Playwright, what is it that draws us close—
When the world seems at loggerheads?

In a willow-laden detour to Créteil,
A blithe Thursday pause from Parisian stress,

You lure the inspiriting swans to your side
With fillips of fresh bread,

But the Garbo-shy heron refuses
To stir or alight on the center stage.

It is not unlike the past, the myriad
Plots and characters cached within us—

*

Île des Ravageurs, Île Sainte-Catherine, Île Brise-Pain,
The names of the Lilliputian islands

(Linked by appealing footbridges)
A genial bracelet or a bagatelle’s

Initial notes. Along the tranquil Marne,
We launch into your brand-new play,

With a duo of intent anglers
As desultory bystanders,

And a stealthy, beaver-like creature
The French call a copyu

As a hirsute witness.
You relish the role of a callous,

Up-and-coming businessman, 
And straightaway, I shape-shift

Into an “eyesore,” a homeless,
Tatterdemalion crone

Loitering in a London Tube station,
Antsy to present a scathing mirror

To the posh Bond Street princeling’s
Blistering selfishness—

*

This riverine role-playing implies
Our easy theatrical rapport

Is surely bolder, more fathomless,
Than our Puck-giddy or pensive,

Slowpoke or brisk daylight masks—
As fallible dreamers, co-stars,

We’re not immune to
Ad libs and nighttime shadows:

In shattering dreams, alarums,
You’re the little Shoah girl

Whose hiding-place cough and sniffle
Ensnares her whole hounded family;                      

You’re the doomed, headstrong queen’s
Miscarried son, the longed-for dauphin

Whose death-in-the-womb unravels
The irascible monarch’s ambitions—

*

What does the here-and-now Marne whisper—
With its Maytime retinue

Of gumshoe-inquisitive swans,
Its foraging tenant heron?

On-the-rise dramatist, lush-haired
Phoenix among pendant willows

And resilient water lilies,
Deep green prosceniums, 

You possess the art, the wherewithal,
The inner treasure house to fashion

New worlds, to annul
Disastrous history—

Be with me in this life.
Be brave against the ruinous.

Be born.

*

Cyrus Cassells is the 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas. His most recent book, The World That the Shooter Left Us, was published in 2022, and his ninth book, Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, will be published by Four Way Books in March 2024. Among his honors: a Guggenheim fellowship, the 1981 National Poetry Series, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, two NEA grants, a Pushcart Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award. His 2018 volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, translated from the Catalan, was awarded the Texas Institute of Letters’ Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2018 and 2019. His second volume of Catalan translations, To The Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu, was published in March 2023. He was nominated for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for his cultural reviews in The Washington Spectator. He teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University and received the 2021 Presidential Award for Scholarly/Creative Activities, one the university’s highest honors.

—The headlong classic where
July’s leafed-out lindens & the greengage hill

Spell the end of time & break-spirit yearning:
All the cuckoo-clocks & wristwatches halt,

Even the comic mime exploring
The invisible with his expressive hands,

For the adamant, all-systems-go,
Bantering lovers who spy

A furloughed Belgian soldier tumble down
An intoxicating meadow,

Frolicking with his April-named daughter
(O her blossoming laughter

& the riverbed gold of her sunlit hair)
With such wave-crest glee & ecstasy,

The gargantuan future
& the vast, refractory past—presto chango!—

Vanish all at once—

*

Cyrus Cassells is the 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas. His most recent book, The World That the Shooter Left Us, was published in 2022, and his ninth book, Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, will be published by Four Way Books in March 2024. Among his honors: a Guggenheim fellowship, the 1981 National Poetry Series, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, two NEA grants, a Pushcart Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award. His 2018 volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, translated from the Catalan, was awarded the Texas Institute of Letters’ Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2018 and 2019. His second volume of Catalan translations, To The Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu, was published in March 2023. He was nominated for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for his cultural reviews in The Washington Spectator. He teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University and received the 2021 Presidential Award for Scholarly/Creative Activities, one the university’s highest honors.

Is anything in it doing what you were interested in doing?
And pausing, a silhouettist, skillfully unaware, grew another day,
while another, kissfully aware, closed shop.
I will have to return another day to do this portrait—
Meanwhile these
Shadows that drop their coins — are all but one.
(only one large dollar my privates pursed).
I will spend this rent at old Wenceslaw square 
where I sit and wait for a silhouette to appear 
And ask me for work.
Like the one man who stood there like a capital, his eyelids dropped
Down to his feet, where they sat with the weight of a floor-length
gown. I emphasize the weight, though heavy, was very alive
and slow moving at his feet, a large snake pacing
in and out itself. Life! There! Observed in the far corner of Old Wenceslaw,
his capital head, almost asleep in my lap, gently appearing
to cast disco shades, gold and blue, in the far corners
where he stood.  
Some think the square should be renamed Kafka’s or, all the tremblings of the lids of K., who self-determined
that all vowels beat past him—in frozendinner wings—  while he saw through where he stood–
And universally took the lift! And in service, to me! worked,
w/ coal in the bosom! And worked freely a force
that scalps the earth, that pulls back the fiery the very
scalp of the earth!

*

Farnoosh Fathi is the author of Great Guns (Canarium Books) and the forthcoming Granny Cloud (NYRB Poets) , editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (NYRB Poets) and founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). She lives in New York.

There was a grating in the teeth— like a piano
being carried through a story,
to the front of the shop—and one waiting
with a dove pressed
between the covers of his book—
like a purge
threatening to quote him.

The idiot could be by the street
or alongside his great love.
“Is this— the piano—milady?”
the beau stumbled
sharply in his stairs.
Her left eye opened first—
twenty hurdles lay out at once—
each hurdle an ivory letter opener
spaced at even distances from one another, and from her
to him with purple tears, lunging towards her,
the piano spine writhing
in his teeth.

Every ivory letter-opener he cleared released
a formidable height—
her right eye—
and the cross which hung from her eyes—
she wiped with the Twister mat from the window display.

It is impossible –they cried—
I have spread all this out—
my organs, my leafblower, the skies of tomorrow–
these hands—bound– doves are– so to speak
writhing there, set down, rooting there—
he is—sort tears— going long
how long– such bells
stepped down—and Twister moles flutter to
the nearest, the wettest ladder.
We stood on one, like a bride on her beauty’s face,
the grate shuddered, the shop
too, everything trailed by long hair, which sheds as it goes,
only apparently growing!

*

Farnoosh Fathi is the author of Great Guns (Canarium Books) and the forthcoming Granny Cloud (NYRB Poets) , editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (NYRB Poets) and founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). She lives in New York.

We’re sounding words. KRILL. CLAM. SKATE. SHARK. We scan
Down lines each page to find the ones he gets.
I realize I skip a word I want
To keep away as long as possible.

He asks me what it is, and so I teach
Him KILL. Come on. It’s in a nature book.
It’s part of life, I know, I know. I know.
KILL. KILL. It’s all there is. The sharks will kill

The eels and eels will kill the smaller fish,
And on and on it goes. We kill the sharks.
We’re like a net that sinks to suffocate
The world. Even sharks, those primordial killers,

Are going to go away, fewer of them
Each year, fewer than since time began,
An extinction that’s never slowing down,
He learns. He learns to say the word. To KILL.

He learns what’s gone is really gone for good.
We learn together KILL. Our fingers touch
As we draw them smoothly along the page
Until we reach and brush against the word, KILL. KILL.

*

Ernest Hilbert is the author of Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—and Last One Out. His fifth book, Storm Swimmer, was selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize and will appear in 2023. Visit him at www.ernesthilbert.com

1.

I place a call and find myself on hold
All day to what we used to call Muzak,
An aimless unsung fog of sound.
It takes a while, and then it comes to me:
It’s “Hotel California!” Holy shit.
How jealously the body guards its fat.
How horrible everything seems these days,
Once so golden, now broken or ablaze.
I dream I’m a king who reigns beyond time . . .
The City of the Young has drained its wine.
The pepper, halved, reveals cathedral light.
The City of Suns compels itself to rise.

2.

No need to do more work. Just call it art.
You know, they feel it’s easier this way,
More civilized, in a manner of thinking.
We never tried to care this much before.
They reassure each other that they’re smart.
They say that furniture is little more
Than bourgeois convention. Naked on ash floors,
They sip Bordeaux. This high, they see so much.
They make their art from what’s at hand. They’re so
Advanced they hardly know what’s going on.
Shhh, quiet. Don’t frighten them. We watch.
They never even guessed that we exist.

3.

We knew the bonus box was filled with snakes
Before we shook it up and reached inside.
The crows are loud today. They call to us
Beyond the railroad tracks. The sun has set.
Our luck’s been kind of weird but good for once.
We’ll always have these vespertine desires,
The bats that loop their loops so close to us,
The fireflies showing in bluer darkness.
We simply have to stop and watch a while.
Jesus God it’s fucking hot out here at night.
We’ll wait for lightning. Till then we have the dark.
You’ll feel it now. We made the storms we swim. 

*

Ernest Hilbert is the author of Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—and Last One Out. His fifth book, Storm Swimmer, was selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize and will appear in 2023. Visit him at www.ernesthilbert.com

As in darkness stooping in the alluvium
at the oxbow she remembered rubble,

days of rubble, her companion unearthing
a sword that had never tasted blood

blade engraved with lily of the valley
hilt of crystal inlaid with topaz

and opal scintillating—so the mislaid word
for this was lovelorn, an unknowing.

But to the water again, she a mudlarker
cradling bliss in her silty palm,

what comes to her is earthly satisfaction:
hay mown and stacked for thatching

the first chill of a sumac sun setting
the day’s work done and rough knuckles

tracing her belly’s silk doublings or
a storm beyond the horizon, still unknown

rasp of the arrow’s fletching, a fine wind
and the high ground—

*

Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, forthcoming 2024) and Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022), selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. Her poems appear in three chapbooks and in The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, At Length, Plume, and elsewhere. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts. Her website is carolynoliver.net.

Lo:
why
is it
the angel
bodiless power
the herald of the mysteries
enters time and space—suffers to speak—on the blade’s edge
of day and dark—and being come in, at once acquires
a winged body, sexless image—
leaves behind only
a girl’s word,
taper
burnt
low.

*

Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, forthcoming 2024) and Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022), selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. Her poems appear in three chapbooks and in The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, At Length, Plume, and elsewhere. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts. Her website is carolynoliver.net.

Our neighbors loved us.

If by love you mean recited
each annoying thing we did

with fondness

back to us without the tsktsk
that would actually have made it fond. 

I still remember
the way you turned to me

as you peed in your sock drawer

after a night with
that history professor on anti-psychotics.

Foofy-cocktail blue bathing
mountain peak after mountain peak

to the increasingly pastel horizon.

A pure color you can taste:
like oceans in the bible.

The plush
of a plot

with no actual adults in it.

*

John Emil Vincent lives in Montreal. His first book, Excitement Tax, was a finalist for the Quebec Writers Federation First Book Prize and the ReLit Prize. His fourth book of poems, The Decline and Fall of the Chatty Empire, an epyllion following the adventures of Chatty Cathy and her band of has-been dolls, is just out with McGill-Queen’s University Press. 

By the time I understood it, I had no need to recount it.

Some music comes up through the storm—that’s when you should

     worry.

It’s not the worst-case scenario, the pilot said, but it’s as bad as it

     could ever get.

Shovel the snow from the boat!

Or snow rises through a hole in the boat, you could walk ashore,

     but what’s sea, what’s shore.

The worst-case scenario would be even more rhapsodic.

Like—what?—the boat is also snow? Your hand is?

No, like the boat is the boat, totally, and your hand is totally your

     hand, each item utterly only totally itself.

I had no need to understand it.

Piano rising in the storm.

I preferred the involuntary lavender.

I preferred the near expanse, compound of wrists and silt.

How many years until you stop counting, and being astonished by,

     how many years?

Or by then are you durably astonished.

I count the permissible neglects, and the eventual omens, as bean

     sprouts in a colander.

*

Zach Savich is the author of eight books of poetry and prose, including Daybed (Black Ocean, 2018). Recent work has appeared in A Dozen Nothing, Always Crashing, Full Stop, andthe Georgia Review. He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.