I’ve become a connoisseur

of roadside hotels — the mini fridge,

the single-serve coffee machine,

the ironing board. The Super8

in Georgia has a chandelier

above the kitchenette, in Kentucky

there’s a Turkish rug in the lobby

of a Days Inn, hand-knotted red wool

caked in cement dust from work boots,

in Tennessee the centerpiece of geraniums

is delivered daily, sunrise orange pinks

under deep green leaves set on a round

walnut table, but the water pressure is weak

in Alabama, and all three little bottles

are conditioner. And I say: “This will not

define my day,” but it does. My mother

calls and we don’t mention sarcoma

and she says she’s bought me

shampoo and my sister has apologized

and that she feels fine. I fear her health

is failing. What is failing? like a motor

fails, like a bridge fails? I fear my mother

dying. And how did she know I needed

shampoo? Once, in La Paz, at a retreat

for the School of Tourism, a group

of Cañari women laid out a feast

on red woven runners over patchy

grass: cheese, fruits, lima beans, purple

fingerling potatoes, sweet corn. A woman

named Carmelina picked up some grapes

and threw them into the open field

for the birds, she said— so the Pacha Mama[1]

sees how we take care of them

like she takes care of us.    

---

[1] Earth Mother in the Cañar Quichua language

*

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.

Social media knows that sacred image wouldn’t have
struck you had it not been (re)posted by an artist
you admire from a distance & have mutuals with.

The teacher asks each of us to write out
“Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadooloop.”
I ask the piano what instrument it plays.

The piano starts playing itself again,
improvisation at a remove from improve,
the live show that got cancelled, as if holism is

a family band, a neo-imploding leafy possible.
“I want to be overused by the vibraphone for a while.”
The drummer doesn’t have to tell us to play a dirge.

What if it’s a purely neurobiological thing; free your lips
& fingers & the throat & lung part of the soul will follow
till it leads & fools the ears into thinking you love the sounds?

“Water rabbit says the answer to war isn’t
necessarily peace, it’s creativity & agility.”

+++

A cornet may tumble into piano chords
& a bass flub for the right keys, but the congas
call the meeting to order, or a loose groove
on the “what’s so funny about law & order” changes.

Can creativity & agility be peacing? Imagine
all those toxic cuckold horns in Shakespeare blew jazz
to soothe the overstimulated, restless and fickle.
I was feeling too half-in, half-out again, until the bass

started playing a riff that, becoming recognizable, turns
into heard words seen as numbers “99 ½ just won’t do…
got to have a 100” Ninety-nine and a half …a hundred..
Got to   got to   got to…. (got two too…)…

Get back into H2O walking. “Last year was based on aggression
2023 should provide balance if you can embrace life’s wobbles
with the ‘kwyet konfidence’ of the water rabbit”
outside commotion’s connotation cages.

+++

I’m a so so so and so celebrating the taco truck
liberating itself from the laugh track it’s been
trapped in, the laugh track in the sit com
but not the oil ad. Laughing with or @?

Arrows of rage narrow with age, though
algorithms may suck you back from an open curiosity.
“They’re arguing about what to call us again.”
“Maybe we should start doing that too.”

David called indie rock a roped-off theme park.
Slow the scroll.  Even the acoustic drums & horns
can scare away the birdsongs that inspired them,

but enough about me. My research, left alone,
reaches for footnotes and exceptions, and so on.
How many phones does it take to change an internet?

+++

Parts parting. Goodbye, division. Close closing, getting closer.
“I don’t like that melody.” “I’ll play the same melody
on the higher notes.” “I like it now.” You taught me
the difference between composing & arranging

was primarily a legal term of intellectual property
because “the music industry can only count to 1.”
Now I’m a processed food: feral referees exchange
fluid’s refugee funerals. Is offensive a contranym?

The groundhog saw its shadow, but not theAudubon Zoo aardvark;
neither did the Staten Island Woodchuck or Oklahoma City bears.
Are we still in the monoculture? Saturn & The Sun sing
behind the earth’s back, in front of the front, bleeding maraca tears

I lack the fluidity of James Booker, or Huey “Piano” Smith (RIP)
but am more of what Gil Scott Heron called rhythm piano without a Brian.

*

Chris Stroffolino currently lives in Oakland. A recent dialogue/conversation with Adeena Karasick appears in the Feb. 2023 issue of the Brooklyn Rail. He also published review/essays of Tureeda Mikell, Joanna Fuhrman, Maw Shein Win, and Anne Boyer in Konch, Entropy, and The Rumpus.

before they turn off the lights
at the last slaughterhouse
they cover the chickens in foam

I wear a broken mouth where a river
once branched like a wishbone
like a chromosome

outside the door to the party
I beg myself don’t tell them
about the chickens

don’t tell them
how miserable you are
but I want to matter

the modern chicken is bred to live
no longer than forty-seven days  

I wear a broken wing
where my mouth should be

sometimes I feel like I’ve forgotten
how to breathe
they turn off the lights after I leave

*

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. 

the first
its fur like an early image
of the universe gray swirls
and dark spots

the other
like a field of unharvested
wheat at the end
of summer

they mimic the violence of survival
as we do

our favorite game
holding one another
by the neck the threat
and exhilaration of release

who do you belong to

they play upon a patch of grass
returned now to its undomesticated brethren
flora designed for their own survival
instead of ours

a new nature grows inside
the blasted-out walls of the abandoned
post dispatch which once spun
deep into the night
with yesterday’s news

*

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. 

The Sun always rises. Plant-growth echoes the cycle of seasons. Lockstep tides follow strict Moon phases.

Scratched into bones, we total our days. Pick one red berry. Pick two. Eat more. We eye sized portions of barley, rationing fairly. In branches of lindens, we estimate crows. In shallow pools, the minnows.

We count on the parts of our finite physiques. Ten fingers add to ten toes. Twenty equals one body. Every single body weighs, reaches, and measures out an odd connection with its numbers.

Mathematics reframe reality, telling unbelievable true stories. Maths express ideas our minds must bend to form – irrationality, negativity, symmetry. Wild tales of change and shape, epic quests that help us touch the surface of the Moon.

Nature functions, integrates, generalizes, differentiates what nobody’s body can easily sense, as though remaining-strange-to-us were a condition of existence. The square root of negative one red berry is imaginary. The universe’s secrets are related to us by mathematical increments.

*

Geoff Bouvier’s third full-length volume of prose poetry, Us From Nothing, is a poetic history spanning from the Big Bang to the near future. The book will appear in fall 2023 from Wolsak and Wynn’s Buckrider imprint in Canada and in fall 2024 from Black Lawrence Press in the United States. 

Long before we speak or write, we start to hear a natural song, as though the universe forever hums a patient, urgent message, and we’ve learned to play its tune. We understand how Sun and Moon arrive and pass, gazelles and grass show up then leave, summers fall into winters then bloom into springs, and everybody dies. Around our fires, we practice nature’s measures, and we move without a reason, just to move. It reminds us we share an invisible body, singing as our heartbeats synch along, developing a rhythmic sense of flowing time. Music composes us.

*

Geoff Bouvier’s third full-length volume of prose poetry, Us From Nothing, is a poetic history spanning from the Big Bang to the near future. The book will appear in fall 2023 from Wolsak and Wynn’s Buckrider imprint in Canada and in fall 2024 from Black Lawrence Press in the United States. 

Lisbon, you’ve hurt me, tricked
me into believing all the old lies.

Delusions are endless.

If you’re looking for a mark, here
I am, doing horizontal stand-up

in my hospital bed, joking against
amnesia, transient, global, while

my son stands by in terror. I told him
it felt like an acid flashback, there was

a buzzing in my brain, apologized
for his chromosomes, forgot

and apologized again. His mother’s shadow
circled like a summoner, birdwing

petulance, all the elegance of crow’s
flight, called back after she’d flown

to an intrigue’s heights. I filed my own
missing person’s report. Still I grouse, land

me, because this is about you, Lisbon,

because you waited for us. This return.
My son’s along and laughing, memory

back and every labyrinth
open, your pink walls and pink   

streets I wake and dream down.
At the end of every looted marble

sidewalk, under the sky of Igreja
de Sao Domingos, the clean halls

and coffee roast, machine oil
of Rossio Station, Alameda’s uphill

tracks, along the plane trees
and at the top of every miradouro

I see you, in this second, this new Lisbon
we plant and pave for each other.

*

John Hennessy is the author of two collections, Coney Island Pilgrims and Bridge and Tunnel, and his poems appear in many journals and anthologies, including The Believer, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, The Huffington Post, Jacket, The New Republic, Poetry, The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry at Sangam (India), Poetry Ireland Review, and The Yale Review. He is the translator, with Ostap Kin, of A New Orthography, selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, 2021, and winner of the Derek Walcott Prize, 2021, and the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (part of the Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature/HUP). Their new translations of poems by Yuri Andrukhovych have appeared in NYRB, TLS, and The New Statesman. Hennessy is the poetry editor of The Common and teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The hummingbird hovered in the kitchen, wrong
side of the door, thudded the glass, stopped

all talk. Our boys drew at the table. I chopped
garlic at the counter. You filled wineglasses

near the sink. The bird in place, everyone
still. More fish swimming the damp June air

than god of war striking a wall, stoking
its foundry of anger and desire—helmeted, snake-

waving Huitzilopochtli, one of your subjects,
devotions, however ironic, maybe half, maybe

less. Wings nearly invisible, a crucifix hologram,
posture held static, petitioning, priestlike, green

back, black and red throat, hardly
the reincarnated warrior, syncretic Mars—

the wars were elsewhere, Donbas, Libya,
Afghanistan, elsewhere, far from our kitchen.

And then everyone moved. I billowed a tea
towel, some Sifnian souvenir, Apollonian

sunburst, gently covered the bird mid-air,
asked you to open the door, in one motion he was

liberated, flying back to the feeder. I wanted you
to love me. I could calm, pacify Mars. I thought

I did it for you. Before the war came
to us, before I knew we were fighting it.

*

John Hennessy is the author of two collections, Coney Island Pilgrims and Bridge and Tunnel, and his poems appear in many journals and anthologies, including The Believer, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, The Huffington Post, Jacket, The New Republic, Poetry, The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry at Sangam (India), Poetry Ireland Review, and The Yale Review. He is the translator, with Ostap Kin, of A New Orthography, selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, 2021, and winner of the Derek Walcott Prize, 2021, and the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (part of the Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature/HUP). Their new translations of poems by Yuri Andrukhovych have appeared in NYRB, TLS, and The New Statesman. Hennessy is the poetry editor of The Common and teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

–advice from Tobias Wolff to Mary Karr

Whatever it might mean
it’s a strange dictum to live out.

That calving off the pretense of any
outer husk is what confides us

one to the other. I shit myself.
I apologized without meaning it.

I listened to my neighbor scream
at her mother, trying to decipher
the content of what was said.

The fantasies often fall to pieces,
get warped, and bend back in on
themselves so that any hope
of an orgasm is lost.

That I like to shave at the sink
while my son splashes the water.
That quitting too is a vice
I happen to thrill myself against.

Each piece falls away. What’s left,
just a man puttering in a garden,
traipsing through the city in the rain,
wondering about the score of the game.

*

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of several books, including a new collection of poetry, Bad Woods (Sidebrow), and a novel, Trouble Finds You (Fonograf), both out later this year. Wilkinson is a psychotherapist and he lives in Seattle.

My son requests four songs by
name, and when I find this one
for him he takes off

to run laps around the table
in our front room. He is two
and does this with a determined
face, like he has gone off

to solve a problem. What is dancing
if not a way to disappear?

What is song if not a trapdoor
through the ordinary. Seeing, too,
is measuring distance. How long
will he hold my hand? Or try

to bite me? Or push food into my mouth?
Whatever frightens him—the garbage
truck, the carwash, the kindly dentist—
he metabolizes by
the following morning.

What are his tears? What are his screams,
exactly, if not a recasting of the present
in the body?

I have reason to believe we will all
be conceived and fall down
and get up to cry or dance.

*

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of several books, including a new collection of poetry, Bad Woods (Sidebrow), and a novel, Trouble Finds You (Fonograf), both out later this year. Wilkinson is a psychotherapist and he lives in Seattle.