next to nothing is where we grew
eagerly up, home an approximation of somewhere else

ersatz Africa where soldiers planted live mines and played
dead, decades later they found one, an officer

lost in his own land, lost to the game
everyone got tired of playing

skeleton in uniform, how time
conscripts the sinners and innocents

alike. but that’s not right you say, no one is innocent

+

a battered piano cowers in the corner of the empty sanctuary

memory in extremity, unthinking fingers gently coax the ghosts out of a song long forgotten

battered by the waves / my ship’s too small to save your mother sings, little boats in frothy water, little
****** barren island of you

orange at first then blue in all its hues, the sanctuary filled and emptied of light

you would be amazed by the miracles I’ve seen. or have you been promised too many already

clouds long to be shadows / mountains want to be meadows, your mother’s voice tattered at the edges of sleep

art is unnecessary, obscene even. I see that now. what I thought I had sacrificed I had simply abandoned

+

lost in the idea of redemption or rather lulled into the
undertow of the idea which
drags me out further into shimmering inhospitable
lands that once stared up into miles
of ocean. wasn’t it God who made me this
way I used to say when I was feeling especially
cruel. the sun forgives the moon its grand illusion
Abraham slices Isaac’s throat and walks back down the mountain alone

+

blue of the robin’s demolished eggshell, my daughter
asks where are the birdies daddy. blue of the scaffold of sky painted with
robins so blue it hurts. we live on the edge of the sudden nothing for miles

sun like a god that makes you say sorry for spilling your juice like his father and his

taillights of trucks pass through town like red blood cells
off to some better extremity, the tips of things have all the fun

Wednesday nights at the Stardust Inn my mother played piano for the lonesome drunks
catechism of sadness, sickness as ritual, they opened their cavernous mouths
and she lay down on their swollen tongues

+

virgin glass the first version of the self born
in furnaces of sand limestone and ash the
clash’s police and
thieves on the stereo our lives beyond tonight
outside our capacity to imagine marlboro
reds spread their sick bouquet from a shallow
vase your face
in the broken plate of mirror
lines around your eyes disappear
lines form outside the door to oblivion
enter you say enter enter enter over and over you
can’t understand
anymore what it means

+

part of me is afraid of what I’ll find
at the end of this highway

sun-colored skin of the comfortably moneyed

arabesque as prayer
dancers with whole bodies almost
entirely in heaven

nights that descend from the blue mountains
and carry away loners with warm whispers and
chloroform. tendrils grow out of the ocean
asking for directions, taking me home

+

long afternoon shadows leak from palms, burnt
orange turns violet on the distant
side of the mountain where golden poppies grow in the
aftermath of the fire, every petal a fibrous memory of flame

not everyone gets to
go home, not
everyone wants to

late nights on the road to nowhere blur into
early morning prayer to the cruel administrator of my
self-destruction. look at it you pathetic loser you fucking
coward I shout. a photo of flowers that grew in my
absence cut and placed in a vase

+

black orbs of caviar in a pile like a failed god’s discarded worlds
earlobes stretched towards death with diamonds
vintage Corvette convertibles with angry
engines and bright white grins at the wheel

remember how we tried to open the
locked door to the blinding Palace of Glass and Handbags
you pointed incredulously at the crafted brass
handle but inside two animatronic odes to fashion
indicated with a synchronous swivel of
lacquered heads that we were surely
lost, we should surely get lost. we did but not before you
showed them your unadorned finger. I’m not far now from the
coast from what I had until now considered the end of
away. but there isn’t, is there. an end to away

+

Saint Christopher paces the length of the pier
anointing the heads of melon and abalone

nannies push their payloads into the ever after
tall specimens contort their forms to fit the frame
arms and legs bent like alabaster cranes who forsook
migration for stillness, for provocation of the restless
ocean’s depthless compulsion. to become deathless

nearest the heart of grief the heat
intensifies, becomes unbearable, nothing but the
conflagration survives. if I teach you
anything I hope it’s this: don’t
confuse the light of the fire of despair for
a sun

*

Brian Russell is the author of The Year of What Now (Graywolf). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Kenyon Review. He lives in St. Louis. 

1.

         After a film by Parviz Kimiavi

The slender dervish lifts the rock to his lips,
sways. In the low, parched trees, 
he cradles each in the phone wires he cuts
off his neighbors’ lines to make strange
necklaces of the branches. His children sold 
their deaf father’s garden as a stage for faith,
his turning a mystic’s ecstasy, lissome arms
channeling what paying pilgrims seek,
the desert invitation.

2.

In 1990, I wandered a bazaar in Albany, NY 
before the Knick for the message of The Dead. 
Celebrants in open air, the spinners’ 
Waterhouse hair, altered followers after a miracle  
I wouldn’t part with, not for blotter acid or
psalms of smoke. Outside their circles, a voyeur 
of closed-eyed whirlings meant to be observed— 
they taped the seance of Drums / Space, waiting 
for Jerry’s sermon to bless the eyes of the world.

3.

Sundays, I pass the visible church, the living 
picture of our town’s wanting, unsure if it is weeds
or wheat, hoping shows will grant an audience
in God’s seventh day mind. I know our garden’s 
no place a wanderer would one day call a shrine, 
the slate we stole from a retaining wall 
to make a base for outdoor fires, the rest sculptures 
my love haloed with a barrel’s ring. Faith is a moving
silence, the open secret of our solid dust.

*

Max Heinegg is the author of Good Harbor which won the inaugural Paul Nemser Prize from Lily Poetry Press in 2022. His second book, Going There, is forthcoming later this year. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Thrush, Nimrod, Kestrel, and Crab Creek Review, among others.

Find him on the web at www.maxheinegg.com

– spray painted on a garbage can in Luquillo, PR

Before the low security post and the mangrove trail 
teeming with hermit crabs and darts of lizards, 
we find the Drake quotation and think of the video 
the island needs in real life. To believe the way things are 
is justified if you were denied an education. God’s plan
disgusts as we avoid the sidelong trash visitors leave 
on the way to the ideal beach. I imagine the rap-pop king 
slash stacked philanthropist dropping hundred bands 
into an adoration of hands. Here, who wouldn’t cheer
such generous clemency? If that was what the rich did
I might incline to think these waters exist to drown
tourists unfamiliar with riptides. No ads needed here
where even the sand doesn’t stick, and the kioskos’ oil is 
always afire. It’s February yet the sun knows its strength. 
The clouds go dark before dinner; the morning’s mist. 
To think we thought island rain was a bad forecast. 
By night, our girls watch the British Baking Show,
a prodigal entertainment of judged sand paintings 
of sugar and buttercream. I get takeaway margaritas. 
To be able to travel makes two teachers rich as rappers,
and what decent deity would deny anyone the salt rim? 
As much as it’s tempting to accept inequity as a lesson 
in the inevitable, to say that unattended suffering or luck’s
anything but improvised is the way the captive comes to
love the captor and forget the dream of lifted keys.

*

Max Heinegg is the author of Good Harbor which won the inaugural Paul Nemser Prize from Lily Poetry Press in 2022. His second book, Going There, is forthcoming later this year. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Thrush, Nimrod, Kestrel, and Crab Creek Review, among others.

Find him on the web at www.maxheinegg.com

I’m glad I didn’t off myself because today I got a ticket to Isabelle Huppert. Same-day, fifteen Euros, an eighty-minute monologue by Mary Queen of Scots. I’ve always liked dark spaces, benches shared with foreign strangers. I dislike Dad jokes and too many throw pillows, flat screen televisions in soft-lit bars. Isabelle wound herself white on white, her corset coughing up Stuart red. Adieu, ma mère. Adieu, la France. I understood little and loved it all, thought that was how to live my life. Mes mains, mes amis, are stronger than they look. My father bequeathed a deadly grip.

*

Eileen G’Sell is a poet and culture critic with recent contributions to The Baffler, Fence, Oversound, The Hopkins Review, Current Affairs, Hyperallergic, Reverse Shot, LARB, and other outlets. Her first full-length volume of poetry, Life After Rugby, was published in 2018 by Gold Wake Press, and she is a 2023 nominee for the national Rabkin Foundation award in arts journalism. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

When I was on molly and Mitra was my mom, I started to feel like it all made sense. We stood, two (or three) of us, and my shoes stopped hurting. Her eyes, big, dark, and kind, looked nothing like my own. Her husband, he had eyes, too, but I don’t remember seeing them. I just remember knowing that Mitra was my mom, that time could be tender if I softened my grip.

*

Eileen G’Sell is a poet and culture critic with recent contributions to The Baffler, Fence, Oversound, The Hopkins Review, Current Affairs, Hyperallergic, Reverse Shot, LARB, and other outlets. Her first full-length volume of poetry, Life After Rugby, was published in 2018 by Gold Wake Press, and she is a 2023 nominee for the national Rabkin Foundation award in arts journalism. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Eliana and I talk shit. We talk volumes,
mountains and their sunsets appear.
Tonight, we were talking about music.
We always talk about melodies, harmonies, dissonance
even when we talk about the psychology of starlings
and the way neurodivergent llamas invade our dreams.
Tonight, we weren’t talking about Matty Healy,
lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of The 1975,
and his organic willingness to make people happy,
even though that’s something we talk about a lot.
That’s a gift, you know, to make people happy
and you have to work at it. It’s a full-time job.
We were working at it, making each other happy,
talking about a folk festival I went to when I was 15.
I couldn’t remember where exactly, but it was in the Catskills.
Eliana is an archivist, and she said let me help you remember
and I said maybe Matty will help me remember
so I put on a song, Sincerity Is Scary, because it is.
It was dark outside and the llamas weren’t screaming
so Eliana went on the computer and found an article
in The New York Times, circa 1979, and there it was,
my memory: The Catskills Folk Festival in Andes, NY.
Sometimes when I talk with Eliana, my daughter,
I have to find a folk festival from the past
that still makes sense in the present.
All you have to do is talk to one another to find it,
to find each other, to have joy,
to listen to songs that are not even on the radio
but course through your blood
even though you have forgotten, even though Pete Seeger was there.
He played This Land Is Your Land, and no one could believe their ears,
but felt an irrefutable happiness,
oh, there was so much happiness.

*

Matthew Lippman is the author of six poetry collections. His latest book Mesmerizingly Sadly
Beautiful (2020) is published by Four Way Books. It was the recipient of the 2018 Levis Prize. His
next collection, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On, will be published by Four Way Books
in 2024.

I don’t want to be friends with Instagram anymore.
All those women slapping each other in Walmart.
Those Karens on the debased boulevard.
All those big breasted, ball busting lovers.
I am not interested in pretty sunsets in Bali and the Vermont foliage in November.
Everything so pretty and disgusting
I want to die.
And yet I go back every morning when I’m on the train,
carrying the dog, driving the car.
Instagram called me a racist.
Instagram called me a dopey monkey.
Instagram made me lose a dollar and then forty.
I want to break up with you
and we are not even lovers.
And then I see Matty with his balls in the frame
singing Wintering and I think, I love winter so much
I love Matty that much,
I should go outside and be in winter
in the snow the chill the freeze the ice
but I don’t.
I stay inside with my fingers on the phone and click and click
like I am going to get somewhere beyond the dopiness of my own mind.
The other day I heard a guy on TV say there is a building full of 300 people
trying to figure out content for kids.
To keep the kids on the phone, the screen, connected,
away from the outside.
It made me sick like the first time I saw porn made me sick.
I needed to get somewhere quick—into the foliage,
into the sunset, into the cold freeze of winter
in Paris—
like those Instagram photos I scroll through
when I am driving to pick up my kids
and can’t keep my eyes on the road.

*

Matthew Lippman is the author of six poetry collections. His latest book Mesmerizingly Sadly
Beautiful (2020) is published by Four Way Books. It was the recipient of the 2018 Levis Prize. His
next collection, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On, will be published by Four Way Books
in 2024.

Left to their devices their devices
falter, strand them on a street
they’ve not seen before, what they call
the criminal element all around them,
the pavement they want to drive away on
scarified, its surface shattered.     

It’s sadistic, they think then say out loud—   
not the right word but all they have,
statistics from this neighborhood
no longer in their favor.

The flavor of their fear is bitter,
chocolate with a hint of plum     
gone sour, unlike the dark bars
they ate when young, wrapped in foil  
gold as their hair, their tongues still filled
with tastebuds they never thought
would be taken from them.

*

Wyn Cooper has published five books of poetry, including, most recently, Mars Poetica. His
poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry,
as well as in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry. Many of his poems have been turned into
songs, including by recording artists Sheryl Crow, David Broza, and Madison Smartt Bell. He is
a former editor of Quarterly West, and the recipient of a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation.
For two years he worked at the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, a think tank run by the Poetry
Foundation. His first novel, Way Out West, was published in 2022. He lives in Vermont, and
works as a freelance editor. www.wyncooper.com

Litter in ditches: water bottles,
Bud Light cans, cigarette packs.
A bag of diapers not used yet.

Litter in trees: junk mail, Kleenex,
the blue skins of balloons—
a barrage of human garbage.

Litter in wetlands, on farmland, where
birds pick and choose their bird meals
from sandwich wrappers blown there. 

A rash of rubbish, the itch of it,
the redness. The spread of it. 

The litter, the clutter, the junk of junkyards:
carcasses of trucks, coffee tables turned up-
side down, chairs with no backs, lamps
without cords, couches minus pillows:
deconstructed living rooms lived in last
night, cardboard shelters abandoned   
when embers of trash-can fires faltered.

Overhead: planets not yet landed on,
their auras bright in tonight’s black sky
under which we stand and draw breath,
our deaths a distant rumor.

*

Wyn Cooper has published five books of poetry, including, most recently, Mars Poetica. His
poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry,
as well as in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry. Many of his poems have been turned into
songs, including by recording artists Sheryl Crow, David Broza, and Madison Smartt Bell. He is
a former editor of Quarterly West, and the recipient of a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation.
For two years he worked at the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, a think tank run by the Poetry
Foundation. His first novel, Way Out West, was published in 2022. He lives in Vermont, and
works as a freelance editor. www.wyncooper.com

I don’t believe in ghosts, I say

when the door creaks, when a rumble

of footsteps chase after no one

upstairs, when a thick hint of cigar

starts to fill the room. The dead

stay dead, they don’t creep around

while we sleep, rattling chains

we had long ago broken. Broken

old bones under the floorboards

don’t curse our foundations, we don’t

live unaware atop their desolation.

Their tears dried on our skin, their

cries like our cries, their fingers

gently brushing the back of our necks,

tightening, holding our breath. Death

is a door that shuts tight. The night

doesn’t whisper secrets of our past,

of broken oars and broken masts, sugar,

cotton, dyewood, ginger, iron bars and

iron shackles. Death is a door that shuts

tight. I don’t believe in ghosts, I say,

even as their echoes fill our lungs

like salt water.

*

Pablo Otavalo is from Cuenca, Ecuador, and now lives and writes in Illinois. A recipient of the 2013 and 2014 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition prize, his work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, RHINO Poetry, Jet Fuel Review, Structo Magazine, Levitate, No Tender Fences: An Anthology of Immigrant & First-Generation American Poetry, and other publications. We must find what we revere in each other.