Seaside birdcall: profiteer, profiteer!
keeps me irritant company. As middle-distant
salt waters lift, I’ll tilt
a beaujolais & toast to bony appetite–
to all those abroad said

to starve– yet even as yonder
cruise vessels tipsy in festivity offset
the sun (itself pasha upon its incandescent
poufs of cloud), any horizon I manage to keep
an eye on helplessly seasickens me.

Can’t pinch what time
is it now? greedily enough. Ancient imperial
ships, chests stuffed to their distended
hasps with wrought gold rummage & coin, all those
that shivered & sank shook from their loosening
ribs never loot enough to redeem
even what infinitesimal
millisecond ago
just swooped by seizing its nip
of my speed-of-night jittery late light.

The drowning sailors’ senses of humor passed.
If I get up to cross a room my head swims

& oof, a single lugubrious great
blue heron drops out of deadwood & slowly
moseys off the lowdown air. I believe
it was when?– backsliding
years & continents — a moose
circled around and around its own brain worm.

Stay me again against the sand pillars! — I,
to my confusion, who muttered once against what an uproarious
world O no! –not yet another squall!
then later came to acknowledge the feral
ocean, however vigorous the continual
urgings of its surf, mostly flat.

*

Martha Zweig’s work has received Hopwood and Whiting awards. Her collections include Monkey Lightning, Tupelo Press, 2010; What Kind (2003) and Vinegar Bone (1999), both Wesleyan University Press, and Powers, Vermont Arts Council, 1976. Get Lost, 2014 Rousseau Prize winner, is forthcoming from The National Poetry Review Press.

Whereas the word must propagate itself to become world, but in so doing clarity gives way to subtlety, as field grows its definition, becoming both thing and concept, land and figure;

Whereas the world itself propagates, animals making more of themselves, and trees and ideas and nouns with them, and it all spreads like the shade before a hurricane, blacking out what was once something, now something else;

Whereas even human might be misinterpreted;

Whereas in the joist of your hip I can see where you took on flesh—you who were once thunder, pure sound awaiting the light, eager to mark distance—a signal sounding more like warning;

Whereas I, too, was once other, my lumbering Kodiak claws sometimes still visible beneath the soft moons of my nailbeds;

Whereas every woman who wakes in the night a fox knows she is not alone, but is nevertheless surprised she was not made iron or stone;

Whereas the realization of another’s secrets raises the hackles like an oncoming storm, and we all fear ourselves known;

Therefore we remind you that, words having become too unwieldy for self-defense, the fear of claws leads inevitably to the bearing of claws.

*

Brianna Noll’s first book, The Price of Scarlet, was the inaugural poetry selection for the University Press of Kentucky’s New Poetry and Prose Series and is forthcoming in Spring 2017. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Teaching and Mentoring in the Honors College at UIC, and she serves as Poetry Editor of The Account, which she helped found. Her poems have recently appeared in The Georgia Review, Passages North, Puerto del Sol, Hunger Mountain, and the Kenyon Review Online.

Laurel is slow, a weight pressing
ever more forcefully on a bird’s wings,
countering its inexplicable buoyancy
as though gravity were reclaiming the air.
If in the poison garden you are still
breathing, remember: this is a study
to see how a plant kills you, how
it makes you feel before you die.
Chaos: the lungs’ fight against collapse.
Chaos: the first creation, a shapeless
heap fighting for order, to be ordered.
So when the galaxy starts dumping
its stars, little dumplings not eaten
but tossed, and the sky grows dark
and darker, the darkest we’ve ever
seen, do we hold our breath?
No—this is the mistake of darkness.
Order is not a bomb that decides
whom it kills, but Chaoskampf—
the hero’s struggle against the chaos
monster. The hero falters, and perhaps
fails, but still her spilled blood draws
oxygen—even when her lungs fail, she
breathes and breathes and breathes.

*

Brianna Noll’s first book, The Price of Scarlet, was the inaugural poetry selection for the University Press of Kentucky’s New Poetry and Prose Series and is forthcoming in Spring 2017. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Teaching and Mentoring in the Honors College at UIC, and she serves as Poetry Editor of The Account, which she helped found. Her poems have recently appeared in The Georgia Review, Passages North, Puerto del Sol, Hunger Mountain, and the Kenyon Review Online.

From a distance, it’s hard
to tell whether she is glass
or glassine. In either case,
you might assume her epithet
to be The Unfortunate,
but you would be wrong.
Neither is she The Accursed.
No, this girl is Shockhead,
for no one sees her fragile;
they see her towheaded,
and through her,
lightning bugs seem to glow
with greater force.
No one thinks they’re a sucker
for the obvious, but it’s so
hard to listen past the mortars
when they fall. Don’t think
of her body as a form
perpetually on the verge
of fissure. She will be the one
to labor like a desert dog
to call the last cease-fire.

*

Brianna Noll’s first book, The Price of Scarlet, was the inaugural poetry selection for the University Press of Kentucky’s New Poetry and Prose Series and is forthcoming in Spring 2017. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Teaching and Mentoring in the Honors College at UIC, and she serves as Poetry Editor of The Account, which she helped found. Her poems have recently appeared in The Georgia Review, Passages North, Puerto del Sol, Hunger Mountain, and the Kenyon Review Online.

Not beautiful.
Sebaceous guise.
Amber waves of fame.

 

*

Janis Butler Holm has served as Associate Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal. Her prose, poems, and performance pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines. Her plays have been produced in the U.S., Canada, and England.