by David Lehman
who crushed redwoods with her feet, who could swim a whole lake
in two strokes—she ate human flesh and terrorized the people.
I loved that story. She was bigger than any monster, or Bigfoot,
or Loch Ness creature—
a woman who was like weather, as enormous as a storm.
He’d tell me how she walked through the woods, each tree coming down,
branch to sawdust, leaf to skeleton, each mountain
pulverized to dust.
Then they set a trap. A hole so deep she could not climb out of it.
(I have known that trap.)
Then people set her on fire with torches. So she could not eat them
anymore, could not steal their children or ruin their trees.
I liked this part too. The fire. I imagined how it burned her mouth,
her skin, and how she tried to stand but couldn’t, how it almost felt
good to her—as if something was finally meeting her desire with desire.
The part I didn’t like was the end, how each ash that flew up in the night
became a mosquito, how she is still all around us
in the dark, multiplied.
I’ve worried my whole life that my father told me this because she is my
anger: first comes this hunger, then abyss, then fire,
and then a nearly invisible fly made of ash goes on and on eating mouthful
after mouthful of those I love.
from SWWIM
REBECCA LINDENBERG
* * *
A Brief History of the Future Apocalypse
Worlds just keep on ending and
ending, ask anybody who survived
an earthquake in an ancient city
its people can’t afford to bolt
to the bedrock, or lived to testify
about the tyrant who used his city’s roofs
like planks to walk people off,
his country’s rivers like alligator pits
he could lever open and drop a whole
angry nation into. Ask anyone
who has watched their own ribs emerge
as hunger pulls them out like a tide,
who watched bloody-sheet-wrapped
bodies from the epidemic burn,
or fled any of the wars to come.
The year I was eleven, I felt
the ground go airplane turbulent
beneath me. Its curt shuddering
brought down a bridge and a highway
I’d been under just the day before.
And I was not afraid, but should have been
the first time love fell in me like snow.
How could I know it would inter us
both, so much volcanic ash—
how could I not? The world must
end and I think it will keep ending
so long as we keep failing to heed
the simple prophesies of fact—
hot-mouthed coal-breathing machines
fog our crystal ball, war is a trapdoor
sprung open in the earth that a whole
generation falls through, love ends,
if no one errs, in death. When
my love died, I remember thinking
this happens to people every day,
just—today, it’s our world
crashing like an unmanned plane
into the jungle of all I’ve ever
had to feel, or imagine knowing.
It feels terrible to feel terrible
and so we let ourselves
start to forget. That must be it.
Why else would we let the drawbridge
down for a new army, water
the Horseman of Famine’s red steed
with the last bucket from the well
or worse—give up then. A heart
sorrow-whipped and cowering
will still nose its ribcage to be petted.
Will still have an urge for heroics.
And anyway, when has fear of grief
actually kept anyone from harm.
Some hope rustles in my leaves
again. It blows through, they eddy
the floor of me, unsettling
all I tried to learn to settle for.
Would I be wiser to keep
a past sacrament folded in my lap
or would I be more wise to shake
the gathered poppies from my apron,
brush off soft crimson petals
of memory and be un-haunted—
I don’t know. So I choose you and we
will have to live this to learn what happens.
And though it’s tempting to mistake
for wonders the surge of dappled
white-tailed does vaulting through
suburban sliding glass doors,
they are not. Not vanishing bees
blown out like so many thousands
of tiny candle-flames, neither
the glinting throngs of small black birds
suddenly spiraling out of the sky,
the earth almost not even dimpling
with the soft thuds of feathered weight.
Nor the great wet sacks of whale
allowing the tide to deposit them alive
on a strand, nor even the sudden
translucent bloom of jellyfishes.
They’re not wonders, but signs
and therefore can be read. I didn’t
always know that apocalypse
meant not the end of the world but
the universe disclosing its knowledge
as the sea is meant to give up its dead,
the big reveal, when the veil blows back
like so many cobwebs amid the ruins
and all the meaning of all the evidence
will shine in us to finally see—
And there you’ll be and I’ll know you
not by the moon in your voice but the song
rung in my animal self. For I feel you,
my sure-handed one, with something
sacreder than instinct but just as fanged.
Then unfold me the way you know
I want so I can watch the stars
blink back on over the garden as we grapple
in the dimming black like little, little gods.
from Southern Indiana Review
NABILA LOVELACE
* * *
The S in “I Loves You, Porgy”
makes me think plurality. Maybe I can love you
with many selves. Or. I love all the Porgys.
Even as a colloquialism: a queering of
love as singular. English is a strange
language because I loves
and He loves are not
both grammarly. I loves you,
Porgy. Better to ask what man is not,
Porgy.
The beauty of Nina’s Porgy distorts
gravity. Don’t let him take
me. The ceiling is in
the floor. There is one name
I cannot say.
Who is
_________
now?
Beauty, a proposal on
refuse. Disposal.
Nina’s eyes know
a fist too well. Not
well enough.
Pick one
out a
lineup.
from Poem-a-Day
CLARENCE MAJOR
* * *
Hair
In the old days
hair was magical.
If hair was cut
you had to make sure it didn’t end up
in the wrong hands.
Bad people could mix it
with, say, the spit of a frog.
Or with the urine of a rat!
And certain words
might be spoken.
Then horrible things
might happen to you.
A woman with a husband
in the Navy
<
br /> could not comb her hair after dark.
His ship might go down.
But good things
could happen, too.
My grandmother
threw a lock of her hair
into the fireplace.
It burned brightly.
That is why she lived
to be a hundred and one.
My uncle had red hair.
One day it started falling out.
A few days later
his infant son died.
Some women let their hair grow long.
If it fell below the knees
that meant
they would never find a husband.
Braiding hair into cornrows
was a safety measure.
It would keep hair
from falling out.
My aunt dropped a hairpin.
It meant somebody
was talking about her.
Birds gathered human hair
to build their nests.
They wove it around sticks.
And nothing happened to the birds.
They were lucky.
But people?
from The New Yorker
GAIL MAZUR
* * *
At Land’s End
This garden, its descendants of Stanley’s anemones,
flowing, pearlescent like the nacre of shells,
their offspring mine now, in my yard, fragile
beside the orange blare of Dugan’s trumpet vine—
the garden’s almanac of inheritances swanning
around the bee balm and butterfly bush,
monarchs and black swallowtails fluttering,
a sunflower bowing its great human head
toward the sun. The garden’s heart, the lilies,
its consoling perfumes, the richesse of memory . . .
What would they say today, I wonder, our Old Ones—
Stanley, ancient and clear-eyed, ready to jump into action,
and Dugan, irascible, a furious activism far in his past,
removed, really, past caring about much—
yet somehow bracing, abrasive.
Their—our—century long over, and today’s news—
preposterous—still somehow unthinkable:
a barbaric clown “at the helm,” breaking
the toys of the circus he never liked anyway—
every treasure, every human pact,
tossed aside as if they were made to be broken.
Playthings of the world, mortal, uprooted.
Oh, Stanley, tending your cultivated dune
under the sun of justice, wiry, undefeated, feeding
your annual seedlings. One late afternoon
long ago, a little too early for martinis,
you lay down your clippers on warm flagstone
by a withering clutch of weeds—
Gail, you said, grabbing my wrist, urgent,
What are we going to do about Bosnia?
Where did it come from, where does it go, that sense of agency?
You, so ready to drop your tools, compost the cuttings,
compost your newspapers for the garden’s future—
The Times, The Globe—
as if here at land’s end, here on the coast, urgent,
together we’d have energies to do battle forever.
As if we could rescue the guttering world. . . .
from Salamander
SHANE MCCRAE
* * *
The President Visits the Storm
“What a crowd! What a turnout!”
—Donald Trump, to victims of Hurricane Harvey
America you’re what a turnout great
Crowd a great crowd big smiles America
The hurricane is everywhere but here an
Important man is talking here Ameri-
ca the important president is talking
And if the heavens open up the heavens
Open above the president the heavens
Open to assume him bodily into heaven
As they have opened to assume great men
Who will come back and bring the end with them
America he trumpets the end of your
Suffering both swan and horseman trumpeting
From the back of the beast the fire and rose are one
On the president’s bright head the flames implanted
To make a gilded crown America
The hurricane is everywhere but here
America a great man is a poison
That kills the sky the weather in the sky
For who America can look above him
You’re what a great a crowd big smiles the ratings
The body of a storm is a man’s body
It has an eye and everything in the eye
Is dead a calm man is a man who has
Let weakness overcome his urge for death
America the president is talking
You’re what a great a turnout you could be
Anywhere but your anywhere is here
And every inch of the stadium except those
Feet occupied by the stage after his speech will
Be used to shelter those displaced by the storm
Except those feet occupied by the they’re
Armed folks police assigned to guard the stage
Which must remain in place for the duration
Of the hurricane except those feet of dead
Unmarked space called The Safety Zone between
Those officers and you you must not vi-
olate The Safety Zone you must not leave
The Safety Zone the president suggests
You find the edge it’s at a common sense
Distance it is farther than you can throw
A rock no farther than a bullet flies
from Iowa Review
JEFFREY MCDANIEL
* * *
Bio from a Parallel World
Jeffrey McDaniel lives in a small apartment
in Philadelphia. His hair gathered back
into a ponytail. His smile a wobbly
merry-go-round that he hopes you will get on.
He treads water in the same dive bar
every Thursday night. He smiles at each girl
who stumbles in and says, Would you like to ride
the Tilt-a-Whirl? Notice how each one of his teeth
is a different shade of yellow. Then he flutters
into the bathroom and digs a roller coaster
out of his pocket. Jeffrey McDaniel inherited
a lot of breadsticks when he was twelve
from his dead grandfather. He has a fake shrine
in his backyard. Sometimes his brothers call him
and ask to borrow lawn furniture. In his pocket,
the calls go to voicemail: Hi there,
you sexy little dumpling. Welcome to my earlobe.
Please breathe hard into the mouthpiece. Jeffrey McDaniel
runs his hands along the two f’s in his name
like elephant tusks and shakes his head like a bucket
full of soggy trademarks, then he stomps out
of the bathroom and finds a pool of bourbon
hovering near his stool. Girls he knew in college
lounge in bathing suits. He yanks off his t-shirt,
struts out onto the diving board and cannonballs
into his future, which smells just like his past.
from The Southampton Review
CAMPBELL MCGRATH
* * *
Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool/The Founding of Brasilia (1950)
This is the birth of the cool, atom in the molecule,
raindrop in the storm cloud and child in the man,
this is kind of blue and bitches brew, purity and fusion,
the gesture, the line, arpeggio and appoggiatura,
notes and scales an
d all the imperial flourishes
this is the plains before Carthage sewn with salt,
the past itself disgraced by the ferocity of the new,
this is the creation of a city in the jungle by a man
with a horn, the founding of a capital and a nation
triumphal boulevards clawed from flowers,
this is the American Song Book harpooned like Moby Dick,
this is the white whale, the white line, the white monster
even Miles cannot over-master,
this is a rainy night in Detroit when Miles walks in
dripping wet, trumpet wrapped in a paper bag,
and starts to play “My Funny Valentine” while the band
on stage is playing “Sweet Georgia Brown,”
I will build your city, I will make the towers rise,
I will raze the jungle and delineate the plazas,
like this, in G, like this, in F sharp,
born a man to raise from the darkness
the artifice of mankind, the symphony which is a city
which is a hive and a bass line and ride cymbal
and a solo cool as polar iron, this is time’s bulldozer
clearing a space for the invisible song of the machine,
invisible smoke rising from brush fires and funeral pyres,
I will build Brasilia, I will tame your Amazon,
I will build your mother-fucking city—
here it is, shut up and listen.
from Salmagundi
ANGE MLINKO
* * *
Sleepwalking in Venice
“Two kinds of imagination: the strong, the promiscuous.”
—Leopardi
Calle Rombiasio
Watching a boneless nymph’s
half-hearted resurrection
from a spout in the pavement
over and over; catching a glimpse
of the source of my exhaustion,
as if my gaze all this time had lent
muscular support to her effort . . .
She wasn’t at all as mischievous
as her sisters, who seeped up
through the flagstones of the court,
serving the blue basilica to us
