from POEMS FROM AN EMAIL EXCHANGE

Re: Your Submission 11:38pm

Me

to Editor

Respectfully,

Midnight is closing in / isn’t it funny / how only the darkness / is a thing that people say closes in / I come from a state / where there is grass everywhere / it grows out of the walls / it grows out of our hands / it spills from our mouths / any time we speak / I mean to say / that I am actually the garden you are looking for / I mean to say / that I have awaken in the brunch hours / and refused to eat / I am a man of boundaries / there is an hour for pancakes / there is an hour for pizza / in between / there is only hunger / and now we return / to the animal / my friend had an iguana / that would rest on his stomach as he slept / every night / for the sake of warmth / but never for the sake of love / I have had my face pulled away from this closing darkness / and into the light of a computer screen / once again / but this is also not love / I do not confuse necessity for love / I do not confuse hunger / with the need to fill myself / with anything that will have me / I am sorry about Brooklyn / I am sorry about everywhere that is not what it was once / isn’t that so American / I am so sorry about what all of this / has done to your heart.

HANIF ABURRAQIB

No tidy endings.

ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS

HOW COULD I HAVE KNOWN I WOULD NEED TO REMEMBER YOUR LAUGHTER,

the way it ricocheted—a boomerang flung from your throat, stilling the breathless air.

How you were luminous in it. Your smile. Your hair tossed back, flaming. Everyone around you aglow.

How I wanted to live in it those times it ignited us into giggles, doubling us over aching and unmoored

for precious minutes from our twin scars— the thorned secrets our tongues learned too well

to carry. It is impossible to imagine you gone, dear one, your laugh lost to some silence I can’t breach,

from which you will not return.

for Fay Botham (May 31, 1968–January 10, 2021)

LAUREN K. ALLEYNE

SALMON

My father and I sit at a sushi bar in my new city sampling three different kinds of salmon nigiri. He tells me about a great funeral speech he recently heard a son give for his father. The speech was structured around regrets everyone assumed the father didn’t have, interspersed with hilarious stories involving boys crashing the family van and fishing mishaps. The ivory salmon is pale and impossibly soft. The sliver of steelhead, orange enough to pretend it’s salmon. How else to say it. I am my father’s only child, and he is my mother. We dip our chopsticks into a horseradish paste dyed green and called wasabi. I know his regrets. I could list them. But instead at his funeral I will talk if I can talk about nights like this, how good it felt just to be next to him, to be the closest thing he had.

GABRIELLE BATES

TREES AT NIGHT

Slim Sentinels Stretching lacy arms About a slumbrous moon; Black quivering Silhouettes, Tremulous, Stencilled on the petal Of a bluebell; Ink sputtered On a robin’s breast; The jagged rent Of mountains Reflected in a Stilly sleeping lake; Fragile pinnacles Of fairy castles; Torn webs of shadows; And Printed ’gainst the sky— The trembling beauty Of an urgent pine.

HELENE JOHNSON

HOW

Loves How I love you How you How we hang on words How eaten with need How we need to eat How weevils sift the wheat How cold it is How thick with hoarfrost ice slick sleet freeze How wintry the mix How full of angst How gut sick How blue lipped How we drink How we drink a health How we care How easy over as eggs How it all slides How absurd How yet tender we all How wrapped in a thick coat How battered How slender the flesh How we wrap ourselves How many selves we all How I miss you many How I see you How your eyes warm mine How tiny am I inside How enormous my need How you open an old-fashioned satchel How deep it yawns How bleak this need How like winter How it yet catches the light How brilliant the sun dogs parhelion moon dogs paraselene phenomenon optic How fetching your spectacles How my thumbs might fit alongside the slope of your nose How my own glasses slide down my thin bridge How ridiculous the theory of the bridge How inane the bibble babble How we grew to be friends How we grew thumbs How opposable we all How we grew sparks How we blew up a fire How angry How incensed How we resist How we bead up drops How water will not run How we distract How loud the dog snores How loudly How noisy the snow grows How many degrees below How we fret How again How we all came here How did we come How did we How loves How did we come to this

HEID E. ERDRICH

SITTING ON AN OLD BEDSPREAD UNDER AN OAK TREE, WATCHING MY SON’S SOCCER PRACTICE

For reasons I can’t explain —that’s what therapy is for—

I can be doing anything, anywhere, and my mind slips away without warning, an Irish exit,

and enters the dark room again. Cross-legged in a lattice

of shade and sun, bits of acorn in my hair from the squirrels overhead, I’m watching my son in goal,

but my mind, in the dark, is busy guessing the story his father tells

about our marriage. My money’s on the one that goes, She didn’t love me enough. But didn’t I? In the field the boys

are scrimmaging now, calling out to each other—Here! I’m open!

And wasn’t I? Among the sentences I sent him at the end are these, and what a handsome pair they make:

Have some compassion. This is not how you leave a person.

I’ll see what my therapist can do with this couple in our next hour together. When I say it now, it sounds

like an offering: Have some compassion. Like, have some cake or have a seat.

All of these things can be refused. My story goes something like this: I loved him plenty. I loved

how life had stretched around us, and how I knew it by its shape.

Now my son gives me a thumbs up, a smile. Do I look whole to him, or can he tell my mind has wandered off

in darkness? I call it back. I know: I needed to love myself

more than I feared what that love would do to me. What it might require of me. What, in the end, it did.

MAGGIE SMITH

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH WOMAN ON THE SUBWAY

Across from me she was crying badly, everyone around her looking into their laps trying to pretend they did not notice. So unashamed in her grief she wept like the N line was a room in her apartment and the afternoon would last forever. Twenty years on, I could’ve said something, anything— “The red of your scarf is beautiful.”

HAYAN CHARARA

JOSÉ OLIVAREZ

DEREK WALCOTT

DON’T TOUCH

The first gun we knew came in a toolbox for the apocalypse: hammer, barrel, crushed can, pack of Newports, a ballpoint pen someone took apart. Momma said, Don’t touch & we didn’t—because all that could happen next seemed obvious: blue lights in the windows of houses already turned out for the evening, boys with pockets clenched in their fists. Brother says it was there—next to the TV remotes, the box of tissues—that the pistol became a whole thing. One boy grabbed at another’s t-shirt & the sounds that came next were fire spreading up a staircase, the sounds of a freight train with a cement block in its tracks. The gun was afraid of nothing—not daylight, not trouble & Brother palmed it like he was drawing from a stack of discards. When one boy jumped another, opened his temple onto concrete, where earlier in the afternoon two boys shot rock, shot scissors, soon there were spiderweb cracks in the Laundromat window, holes just big enough to fit our fingers. There were stray shells that needed picking from the grass before another girl showed up with a lawnmower. Don’t touch, we told kids riding big wheels in nothing but diapers & sunglasses, kids with whole collections of shells in shoeboxes. Don’t touch, we told the dog, his muzzle a divining rod, his body a strung bow.

SARAH CARSON

GEORGIA O’KEEFE, “FROM THE FARAWAY, NEARBY,” 1937

Make no bones about it—                         or better yet, make bones: sandborne, sun-bleached, bald-faced bones naked but for a Southwest sky. I began picking up bones                         because there were no flowers. More than enough to fill your pockets, a treasure trove—in plain sight—atop sage-covered plains. In the picture taken by your lover, you pose with them—                          nestling them, caressing them, pressing them: brush of bone against your cheekbone. You eyes rolled back in ecstasy—momentarily, you were someplace else. Place was a metaphysics; the word “skeleton” meant “home.”                         He will not follow you there. You return alone to New Mexico, to your catacomb, curio cabinet stuffed with canvases, with corpses. It’s the summer of 1936 when you receive his letter:           I worry…the landscape makes you lonely… But it is his logic that makes you lonely. You will not bother to reply. Outside at dusk, you paint the desert, the broken fence, a single            chicken bone. Suddenly you are struck to think how elemental they turned out to be, your life’s preoccupations. Where in the prism of the painting antlers bloom,             as ascendant and gnarled as branches, sits the alien skull of the once-majestic stag, his eye-sockets hollow but for your projections. One night you dream you see yourself as if from far away,              asleep and slumped on sand dunes the color of cream. Walking backwards you watch with fascination as your body fades into a hillock’s hump, is stifled by a sun-drenched sheet.

CAMILLE CARTER

HALA ALYAN

WONDROUS

I’m driving home from school when the radio talk turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit the here and now of the freeway at rush hour,

travel back into the past, where my mother is reading to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte

has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math, how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief

multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried seventeen times to record the words She died alone without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during

which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention — wondrous how those words would come back and make

him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice ten years after the day she died — the catch, the rasp, the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.

SARAH FRELIGH

INTELLIGENT DESIGN

An engineer in Wisconsin claims to have improved grief's design. Aerodynamic, he says, showing off his sketches, barely grief at all! Applying physics like salve to a wound, he remembers what Torricelli said about vacuums, what Carnot said about absolute terror. He grabs a pencil and revises one more time. There's money to be made in this, his father would assure, chopping chicken-necks through the afternoon. Flightless birds! The engineer pores over schematics, grimaces at draft after draft. His last sketch: confused. Joints unlabeled. A room inside a room inside a room.

J. ESTANISLAO LOPEZ 

POLYCARDIAL

You don't have to be a cephalopod to understand it's good to have a spare hidden somewhere in the body's crags. You don't need to possess random superpowers nor free dive in arctic rifts or play emotional whack-a-mole. I mean, who couldn't use a wonderfully engorged backup, a blue reliever to answer the hunger of being human. You never know. You never know. But spares, these days, hard to come by. Can't score them in the East Village anymore, not dozing on a bench in Tompkins Square Park, not even Brooklyn. Forget Brooklyn. Imagine. Some days you slump in the paunch of a lawn chair, sipping gin and tonic, and a Gremlin goes by and you dream the smell of your teenage self and herself, how you took time, how she showed you, kissing in an orange beater that forever faintly stunk of oil and singed carburetor hose and stale Parliament cigarettes. Her car, her mouth. It was good, right? In your rush, you were kind, right? All those fantasies are now memories. They float in a softly lit aquarium exhibit you've curated your whole life, and you are almost returned to 1982 yellowy streetlamp night, cassettes playing "Take on Me"... "I Melt with You"... Why are we equal parts tender and not? Perhaps, we were once polycardial: one heart of air; the other air that burns. Maybe one burst and cauterized the other. Or the humans exhausted all the feelings, so ran to the fjord and threw our wasted heart into the sea. Which might explain squid and octopi, and why we are lousy at swimming, and why your heart thaws in the sink of your old tired weak worn-out body which no longer sleeps, which wakes and stirs the warm second you hear your wife open the screen door or children shrieking in the yard as they gather jarfuls of fireflies. Listen: Let the air be an ocean. Let the ocean occupy your tongue.

JAMES HOCH

TIN BUCKET

The world is not simple. Anyone will tell you. But have you ever washed a person’s hair over a tin bucket, gently twisting the rope of it to wring the water out? At the end of everything, dancers just use air as their material. A voice keeps singing even without an instrument. You make your fingers into a comb.

JENNY GEORGE

RITA DOVE