The poshest
neighborhoods
were first to
learn the word
disaggregation.
All over their
hoverboards came
apart levitating
plastic airspace
lowering home
values nesting
throughout
jacaranda and silk
oak machine
elements quiet
as bishops paid
for silence. Across
America rogue
axels ring steeples
tinny too and all
there is to do is
pray the after
echo is royal
thunderous pride
felling the fallout
its own market
of shame.

***

Brianna Noll is the author of The Era of Discontent, forthcoming from Elixir Press in 2021, and The Price of Scarlet (University Press of Kentucky, 2017), which was named one of the top poetry books of 2017 by the Chicago Review of Books. She is poetry editor of The Account, which she helped found, and her poems and translations have appeared widely in journals, including the Kenyon Review Online, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, and Waxwing. She lives in Los Angeles.

In this land of drum
beats rhythms announce
us our movements
actions our thoughts here
you are the event we
are all happenings all
with an end just not
an end in sight. Yes
with everything so
punctuated you might
say we’re desensitized
but not habituated when
the faucet drips we
hear it or at least
I do but it’s not an
annoyance it’s another
pulse another instrument
in the orchestra. We are
thus propelled and desire
propulsion make no
mind the chicken egg
dilemma we value
differently so it should
be no surprise we react
perhaps too harshly to
a slowing of the tempo
to diminuendo we have
a responsibility to
every beat no matter
how ridiculous everything
that sounds like
a heart is a heart is
alive is all our lives
is the only thing
worth living for.

***

Brianna Noll is the author of The Era of Discontent, forthcoming from Elixir Press in 2021, and The Price of Scarlet (University Press of Kentucky, 2017), which was named one of the top poetry books of 2017 by the Chicago Review of Books. She is poetry editor of The Account, which she helped found, and her poems and translations have appeared widely in journals, including the Kenyon Review Online, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, and Waxwing. She lives in Los Angeles.

Before the song closes I start it again:  
there are 37 minutes of this meant to flame memory 

so that it can be shrouded once more. True friends 
know this phenomenon. Truer friends forgive me for it. 

Like how I apply the wrong lipstick, a bright red 
that washes out my face, just because I want it 

to be right, like the color in A Portrait of a Girl 
with a Rose in Her Hair.  I live in a concord of want:

it’s the best & worst place to be, like sleeping. I stand 
up against its door for hours, that in-between. Outside, 

August shadows overhead like a carnival tent, the smell 
of fresh hay after rain, and the feeling there are animals 

close, like holding a trinket. Inside, the sherry glasses, 
white streams of paper, & drawers I can’t shut. This life 

halved like a nut. Was there always so much dust? 
A younger me would relinquish all of these books. 

She slips out to ride the amusement park spaceship 
where she spins, animated zoetrope, mouth rising 

& falling like hysteria, the sun slicing her face. Her treaty 
issued in captivity: she doesn’t want me to come, nor fall.

***

Nicole Greaves holds an MFA from Columbia University and an M.Ed. in special education. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary reviews and was awarded prizes by The Academy of American Poets and the Leeway Foundation of Philadelphia. She was a 2015 finalist for the Coniston Prize of Radar Poetry, who also nominated her for The Best of the Net. She was a 2020 finalist for the Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest and the Dogfish Head Poetry Contest. Nicole is a former poet laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania and lives right outside Philadelphia, where she teaches English and creative writing at The Crefeld School. 

Cars pass and light up the wall,
casting spotlights that intertwine,

illuminating dancers in a music box
who turn away from each other

to find themselves, as if before a duel.
In this apparition, it’s necessary for one

to leave in order for the other to remain,
or both would be lost:  there

are certain truths, even when no one
wants to listen. So you must listen

more intently, in the way you looked
at the sky at fifteen, looking for what

belonged to you. Listen
to the circus music that burns from braille

where a finger is a little hammer 
branding your surrender

to “Sobre las Olas,” to the waltz
by which so many have moved

through the air, bullets of exaltation,
to that which cannot happen, but is here.

***

Nicole Greaves holds an MFA from Columbia University and an M.Ed. in special education. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary reviews and was awarded prizes by The Academy of American Poets and the Leeway Foundation of Philadelphia. She was a 2015 finalist for the Coniston Prize of Radar Poetry, who also nominated her for The Best of the Net. She was a 2020 finalist for the Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest and the Dogfish Head Poetry Contest. Nicole is a former poet laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania and lives right outside Philadelphia, where she teaches English and creative writing at The Crefeld School. 

Create for me

My word

You ask

That describes

Only me

of this beauty you

Say is only me

Enrapturement

Is you

In so many ways

Three words

Of special beauty

Become one

For only you

Radiantuneous you are

Like no other

As you take the

Lighting of many

Stellar true

Description

And fuse them into

One new bolt of beauty

Breathtorgeous in every

moment

Pumping smiles and

Vigor

Through the gray clouds

And touching the sunrise

Waiting to warm

Crescengasm so

Captures

The rise and rapture

As you power

pulse

That pushes me

To the point

Words only for you

For no one is

You or has

What you do

Seer them with your mind

Sear them in

your heart and soul

And sing

Them in our

duet

And one that needs no change

You smile to me

In our language of two

***

Tom Squitieri is a three-time winner of the Overseas Press Club and White House Correspondents’ Association awards for work as a war correspondent. His poetry appears in more than 30 publications, in the book “Put Into Words My Love,”  in the film “Fate’s Shadow: The Whole Story” and in Color: Story 2020. He has taught writing, journalism, media studies, political systems and realities, foreign policy, and practical street knowledge at Washington & Jefferson College and American University, and writes most of his poetry while parallel parking or walking his dogs, Topsie and Batman.

That first winter, Walmart almost starved.
Archer Daniels Midland learned
to ensure a surplus harvest
by burying a fallen enemy warrior’s heart
in infertile earth. Halliburton bartered
exclusive rights to breathe the air
in perpetuity. Thanks to a lax board,
our volunteer treasurer embezzled
undetected for decades. JPMorgan Chase
earned a fortune framing paper currency
for sorcery just to see it burn.
Rogue privateer Kaiser Permanente
smuggled rum and gunpowder
from the mother country. An emergency
vote without a quorum to fire
our embattled secretary sparked
bitter disagreements in the hallway. A hero
during mandatory military service,
Lockheed Martin retired to be a barber.
Historians restored the constitution
Merck handwrote then tore apart.
One article in our mission statement
switched back and forth fourteen times,
which caused our task force
exploring whether we could change
official forms to table debate
yet again. On the new flag, MillerCoors
was half human, half mountain lion
and another half scorpion with authority.
A holiday shifted the birthday of President
Burger King. Our organizational diversity
survey sampled acquaintances
at a bar about how hard we worked
and why our first and only proposal didn’t
and weren’t there bigger worries,
be honest. Marriott and Aramark died
the same hour of the same rare disorder,
but whispers persisted they hadn’t.
In our charter, we reverted every edit.

***

Steven D. Schroeder’s second book, The Royal Nonesuch (Spark Wheel Press), won the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University. His poetry is available or forthcoming from The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Sixth Finch, and Diagram. He works as a creative content manager for a financial marketing agency in St. Louis.

I haven’t tasted the cherries from the tree in my mom’s front yard,
never seen them. It’s mature, with a ropey habit and lichens that badge
its ox-blood oilskin, the county’s original country squire.
I thought it was ornamental, a free-range specimen of the fru fru kind,
until the summer day my mom let drop, in response to the flock of birds that shot
out the shrubbery, scissoring and waving like quintuple double-dutch over the fields,
her cherry tree bears irresistible fruit. Every July — though I have reason to doubt
her vigilance — the birds get there first. She says the tree prepares a meal the second the mob
arrives to gorge on bloody cherries. “When you face it with your faint hurt, it looks at you like,
‘Yep. So what?’ — a survived-the-pogroms insouciance, if you’ll permit the paradox.”

The cherries of hearsay are ascending alongside the ravening songbirds.
But they’re real! Self-befuddling gesture, the performance of belief —
it underwrites a spiritual oomf, a protean messianism that’s shackled to my mom’s cherry.

***

Benjamin Gantcher’s first book of poems, Snow Farmer (CW Books, 2017), was a finalist in several book contests. His work appears in many journals, including Tin House, Guernica and The Brooklyn Rail, and he was Poet of the Week at Brooklyn Poets. His chapbook Strings of Math and Custom was published by Beard of Bees Press, and his first poetry manuscript, If a Lettuce, earned finalist honors in the National Poetry Series and Bright Hill Press contests. A recipient of a LABA fellowship as well as residencies from the UCross Foundation and the Omi International Arts Center, Gantcher is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a former poetry editor of failbetter. He teaches English in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn with his family.  

the mass in the pear light gloops through
the portico and oviposits kids in the pews
they combat the taupe and sage matte noise-suck climate
far back i’m reading the micro-climates the little heads are swaying
in the streaming gossip and turn toward the peppy slideshow
and turn toward the face head
and the unguarded speech of the blind heads sways me
the proto-language of emoto-tropic bulbs
it works on me like the high-toned arches
it works on me like the baroque absence of birds
it works on me like their faith in a slideshow
it works on me like ordination goddamn it

***

Benjamin Gantcher’s first book of poems, Snow Farmer (CW Books, 2017), was a finalist in several book contests. His work appears in many journals, including Tin House, Guernica and The Brooklyn Rail, and he was Poet of the Week at Brooklyn Poets. His chapbook Strings of Math and Custom was published by Beard of Bees Press, and his first poetry manuscript, If a Lettuce, earned finalist honors in the National Poetry Series and Bright Hill Press contests. A recipient of a LABA fellowship as well as residencies from the UCross Foundation and the Omi International Arts Center, Gantcher is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a former poetry editor of failbetter. He teaches English in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn with his family.  

The owners of this small town hear tell of hope in self-immolation, even go so far as to imagine a slim face growing slimmer and the laughing tip of a cigarette against a blueprint of bodies like basement plumbing, like a human-scale refinery as seen from the turnpike, blue-white stage lights in place of the orange-gray throb. But they’re decided in their preference for a light that doesn’t harken, just lays there, late morning, some time after the little girls have been paraded up Madison like feather amulets, the little boys a formulating excuse. Visiting up here’s like picking up shells in the eye of a storm. At first, every shell’s a chip of god, but as you’re poured inside the peaceful horn, the biological rock nudges you, peristalsis. Somehow the border’s unmarked, and I suspect the elderly on their goat tracks are decoy as from elsewhere I sense a kind of Pinkerton. The pause smells like the glands of an artist. In the secret galleries terra cotta panthers and jade tokens wait for the next age of belief that we’ll take to the stars or the roaches oversee, though I wish for the bees in gardens of floral abundance that oxygenate the planet just the way we like it long after we’re gone. The best of us, you might have heard, will carry on in such an apiary, but for me the flower shop is plenty, if I remember correctly. Words like touche and davos are scarcely audible as though already the lopped sacs of the lungs, unpacked from mud, flopped onto a tray, had exhaled. Friends, I also wonder about the flashback, the dive into the nights of the cities in the age of the mechanism, the human form posed against wood and sprockets. Those days are like a pheromone, glory and penumbra, and the answer is chicken empanada with Peruvian green sauce and a blistering-cold IPA.

***

Benjamin Gantcher’s first book of poems, Snow Farmer (CW Books, 2017), was a finalist in several book contests. His work appears in many journals, including Tin House, Guernica and The Brooklyn Rail, and he was Poet of the Week at Brooklyn Poets. His chapbook Strings of Math and Custom was published by Beard of Bees Press, and his first poetry manuscript, If a Lettuce, earned finalist honors in the National Poetry Series and Bright Hill Press contests. A recipient of a LABA fellowship as well as residencies from the UCross Foundation and the Omi International Arts Center, Gantcher is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a former poetry editor of failbetter. He teaches English in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn with his family.  

Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott

“burst joy’s grape against his palate fine”

I read Herbert’s “Wooden Bird” mainly for two gorgeous lines, “between a fern from the forest / and a fern from Larousse,” coordinates of melancholy that cheer me up. My wife thinks I’ve been ignoring the cruel parts of what is a pretty short poem. Not that Herbert is cruel, but the wooden bird suffers in a hostile world. I admit I don’t dwell on the suffering, but in figuring out how the poem casts its spell and where, oh where in the forest it leaves us, I’ve come to see that I haven’t been ignoring the bird’s plight but taking it for granted, which I submit is a species of Miles Davis’s “If you’re not nervous, then you’re not paying attention.” The bird’s suffering is the condition in which the woodland details seem to serve as terms of an allegory, a trip from certainty through precariousness to maybe despair. But the bird crosses the allegory’s double lines, jumps the rail and hangs there out of reach, nearly invisible in the poem’s nightfall. It’s a sly fable, a swift ode to being, the being of the poet constrained by authority or of the imaginative reader, that interior exile, yourself. In this summer of 2020, I want to read the poem, and this reading to operate, as ventilation, a window onto concerns that can revitalize us.

“Wooden Bird” names a contradiction, a stiff version of a thing that’s supposed to be perma-startled, an intimate of the air. At first, Herbert charms us:

In the warm hands
of children
a wooden bird
began to live

Though “began” casts the children into doubt — will their warmth falter?  — a fable with nursery magic is a fine thing. It was a pleasure to identify with the rabbit hero in The Velveteen Rabbit even when I was reading it to my kids, in part because I knew I was feeling what I was supposed to: “Look at me, I’m a real boy!”

under enamel feathers
a tiny heart gave itself
a glass eye
caught fire with sight

The heart gives itself to the children who animate the toy and, in the Velveteen vein, love it, imbue it with personality so that nursery magic can happen. Or the heart gives itself to being alive, to the world.

a painted wing
stirred

(Did Herbert know Hopkins’ “stirred for a bird” from “The Windhover”? The translators did, probably. Did he feel chthonic tug from another phrase in Hopkins’ poem, “plough down,” turned earth soft as underfeathers?)

a dry body
felt craving for the forest

The half-alive bird feels but not for the children — it craves the forest, the primordial home, its origin, as the children who animate the toy are playing with questions of birth, the apparent creation out of nothing, we were not and now we are, incredible no matter how clinical, or wild, the explanation.

it marched
like a soldier in a ballad
with its sticks of legs it drummed
the right leg drummed — forest
the left leg drummed — forest
it dreamed green light
closed eyes of nests
at the bottom

The craving half-animate bird is leaving! Goodbye, velveteen fairytale; we must supply a provisional nursery or Where the Wild Things Are bedroom-glade where the wooden bird can be marching or dreaming of marching like a soldier in a ballad, in this case a toy soldier with the usual instability from which the bird’s getting ideas about teetering off in search of fullfilment. A single glass eye “caught fire with sight.” I see the wooden bird lying on its side. But maybe the fire of sight is strong enough for one eye only. Regardless, the children have vanished; the bird dreams of green light because it’s not in a glade but wishes it were. Maybe it’s lying in the nursery still, not marching but dreaming of it, playing a soldier who is in turn imagining green peace, stolid wooden bird, left right, marching toward its preordained end. 

The bird with green forest in its eyes dreams of “closed eyes of nests,” nests that have been abandoned or close themselves to the bird, like the sleeping or purposely blind eyes that lie “at the bottom,” but the bottom of what? However you’re picturing the bottom of the forest, site of magic and mystery where the deliberately blinded or sleeping or dead nests are, it’s to that imaginary location the wooden bird is marching. We follow it there and suspect the wooden bird is our emissary.

at the forest’s edge
woodpeckers picked out its eyes
its tiny heart blackened
from the torture of common beaks
yet it marched on
shoved about by venomous mushrooms
jeered at by orioles
at the bottom of dead leaves
it sought a nest

The once safe wooden bird has become that allegorical figure, closer than an emissary, its tiny heart like ours, “blackened / from the torture of common beaks.” Despite its suffering, the bird will soldier on. But in the last two stanzas, the forest that had been solidifying becomes notional, doubling the layers between the fictive but possible nursery and the “place” at which the wooden bird has arrived:

it lives now
on the impossible border
between matter animate
and invented
between a fern from the forest
and a fern from Larousse
on a dry stalk
on one leg
on a hair of wind
on what tears itself away from reality
but hasn’t enough heart
enough strength
does not transform itself
into an image

There are not more autumnally revivifying lines than “between a fern from the forest / and a fern from Larousse.” It’s us! The deep notes have been plucked (to be so known), we’re getting our bearings (left right), trying to imagine where this “impossible border” can be, what the situation looks like, how the bird feels. It lives “on what tears itself away from reality,” which, as the anaphora of “on” lines prepares us to know, is as much place as object or sustenance: it is in the end the same as the wooden bird, and the wooden bird who “tears itself away from reality” cannot fulfill its imperative, it cannot “transform itself / into an image.”

If that toy bird is us, as of course it must be, we won’t prevail as matter, but we’re not going to survive as image either, not longer than memories of us, and in those memories not substantively, not as “an image.” The futility is exquisite. It’s liberating. No false promise. The truth we fire all cylinders to comprehend. But of course we’re not the bird — we’re the readers who activate the poem, who read meaning in the synaesthetic imaginary, crossed senses rich with penumbra and emanations.

To get at what we’re doing, and gesture at where we are, at the end of “Wooden Bird,” I need to look at “Why the Classics,” a short three-section poem that concludes Milosz and Scott’s Selected as a quiet exhortation and ars poetica. In it, Herbert contrasts Thucydides with the “generals of the most recent wars” who

whine on their knees before posterity
praise their heroism and innocence
they accuse their subordinates
envious colleagues
unfavourable winds

(Sound like anyone you know?) But Thucydides, who “was late with relief” and “… paid his native city / with lifelong exile,” 

… says only
that he had seven ships
it was winter
and he sailed quickly

Thucydides is Herbert’s model of vigorous refinement, and it’s not a stretch or a knock on the poet’s sense of himself to say that Thucydides is a stand-in for Herbert. He lived through the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Poland; he lived under the Stalinist regime that destroyed his culture and hounded him for his role in the resistance by way of an uncertain legal status — he was an exile in his own land. He had plenty to complain about, but he was in league with obscured histories, the golden mean, irony, Dutch still lifes. Herbert is my model of vigorous refinement. He gets described as astringent, Apollonian, classical, but he’s also conversant with sweetness, romantic love and compassion.

Let’s look at the final section of “Why the Classics,” in which Herbert comes to the point of the title:

if art for its subject
will have a broken jar
a small broken soul
with a great self-pity
what will remain after us
will be like lovers’ weeping
in a small dirty hotel
when wall-paper dawns

Look how sly he is! He asks us to hold the broken jar for a minute while he finds his keys. He’s coming back with Thucydides, but he leaves us waiting with the weeping lovers inside their scant horizon. The lovers are as real as Thucydides. Still, they’re not what Herbert would have us leave behind. But yes they are — they are what he leaves behind.

That alternation between feeling and ironical distance is the principle behind the bathetic last lines of “Wooden Bird”: “but hasn’t enough heart / enough strength // does not transform itself / into an image.” In the deflation we feel, puzzling over what he means by “image,” by “transform itself” (transform itself), we can recognize Herbert’s stand against self-pity. Turning to interpret, we step away from the bird — we’re not it. Where are we, then?

Herbert’s taken us with him on a walk along the “impossible border” of legibility. Like an electron, we’re particle and wave, eluding measurement. I think the image into which the wooden bird can’t transform itself is an eidolon or something similarly powerful. Stuck between the material and the conceptual, the wooden bird who is you hovers where words peter out. But you can’t not imagine a green polar bear. Herbert’s done it again: When you’re told the wooden bird can’t transform itself into an image, you can’t not try to help the poor thing, not try to transform yourself into the third state, the eidolon or whatever that unites the material and the conceptual, can’t not try to carry words across the border.

Paused here just past the brink of the knowable, we’ve given our July 2020 minds an airing, refreshing them while exercising our liberty, or refusing to enter the orange one’s tent through the back flap of obsession. Reading “Wooden Bird” is political, then, doubly so because the negotiations between Herbert and us “promote the idea that there exists a much greater, circumambient energy and order within which we have our being,” as Heaney puts it in “Joy or Night.” The writing is the act of a mind choosing the right words, which is delighting in language, a mind delighting in finding the way inside the shared language. And your meeting with the poem is a kind of communion within the cultural imaginary of which the forces of conformity are merely a part.

***

Benjamin Gantcher’s first book of poems, Snow Farmer (CW Books, 2017), was a finalist in several book contests. His work appears in many journals, including Tin House, Guernica and The Brooklyn Rail, and he was Poet of the Week at Brooklyn Poets. His chapbook Strings of Math and Custom was published by Beard of Bees Press, and his first poetry manuscript, If a Lettuce, earned finalist honors in the National Poetry Series and Bright Hill Press contests. A recipient of a LABA fellowship as well as residencies from the UCross Foundation and the Omi International Arts Center, Gantcher is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a former poetry editor of failbetter. He teaches English in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn with his family.