sky
over the parking lot the crows are frolicking with the other crows
no other word for it no
wine no beer I’m sitting in the park
on a hill above the kids’ soccer practice
one of the coach-dads comes up and says “sorry
but can you go to another meadow
the moms picking up their kids won’t like seeing you here”
if I had a kid instead of this bottle of wine it would be fine
women my age are supposed to have teenagers
the teenagers would already be leaving me
I used to be interested in repetition but not anymore
“this is a public park did you rent it” I say
and the dad’s like “sorry I was nominated to talk to you”
indeterminate syntax I’m seeing
how young he is he’s seeing whatever he’s seeing
the other dads are eyeing us like what’s going to happen

BRITTANY PERHAM 157

 what’s she going to do
my intestines hurt where my mother’s hurt
I know it’s in my head but at night I still fire up the heating pad
I wonder if something’s bursting open
my doctor says “are you getting regular periods”
the still is implied I still haven’t found anything
I can eat I’m still unmarried still year-to-year at work
still have no washing machine still believe
this should buy me a pass I can’t live like this out of a regular life
Sarah and I have been talking about moving
to the other side of the country me and the heating pad
to the towns with our mothers in them
her mother was in a car accident yesterday “I keep thinking
about her on the side of the road with no one to call”
my mother calls me at 4:30 AM my time
no toast no applesauce no peanut butter and jelly
Peter says “you’re living in two places at once”
the woman on my block who lives
in the parking lot behind the fruit stand
no apples no peaches no grapefruits definitely no bananas
throws things at my head or she’s fighting
with her mother who isn’t there
she keeps saying no fruit at all “I’m not a quitter”
and I respect that I also walk faster
I still haven’t been hit
no one talks about caring for a parent
except to talk about the fact that no one talks about it
or maybe I’m not there yet I’m aging
into that conversation one hospitalization one car accident at a time
it’s the same story I haven’t written about my mother
because mostly things have been easy between us
no drama nothing to write home about
“you mean you can be in the same house
with your mother for a whole week” Claire says
and the answer’s yes the answer’s I like it
if you’re the kind of person
who’s done a lot of fighting with their mother
I don’t eat and I’m still in pain I’m sorry
I don’t want my mother in this poem either

BRITTANY PERHAM 158

I’m still standing here alone at the kitchen counter
because that’s how I know it’s real.

BRITTANY PERHAM 159

Triolet with a Line by Sylvia Plath

We take the N out to the turnaround.

The only thing to come now is the sea.
The ice plants make the pink world loud.
We take the N out to the turnaround.
The fog fades in with its foggy sound.
The end is here. Everyone can see.
We take the N out to the turnaround.
The only thing to come now is the sea.

BRITTANY PERHAM 160

Pair

SILICON VALLEY

The neural nets have been connected.

The director takes the stand:
Accolades should be expected.
The neural nets have been connected.
The new regime will be “elected”
—thank you notes are planned.
The neural nets have been connected.
The director takes the stand.

ACADEMIA

The kickball team must be selected.

The director has been canned.
A working group should be expected:
The kickball team must be “selected.”
Accolades should be deflected
—thank you notes are banned.
The kickball team must be selected.
The director has been canned.

BRITTANY PERHAM 161

Olga Livshin

War. Day 294

December. In Odesa,
power stations, shelled.
Your father’s friend
shivers in his apartment
crammed with rare books, oil paintings.
His daughter texts:
Dad put on all his clothes.
He looks like a polar explorer.
You are thousands of miles away,
next to them.

You want to send

a generator. Anya sends
bitterly giggling emojis.
Technology makes sure
a disaster is instant,
shareable, and ideal.
Now you can all sit simultaneously,
homeless. Timeless.
Defenseless. In love.

OLGA LIVSHIN 162

Martha Silano

Is This My Last Ferry Trip?

Is this the last time I’ll admire the guys

in their neon-yellow slickers, guiding us
to our parking spots before we head up

two flights to the passenger deck,

to the cafeteria where a man in a black derby
and black suspenders nods and smiles

as he nibbles popcorn? In honor of this maybe

last trip to San Juan Island, the last time
I hear that somber wail of a horn,

I’m gonna go see if there’s anything I can eat,

and of course there is: Ivar’s clam chowder,
just what the nutritionist ordered:

extra cream, extra butter, tiny potatoes I easily swallow.

Two spoons: one for me, one for the man
otherwise known as my personal

representative. When the time comes, he will help me administer

the cocktail that kills, but until then it’s The Marvelous
Mrs. Maisel, his book about Vronsky and Anna,

my book about the journey to the Higgs boson,

while our daughter calls to remind us
to take pictures of things

she can draw—a sprig of rose hips, a clump of serviceberries.

A deer she nicknamed Chewy. Bellies full of chowder,
we almost forget one of us is dying.

MARTHA SILANO 163

Self-Elegies

Because why not? Why not take the smashed pinecone

of my life, render it in purple? Why not dream of baking
thirteen pies, six bumbleberry, seven sour cherry? I wouldn’t
press myself into a grief box, but I will confess I’m happiest
under a sleeping sky, love the darkness like I loved to run
through old-growth Doug firs and cedars. There’s no more
rolled-out crust, no more loping strides or flour, but at midnight
I read a book about microbes and fungi, how these critters
find a way into us, never leave. It’s the never-leaving part
I like. It’s the memory of the Cuisinart loaded with dough,
the rolling out, crimping with a fork. No grief in the night,
though I’d welcome a northern shoveler, the green head
of a mallard. The Vaux’s swifts that crowd the rising moon.
My husband’s favorite tomato, the Jaune Flamme.

In a Plum Village meditation, a woman says smile,

so I smile, though sometimes I don’t, though sometimes
I’m unable. Disabled is my smile, and a lot makes me cry.
I tell those who hear me sobbing I’m not sad, and it’s true—
I’m moved when friends bring fennel soup or say I look,
well, undying, when I share my joy that my daughter
has said hello to my death, not exactly made friends
but isn’t hysterical, and isn’t that like a favorite song,
the unsilence of “The Sound of Silence”? She’s smiling,
beautiful in her black cap-sleeve top and oversized jeans,
and so is everything out my bedroom window. I open
my curtains to the crows, to a scrub jay in the maple.
Accepting I’ll do death alone like I’ve done most everything:
birth, growth, forgiveness, hunger, all these freaking feelings.

The other night I danced for the first time in months

to my favorite Sheryl Crow song—opens with guitar
and drums. I’ve never been there but the brochure
looks nice. I used to dance on my paddleboard
for hours. Ran down all sorts of winding roads,
getting closer. I could’ve never walked, but I walked
for sixty-two and a half years. Now I look out my window,
envy the dog walkers. Did I ever think I wouldn’t jump in,
... enjoy the show? Each morning, I looked in the mirror,

MARTHA SILANO 164

said, “You’re sure not your grandma!” Pridefully, smugly
able. When anything went. Now the green’s mostly
what I see from my wheelchair. Getting into the done, I guess
you’d say. A little closer to no more Polish polkas,
no impromptu kitchen waltzing. To not feeling fine.

Maybe I was stained with mercury and malathion.

Maybe that time I ran through the fog of mosquito
repellent wasn’t the best idea, though we all did it,
didn’t we? When a friend told me to get a watch
to keep track of my miles, I didn’t know it would
become an obsession, that I would go the way
of Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse. No one told me
don’t overdo it. Even if they had I would’ve been
swinging at the scallops, bashing the bivalves.
Wanna have a good cry? For decades I had flashbacks
I was having another psychotic episode. Fear and Trembling:
isn’t that a great title? I can’t blame my parents or genes
(kinda refreshing). May I free myself, like Insight
Timer instructs, of debris. May I hover like a gull.

Not sure where this is going, though, yeah,

pretty fucking sure. Pretty not pretty as my
daughter would say, kinda shapeless and no
funeral please, no roses or potted begonias.
Please donate to trolling for fish instead of
netting, to Cornell Lab of Ornithology. When
I stack breaths, I’m reminded it ceases—
that’s the Hurricane Debby of this thing:
weakening diaphragmatic storms. Inhalations
de-escalating. My nineteen-year-old self didn’t
imagine this. I was learning bird calls, hermit thrush
and song sparrow. Keeping a list, but also wandering
the forest counting the decades forward, a human
life like alpine snow that seems it will never melt.

MARTHA SILANO 165

NOT TOO HARD TO MASTER

“Not Too Hard to Master” is an essay series of poets writing on form and sharing a prompt.
It seemed to me a kind of magic
to take a made thing and make it
almost unrecognizably new.
Chase Berggrun
Chase Berggrun

“A slow and difficult process that verged on the ridiculous”:

On Erasure

Srikanth Reddy’s Voyager begins quietly—its first section comprises short,

strange, beautiful poems replete with tautologies that spin the mind far past
the page. They muse on philosophy and war in a lyric feast of language: “To
believe in the world, a person has to quiet thinking./The dead do not cease
in the grave./The world is water falling on a stone.” It’s not until the section
titled “Book 2” that you realize something curious is happening, when Reddy
writes: “I began to cross out words from his book on world peace.” Whose
book? Buried till the end, on the very last page, is a link to a website (tiny.
cc/voyagermethod) that offers “A Note on Process,” where the secret is
revealed: this entire miraculous collection is, in fact, an erasure of former
UN Secretary General and alleged Nazi war criminal Kurt Waldheim’s autobi-
ography, In the Eye of the Storm. When I first read Voyager, having swooned
my way from cover to cover, I was astonished. How can this be possible? How
on earth did the poet make this—what was the route from there to here?
The question—the gasp of how—that Voyager produced in me became a
haunting, embedding itself in my brain. And then, an opportunity. Shortly
after I first read Voyager, I encountered erasure again, in the way many
encounter it: a writing prompt in an undergraduate poetry workshop. There
was something sexy and transgressive about the idea of sneaking myself
in between the lines of another’s artwork—like many an undergraduate,
I had an irrepressible urge to misbehave. I’d also been taking a class on
Freud. I decided to fuse my interests and play around with his Civilization
and Its Discontents. My first go at it—eventually collected into a chap-
book of brief poems titled, a little less than creatively, “Discontent and Its
Civilizations”—wasn’t exactly the kind of erasure I would later practice.
I used each individual page as a word bank, but allowed myself to reorder the
words however I pleased, without repeating or adding any outside language.
The poems were of dubious quality, but I became obsessed with the chal-
lenge: erasure as puzzle and wordgame as much as poetic form. It seemed to
me a kind of magic to take a made thing and make it almost unrecognizably
new. Fervid, I began to experiment. I erased excerpts of great Russian nov-
els, printed archives of friends’ Facebook profiles, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, and
the academic articles of my own grandfather, an astrophysicist. And, in the
self-unawareness of my youth, I was reckless. One project in particular was
egregiously problematic: I began erasing Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History
of Time, intending to write poems about my own burgeoning feelings of
alienation and gender dysphoria—but in practice, I was appropriating a lan-
guage of disability that I do not experience, vandalizing a text I had no right
to reach my hands into.

CHASE BERGGRUN 169

 As my own politics awoke and evolved, I recognized my own violence—
the ableism and racism inherent in these endeavors, the way that white
supremacy demands a devouring of language and culture as a key mecha-
nism of control. I took a step back from the wanton hacking and slashing, and
turned to books, my most beloved teachers. I studied. I scoured the library,
read all the works of erasure I could find, and analyzed different approaches.
I needed to learn more. I developed preferences, I gathered tools. Often, era-
sures announce themselves immediately—Jen Bervin’s Nets retains the text
of the original Shakespeare; Mary Ruefle uncaps her trusty bottle of Wite-
Out and carefully excises language from aged-brown paper in A Little White
Shadow; Tom Phillips’s long-term erasure project A Humument fuses visual
art and poetic erasure, superimposing version after version onto copies of
an obscure Victorian novel. I learned that there are many ways to make an
erasure poem. The practice, while incredibly diverse in its manifestations,
requires that the poet erase, delete, or otherwise obfuscate the majority of a
source text—the resulting poem is what remains of the original document.
There are no defined or monolithic rules to erasure—it is not a strictly estab-
lished form, with specific metrical requirements or rhyme schemes. Instead,
the poet determines their own procedure. These limitations serve at once to
constrain the poet’s diction while simultaneously enabling intense creative
possibility. Erasure, like any form, arrests the poet’s access to unlimited lan-
guage, birthing new opportunities for invention and innovation.
As I studied, I realized that what I loved most about Voyager was that
Reddy’s erasures don’t just look like “regular” poems, they read like them,
too; they sound and flow like poems. (Taking inspiration from William
Carlos Williams’s experiment in bridging the gap between free and metered
verse, the third section of the book employs his stepped, triadic line and
variable foot—resulting in a rhythmic complexity that is appallingly beauti-
ful, especially considering the stringency of Reddy’s constraint.) They build
in momentum and follow a structural, intelligible arc from the volume’s
beginning to end; they avoid the choppy fragmentation that typifies much
contemporary erasure poetry.
Erasure merges two voices inside a single small bit of language and forces
a confrontation. Robin Coste Lewis says in her lecture “The Race Within
Erasure”: “When it is really, really, really good, erasure can reveal more
about the projects of both writers simultaneously.” I think of works like
Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report, which, over the course of an erasure
that spans eighty-four pages of the original text, pulls a poem achingly slow
from an obscenely callous document, a poem agonizing both in content and
in the effort the reader must devote to read it word by word. Erasure can be
a remarkably effective way of reckoning with power. It is never apolitical—
the word “erasure” itself carries sinister connotations. People, events, trag-
edies, and identities are erased from history. Truth and reality are erased
and rewritten by white supremacist systems, both implicit and explicit, to

CHASE BERGGRUN 170

control and enforce a brutally particular narrative. Solmaz Sharif writes in
her crucial, mandatory essay on erasure, “The Near Transitive Properties
of the Political and Poetical”: “The first time I confronted erasure as an
aesthetic tactic I was horrified.” When we erase a text that was created by
another we are enacting a violence upon it. This can be acceptable: perhaps
the text is so abhorrent that it deserves such treatment! But this should
never be a comfortable process. When well done, an erasure poem can turn
the knife around. It can be a violence against violence. It can move across
time. When we cut away the present of a document, we are allowing some-
thing new to be born out of absence: a process full of both possibility and risk.
Whether one is erasing a text to honor or critique it, the simple fact
remains that one is very literally tearing someone else’s language asunder.
M. NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG!: As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng
painfully, painstakingly, and systematically erases over and over the text of
a legal decision regarding a case in which over 150 enslaved human beings
were drowned in order for the slavers to collect on an insurance policy taken
out on their lives. On the process of making the erasures, Philip writes:

I murder the text, literally cut it into pieces, castrating verbs,

suffocating adjectives, murdering nouns, throwing articles, prep-
ositions, conjunctions overboard, jettisoning adverbs: I separate
subject from verb, verb from object—create semantic mayhem,
until my hands bloodied, from so much killing and cutting, reach
into the stinking, eviscerated innards, and like some seer, san-
goma, or prophet who, having sacrificed an animal for signs and
portents of a new life, or simply life, reads the untold story that
tells itself by not telling.

It is inarguable that the source text of ZONG!, Gregson v. Gilbert, is a doc-

ument that deserves murdering; but Philip recognizes that violence is still
violence. And out of Philip’s excruciating process of violent excavation comes
a chorus of ancestors whose voices overwhelm the cold evil of a text that
reduces a massacre to a question of commerce. Philip undertakes a tactile
procedure of exhumation and transformation; the result is one of the finest
and most complex works of literature I have ever encountered.
Erasure insists on the physicality of poetry. It is palpably deliberate,
intentional, and (ideally) extremely careful. It must not be taken lightly. It
is a terrible thing to do to a text, even if that text is itself terrible. It is a
form that must be respected and distrusted, simultaneously. Which is not to
say that erasure must always be an antagonistic enterprise. Gentle Reader!,
by Matthew Rohrer, Joshua Beckman, and Anthony McCann, was born
from a mutual desire of three friends to collaboratively study the works of
the Romantics. By creating poems out of the very works that they are dis-
cussing and moving through, they use the form as a sort of portal: a way of

CHASE BERGGRUN 171

understanding and engaging with a body of literature by diving intimately
inside the language itself. Gentle Reader! is an homage, a tribute: here
erasure is an exercise in friendship, learning, and play.
After immersing myself in study, the quality of my hunger changed. I still
wanted to erase—one thing I love about erasure is just how very playful it
can feel to move through a text, selecting and arranging words together as
if assembling a puzzle—but I knew I needed to slow down and take a kind of
care I hadn’t taken in my earlier efforts. I stopped my extractive search for
the perfect victim to subject to my obliterating pen. I worked on other proj-
ects. I began graduate school. I read and wrote poems. I went about my life.
And then, it found me. It came to me accidentally, as the best things do: a
battered copy of a classic horror novel, sparkling toward my eye from a stack
of used books outside the Strand in New York City. I was curious, compelled,
I can’t say why. I took it home. It was a time of both uncertainty and excite-
ment—new to New York, and new to the gender identity I had finally found a
name for. Flipping through its yellow pages, I found a comfortable home for
my bottled anger and resentment.
I had first read Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a bored teenager, while work-
ing behind the front desk at my summer job at the Edward Gorey House in
Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, surrounded by the lavish set pieces Gorey
designed for a Broadway adaptation of the novel in 1977. I was not partic-
ularly captivated by its laborious pacing and superfluous detail—much
more interesting to me were the bloodsuckers done and dusted by Buffy the
Vampire Slayer. Rereading it much later, my reaction was visceral.
I was immediately struck by the intensity of Stoker’s misogyny, his fear of
the unfamiliar and of sexuality. The book seemed to cast womanhood as the
monster more than anything. In some ways, I felt a fierce desire to defend the
femininity I was just discovering in myself in the earliest phases of transition.
And the book reminded me of particular violences, inflicted upon me and so
many other women in my life—desecrations of the body, denials of agency
and humanity. It produced in me a creative rage; I wanted to tear it apart,
subject it to its own assaults. I started writing poems. But I didn’t start with
erasure—I didn’t even think to at first. I wrote around Dracula—a long series
of short epistolary poems between the women of the novel, Lucy Westenra
and Mina Murray, but I wasn’t satisfied; the poems didn’t work. Having
exhausted every avenue, but still feeling a compulsion to engage with this
infuriating book, I decided to try writing about the novel from the inside out.
The first erasures were failures. A professor, Kimiko Hahn, was generous
in her blunt assessment—the poems were decently executed, but the idea
was boring. Writing from the perspective of the vampire himself, I was trod-
ding over ground already beaten into mud. I wasn’t saying anything new or
interesting enough that would justify the kind of violence I was subjecting
Stoker’s novel to. I scrapped the poems, started over, and somehow found

CHASE BERGGRUN 172

the voice of a narrator, a voice that whispered out from the terrain of ink and
paper and made herself known to me. I followed her as faithfully as I could.
At the outset of the project that eventually became R E D, I devised a
series of rigid precepts not dissimilar to Reddy’s process to guide and focus
me. Going chapter by chapter through the novel, I first reread the text
entirely. Then, I went through and circled potentially useful or interesting
bits of language that could aid me in the process of excavation, brickword
by brickword, from Stoker’s book. From there, I built my poem. Text was
erased while preserving the word order of the original source and with no
words altered or added. With few exceptions, I did not allow myself to lift
more than five words in a row. Once the resulting poem was divorced from its
source, I relineated in the shape of a conventional poem, with sparse punc-
tuation added to aid rhythm and intelligibility. Remembering the awe I felt
when first reading Voyager, I took pains to produce erasures that looked and
sounded like poems, distinct from Stoker’s voice and more in line with my
own. I walked with the narrator of my book and tried to help her story into
the world—to crawl out of a grave, into the sunlight.
The process of making this book was arduous and often distressing.
I carried the chapters of Dracula with me (literally stuffed into a back pocket
everywhere I went), and they haunted me in sleep and in waking every day
for more than two years. It suffused my experience of life in a way I can-
not say was pleasant. A book is a difficult thing to make already; this book
devastated me. I loved writing it in a way that’s hard to explicate, but it
hurt—I think it was supposed to. If I’d known how much, I’m not sure I would
have started. Without the aid of friends, advisors, and editors (among many
the poet Matthew Rohrer and my inimitable, glorious-hearted, and patient
editor Sampson Starkweather), I’m sure I would not have finished.
I must confess: though perhaps it runs against the spirit of this series,
I think erasure is in fact a hard form to master. It takes a serious amount
of practice, failure, time, and energy. It is, in my opinion, an exceedingly
laborious way to make a poem. “Now, to cross line after line out of his work
seemed to me a slow and difficult process that verged on the ridiculous,”
Reddy writes in “Book 2” of Voyager. “I labored, often tempted to throw up
my hands in frustration, on this form.” Almost always, it is more prudent
to write about a text than it is to write out of it. Erasure is dangerous, an
appropriative form that risks reinscribing colonial harms through thought-
less practice. Erasure horrifies me even as I engage in it. If I am comfortable,
I’m doing something wrong.

CHASE BERGGRUN 173

Writing Prompt

Before diving into this prompt or running off toward your next erasure,
I offer these questions I have found important and illuminating when gauging
my own position and intention in relation to a possible project:

What is interesting or compelling to me about erasure as a form?

What is disinteresting? What is offensive?

Why am I drawn to this particular text? Who is it for? What does it

tell me about myself?

Am I erasing in an attempt to respond to, explore, or better under-

stand the text?

What do I feel about this text? Do I like it, or not? Why do my feel-
ings about this text make me think I have the right to deface it?

In what ways, specifically and in general, is this exercise violent?

Who is being hurt? Who is being served?

What position do I occupy in relation to this text, or to its author’s

identity? What is my relationship with the text’s history?

What other ways could I approach this text? Have I exhausted

other avenues? Is erasure the first idea, or the last resort?

Am I willing to fuck up? Am I willing to practice? Am I willing to

waste my time? Am I willing to abandon this project even after
completing it?

Am I willing to become frustrated? Am I willing to sit inside this

text and let it occupy space within my psyche and my day-to-day
thoughts?

Am I frightened of this work? If so, why? If not, why not?

If you decide to undertake erasure, keep these questions at the fore of your
mind. Allow yourself to be nervous. Allow yourself to doubt the work you’re
doing even as you’re doing it.

CHASE BERGGRUN 174

OPTION 1

Choose a text, no fewer than fifteen pages long. The longer the source text
the better. You’re going to want options and a wide variety of language to
choose from. A shorter text limits the amount of control you have over your
poem and often produces a more fragmented result.
As a general rule, avoid erasing poetry. The language of poems is already
heightened; making a poem out of a poem, in my experience, rarely leads to
something sufficiently divorced from the original. In an erasure, you want the
diction at your disposal to be neither too florid nor too jejune. A refrigerator
instruction manual might not offer the kind of language you need to imbue
your poem with much emotional heft; erasing Nabokov would be cheating.
Choosing a text written in the first person can be helpful. A consistent
pronoun can guide your lines when you get lost and act as a foundation that
keeps your poem grounded.
Experiment with rules. Do you want to adhere strictly to the order of the
words? Do you want to mix them around? Do you want to leave words intact,
or create words not originally in the text by using the letters at your disposal?
Do you want to create an art object? Set out rules and constraints beforehand.
If you decide you want to change them, consider starting over.
Erase a few lines before you start on the whole of your document. That
first line will lead the way in helping you find your poem! It tends to dictate
what the whole poem will be about.

OPTION 2

Choose and print out at least fifteen pages from a book I found on the streets
of Brooklyn last week, George Bridgman’s Constructive Anatomy,* pub-
lished in 1920 and in the public domain.
Retain the word order, and neither add to nor modify the words in the
original. You may confine your erasures to the page of the original, or relin-
eate them externally. For an additional challenge, do not allow yourself to
use any basic anatomical words (hand, leg, eye, muscle) in your poem, and
do not (explicitly) erase a poem about the body.
Using the same pages, repeat the process an additional time.

*You can access a PDF of the book at: https://www.scott-eaton.com/outgoing/books/

George-Bridgman-Constructive-Anatomy.pdf

CHASE BERGGRUN 175

First pass on Chapter VIII of Dracula.

CHASE BERGGRUN 176

Chapter VIII of R E D, transferred to a Word document before relineation.

CHASE BERGGRUN 177

From “R E D”

CHAPTER VIII

Tired I walk toward everything except fear

over seaweed-covered rocks

I think that someday some new women

will be allowed to see each other happy

happy more than usual

I looked in all the other open rooms of my heart

A vague fear obscured the whole scene into a diorama of ruin

As sharp as a sword-cut the light struck a half-reclining cloud

Time and distance trembled in my body

To become in love with everything apropos of nothing

To see without seeming to stare

To change in the reflection

To appear peculiar

We never refer to sadness

as something that looks

like secrecy

but it does

CHASE BERGGRUN 178

I drifted on the fresh breeze

I did not like it

Joy joy joy although not joy a bad thing

I can feel it wet against my bosom

My journey is mapped and ready

I am only taking one dress

I don’t want to talk of infinitesimal distinctions

between man and man see no difference between men and maidens

I am the modern Morpheus

I made the minutes disappear
I am thin
an errant swarm of bees
a naked lunatic
faithful
selfish
old
a tiger
immensely strong
a wild beast
a paroxysm of rage
mercy
murder
coming
coming
coming

This selection from R E D was originally published in the May 2018 issue of Poetry.

CHASE BERGGRUN 179

Contributors

Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024)
and an assistant professor of English at Macalester College.

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator. He teaches at

Colorado State University, where he is a university distinguished teaching
scholar.

Joshua Bennett is a professor of literature and distinguished chair of the

humanities at MIT. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.

Chase Berggrun is a trans woman poet, educator, and organizer, and the
author of Somewhere a seagull (After Hours Editions, 2023) and R E D (Birds
LLC, 2018). She lives in Brooklyn and believes in a free Palestine, from the
river to the sea.

Shangyang Fang* is the author of the poetry collection Burying the

Mountain (Copper Canyon Press, 2021).

Mitchell Glazier* is a poet from West Virginia. He earned an MFA in poetry

from Columbia University, where he now directs a creative writing program
for high school students.

Stefania Gomez* was a finalist for the 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent
Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and a 2023 Fulbright Research Award Grantee.
Her manuscript, “Redwork,” is a finalist for numerous prizes including the
2023 National Poetry Series.

Vona Groarke’s ninth poetry collection is titled Infinity Pool (Gallery Press,
2025).

Daniel Halpern is the author of nine collections of poetry, the publisher of

Ecco Press, and the editor of The Antaeus Anthology (Bantam, 1986). In
1978, he founded the National Poetry Series.

Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras,* an undocumented+Zapotecan from

Oaxaca, lives in Fresno. Her work is in Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from
the Undocumented Diaspora (Harper Perennial, 2024). She received a 2024
Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.

CONTRIBUTORS 180
Michelle Phương Hồ* is a poet based in New Haven, Connecticut, and
recipient of the 2024 BRINK Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing.

Tiffany Hsieh* is the author of Pork Fluff (Sundress Publications, 2025) and
Little Red (Quarter Press, 2023).

Omotara James’s debut collection is Song of My Softening (Alice James

Books, 2024).

Olga Livshin* is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations

from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (Poets & Traitors, 2019).

John Mulcare* is a poet from the Pacific Northwest. He currently works as

an electrician in Philadelphia.

Kate Partridge* is the author of two poetry collections: THINE (Tupelo

Press, 2023) and Ends of the Earth (University of Alaska Press, 2017).

Sasha Pearl* grew up in the Hudson River Valley, where she now resides.

Brittany Perham* is the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton, 2017) and
The Curiosities (Parlor Press, 2012).

Paisley Rekdal’s most recent book, West: A Translation (Copper Canyon

Press, 2023), won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.

Mike Renaud is the founder of Varyer, a brand and creative advisory based
in Chicago.

Rowan Wilde Riggs* frolics on the lily pad of verse, dunks the nomencla-
ture of tousled punctuation, and floats through the social whimsy by enjoy-
ing the bounty of Vermont. His book, Atomic Wonder, was published by
Unrestricted Editions in 2023.

Lauren Russell* is the author of three books, including A Window That Can
Neither Open nor Close (Milkweed Editions, 2024) and Descent (Tarpaulin
Sky Press, 2020).

Martha Silano has published six volumes of poetry, most recently This One
We Call Ours (Washington State University Press, 2024). Terminal Surreal,
about her journey with ALS, was published by Acre Books in 2025.

CONTRIBUTORS 181
Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling
(Penguin, 2022).

Ross White* is the author of Charm Offensive (Black Spring Press Group,
2023) and three chapbooks. He is the director of Bull City Press.

Heidi Williamson* is a poetry mentor from Norfolk, UK. Her latest

Bloodaxe collection is Return by Minor Road (2020).

Xin Qiji ొ০ᅔ* (1140–1207), a Southern Song poet, calligrapher, and mili-
tary general, led a daring raid at twenty-two, earning a place in the Southern
Song court. Sidelined to remote provinces for opposing appeasement, he
improved irrigation, built schools, relocated peasants, and wrote ci poems
for the rest of his life.

Zhang Xian ‫(*܏צ‬990–1078), Northern Song poet-politician, was called

“Zhang of Three Shadows” for his evocative use of “shadow” in poetry.

* First appearance in Poetry

CONTRIBUTORS 182
Founded in Chicago in 1912
Volume 226, Number 2

After tonight, what’s left

of you is you
moving into my dream
Zhang Xian, tr. by Shangyang Fang

Featuring
Sarah Ghazal Ali
Martha Silano
Paul Tran