***

She opened her house to us for a price
but that price has not been paid.
From the back of the room we watch, unseen
witness to her anger, hostage to our shame.

***

Robin Boger’s images from Cuba, Africa and Japan have been shown at the Chandler Gallery in Cambridge, MA, the Orton-Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY, the Amanda Smith Gallery in Johnson City, Texas, South X Southeast Photo Gallery in Molena Georgia and the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA.  She has also shown work at the Soprafina Gallery in Boston, MA, the Iris B. and Gerald Cantor Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, and the Boston Public Library.  On-line presentations include:  “The Virtual Curated Shed: Projections from Pandemic in Focus” on the Social Documentary Network;  “Unexpected Cuba” in CubaSeen, Issue 03, Winter, 2020;  “The 2/22/22 Exhibition:  Pairs and Diptychs” on Lenscratch and “Highlights of NEPR” on “What Will You Remember?”

***

Leaving the baobab tree behind,
we glide through the grasses,
shivering the gilded surface of the swamp
as the setting sun pulls the mokoros home.

***

Robin Boger’s images from Cuba, Africa and Japan have been shown at the Chandler Gallery in Cambridge, MA, the Orton-Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY, the Amanda Smith Gallery in Johnson City, Texas, South X Southeast Photo Gallery in Molena Georgia and the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA.  She has also shown work at the Soprafina Gallery in Boston, MA, the Iris B. and Gerald Cantor Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, and the Boston Public Library.  On-line presentations include:  “The Virtual Curated Shed: Projections from Pandemic in Focus” on the Social Documentary Network;  “Unexpected Cuba” in CubaSeen, Issue 03, Winter, 2020;  “The 2/22/22 Exhibition:  Pairs and Diptychs” on Lenscratch and “Highlights of NEPR” on “What Will You Remember?”

***

You have lived a life of caring,
sowing comfort and cultivating possibilities
as a plough furrows land, preparing it for seed.
There are seasons given for growth,
but no limit on seasons for love.

***

Robin Boger’s images from Cuba, Africa and Japan have been shown at the Chandler Gallery in Cambridge, MA, the Orton-Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY, the Amanda Smith Gallery in Johnson City, Texas, South X Southeast Photo Gallery in Molena Georgia and the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA.  She has also shown work at the Soprafina Gallery in Boston, MA, the Iris B. and Gerald Cantor Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, and the Boston Public Library.  On-line presentations include:  “The Virtual Curated Shed: Projections from Pandemic in Focus” on the Social Documentary Network;  “Unexpected Cuba” in CubaSeen, Issue 03, Winter, 2020;  “The 2/22/22 Exhibition:  Pairs and Diptychs” on Lenscratch and “Highlights of NEPR” on “What Will You Remember?”

so I’m in bed reading a news article
about problems with the supply chain —
why Americans have to suffer
inconvenient waits for gaming
consoles, Cheerios and hot tub parts.
Something about shipping
containers and coronavirus.
No end in sight.
I might deliver this baby in a birthing center.
Not because of supply issues but because hospitals
cost so much: because even though it’s not in the headlines
what’s considered good health insurance still asks
Americans to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege
of having a child under supervision of medical care.
At the birth center, they don’t offer anesthetics.
Very un-American. My mother balks.
This isn’t about being a hero.
I agree, but with anger.
My acupuncturist friend asks if I take
medication for headaches. We’re trying to determine
my tolerance for pain.
I tell her I don’t get headaches but prefer to feel
my period cramps when they’re bad.
The internet says I should plunge my hand
into a bucket of ice water and see how long I can last
without taking it out.
This sounds like a torture
I don’t need to make mine.
In the mail, black bands arrive:
strips of thick fabric with Velcro to support
my belly, ease what the midwife calls round
ligament pain—pressure on my unsettled
pelvic parts. I still can’t give a great
definition of the cervix.
A person who delivers in a birthing center
should probably know more about the cervix.
The belly band doesn’t help.
A friend asks if I’m reading a ton
about childbirth and I tell her not really,
I’m instead trying to finish Jonathan Franzen’s new novel
not because it’s that good and in spite of feeling some shame
around reading the quasi-cancelled guy but because there’s something
comforting in those broken family stories that are far enough
from mine to provide pleasant diversion.
I don’t want an epidural because I want to feel the baby
transition out of me. I want to numb myself
from only certain kinds of boredom and pain.

***

Elizabeth Tannen is a writer, organizer and educator based in Minneapolis. Her poems and essays have appeared in a range of publications including Copper Nickel, Front Porch, PANK, Southern Humanities Review, the Rumpus, Salon and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of New Mexico and has been awarded several residencies including from Kimmel Harding Nelson and the Wurlitzer Foundation. Her manuscript, Notes on Distance, was one of five finalists for Milkweed’s Lindquist and Vennum prize in 2018.

For the fish washed up to shore far behind
the trawl lines, scales gone dry & gills stiffened

by coastal winds, not for them rotting but for gulls
arrived too late, shooed away as children

free their piled dreams like sand buckets, this poem
is theirs. Not the maggot hand clinging

behind the skull’s exposed eye socket, or the jelly
displaced by drift into the sun’s aberrant reflection

but to the beach lice the signs once warned of, the swell
that makes the still-intact tail appear to move

breath back to sea, not the crested waves’
break full of discarded shell but its weight,

the time it spends empty, to which I give
this ode. To all that is hollow or hollows fill

arriving the color of tide matching the low cloud
that brims this cavity, empty except where a storm

should be, all the space constituting what worth this is for.

***

A graduate of Colorado State U’s MFA program, Jerrod E. Bohn is the author of three full-length poetry books, Animal Histories (2017), PULP: A Manifesto (2018), and Ventric(L)e (forthcoming 2023) all from Unsolicited Press. His poetry and nonfiction has appeared in numerous literary journals and other publications. Bohn currently lives in Seattle where he is a college professor and part time writer for Bandbox Vinyl Record Club. Additionally, he runs Gravel: A Reading Series at a local brewery and enjoys cooking and being outdoors.

The ones we loved who drowned
we called uncle. They ate black bread
in their lifetimes but never in ours.
They woke up early, ground their good
legs into brass, educated their children
in one bicycle accident after another.
Moshe had a twitch in his left eye,
the eye that was as blue as the other
stayed brown. He would ask one eye
to sing to the other. Only in bed.
Only when sketching his sheer curtains
blown haywire by the wind. His one
window facing south from Moscow.

***

Jordan Stempleman is the author of eight collections of poetry including Wallop and No, Not
Today (Magic Helicopter Press). He is an editor for The Continental Review and Windfall Room, serves as
the faculty editor for Sprung Formal, and runs A Common Sense Reading Series.

The future
has no money

but it does have
our ideas

about where the money
should go.

Try flipping off the light
right after falling

asleep in that chair.
Do you feel less

cramped
or like your tongue

has swollen
around your little

sudden heart?
What would you pay

to stay in the dark
to say

to that heart
pay anything

when you’re told
cough up

the cash for feeling
this remarkably

still
still enough

to be picked up
or put down?

***

Jordan Stempleman is the author of eight collections of poetry including Wallop and No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter Press). He is an editor for The Continental Review and Windfall Room, serves as the faculty editor for Sprung Formal, and runs A Common Sense Reading Series.

1.

praise be to god, to nought, to nay*1

the Ni in nihilo n’ested within Neest*2
praise be the emptiness 
the colorless light and the naked vagrant

we whisper into any unknown
name new frontiers
serenade coastlines for blessing
            our mecca is roadkill
                        a coup de grace

praise be the prophecy of death: the interim
            a self in a nafas*3
            a breath in a naffs*4
            breath habbs*5 in lungs

praise be the shackles of the body, 
            the kept breath
            the subdued self

praise be the god of subsets
            the force (Jabbr*6)
            in Al-Gebra*7
            to rule: 
            ticker-taped ruler

praise be the ego for lighting the path to praise

praise be the prophet, the prophets.

praise be to all the emphatically human

2.

we sank into the floor
caressed by the music
some eat and call it beautiful
when I say my hunger is ancient
its not for poetic effect
a century defined with wars
we’ve sold madness for bullets
but when I say I am hurting
you’re caressed by its resonance with the natural
sink deeper into comfort

it is frequent

a fattening

it is a soothing

frequency

3.

show me the patriot
in your mind palace
its shape and insignia
a beard
or absence of
of course I’m interested
in hearing about the downfall
plaque by plaque
the martyrs relent
give way to shops
in that part of town

4.

IF I CAN’T BE THE CURE
I MIGHT AS WELL BE THE DISEASE
slouching towards a terminal speaker
to touch with words that hunger
and it is in that impulse to share bodily warmth
that we are colonized at the membrane
a banquet to celebrate the fall of capital
another to celebrate the fall of banquets
            a body suspended
            a body carried
            a body bloodied
waters muddied but
no water to drink
what if before speaking
we settled the unspoken
the working
the struggling
the floating
suspended

between life and death

5.

When they say they don’t like big words,

they mean they don’t like poverty

Notes

1. in Farsi: (نی)a Persian wind instrument, a reference to the beginning of Rumi’s Mathnavi, one of the only works produced in the Islamic world that does not begin with the name of Allah

2. in Farsi (نیست) meaning nothingness

3. in Farsi (نفس) meaning breath

4. in Farsi (نفس) meaning the self, a homonym for *3 in Farsi

5. in Farsi (حبس) meaning to restrict, here meaning “to hold the breath”, used for its rhyming potential with Nafs

6. in Farsi and Arabic (جبر) meaning “Force”

7. Algebra, the mathematical discipline takes its name from the Arabic word “Jabbr”

8. referring to Mansur Hallaj, the Sufi Mystic who said “انا الحق” (Ana’l Haqq) or “I am the truth” which his environment took as a proclamation of divinity and therefore became the reason for his execution.

***

Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (They/Them) is a queer, Iranian born, Toronto-based Poet, Writer and Translator. They were shortlisted for the 2021 Austin Clarke poetry prize, they are the winner of the 2021 Vallum Poetry Prize and the author of three poetry chapbooks and two translated poetry chapbooks. Their debut poetry collection “Me, You, Then Snow” is out with Gordon Hill Press. Their second book “WJD” is forthcoming in a double volume with the translation of Saeed Tavanaee’s “The OceanDweller” from Gordon Hill Press fall 2022. Their collaborative poetry manuscript with poet Klara Du Plessis is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press Fall 2023.

My whole life I have pretended
I was smart enough.

I am not that smart. It’s something with how my head works.
It’s like there is this cloud in my brain that does not let me understand complex thoughts.

Systematic thoughts. That’s why I failed Spanish in 6th grade.
That’s why when I lived in Italy, I could fake the accent great

but couldn’t figure out, for the life of me, how to conjugate verbs.
Mi dispiache.

I can balance a check book, easy. Just addition and subtraction. But percentages. Forgetaboutit. Till this day I can’t fathom how the bookies do in Vegas what the bookies do in Vegas.

What I did understand, early on, was how to pass.
How to pass smart.

And the people who know me know that I am not
and I have just gotten in touch with this myself.

How absolutely dumb I am. Or, how vapid I feel when I am at a dinner party
while all my dinner party friends talk about the geopolitical situation in Ghana

and how it will affect shipping routes across the Pacific
which will, in turn, have an impact on not just U.S. inflation

but the global economy.
Somehow, these friends make links to climate change and the next presidential election

and I sit there like, Saddle up motherfuckers, can’t we just hold hands and hug.
That’s what I am smart at. Holding hands and hugging.

This does not bring me fame or maybe it brings me a certain kind of
holding hands and hugging fame but, honestly, I am done with that.

I want to write a book about cultural appropriation like Paisley Rekdal’s brilliant
Appropriate A Provocation, but again, forgetaboutit.

I could never make sentences like her sentences.
She references Homer and Meredith and A Tribe Called Quest and Ovid and Ted Hughes

and Paul Simon and my God it’s all so organic,
like she’s making a salad with carrots and spring mix and scallions

and a dash of Haas Avocado. It’s that kind of smart.
And I’m 56 years old and my mind is going in the other direction,

down the other side of the mountain, closer to oblivion,
and that cloud gets more cumulous and bulbous, and I want it to rain

because maybe if it does then I will be Freddie Mercury for a night,
standing in front of 500,000 people with a microphone

and we’ll all be singing Somebody To Love,
because he wrote it for everyone.

Because a long time ago he heard Maria Callas sing something operatic
and knew that he wanted to be a queen and damn

it did not matter that he had an overbite,
he knew that if he got it fixed it would mess up his voice

and that was the most brilliant thing ever,
that he didn’t get it fixed one bit.

***

Matthew Lippman’s collection 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.

Sometimes the organ does a number on my head.
It flips it upside down and makes the world flat for a second.

I like to imagine a flat earth.
You drive to San Francisco or Japan in your little electric Honda

and then you fly off into space. All those planets—Jupiter and Saturn—
that could slaughter you in an instant but are so beautiful.

The most beautiful moment of The Beatles documentary Get Back
is Billy Preston.

On his organ. On “Don’t Let Me Down.”
He’s all joy, doesn’t care about the money, lets his smile and fingers light up a planet.

When he played The Hammond, my head went cuckoo.
I’ve heard that song 5 million times and every time his part comes in

my mind goes cuckoo-berserk
and the earth is flat.

I drive in my little Honda Prius and when I get to Brooklyn, I open my window and scream,
“Here we go,”

and then we’re off into space, right off the Verrazano,
the millions and billions and trillions of gallons of sea water

cascading into space with me.
Herbie Hancock’s “Textures” is on the stereo, and everything is textures

and my mind is a disco ball.
All the stars bouncing off my rearview mirror

and it’s good the earth has people like Billy Preston,
even if it is round.

All that g-flat major into a-minor joy
that flips the spirit.

We all need our spirit flipped, every day, in hopes
that we can get back

to somewhere we’ve never been
and friend, it ain’t ever been about the money.

***

Matthew Lippman’s collection 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.