I met a woman named Nata  
with short blonde dreadlocks.  
I met her boyfriend Fyodor,  

who fell a bit in love with me.  
A little in love with both,  
I ordered ice cream  

with champanskie, wore bing cherry  
earrings that looked real enough to eat.  
I was a girl in a flute in the city  

of Petrograd, a city called Leningrad  
when I was a girl. Nata and Fed  
led me up a scaffold. We sat  

on newsprint, split block chocolate.  
The bricks of the roof read  
of families whom we starlit 

serenaded. I learned Cyrillic.  
I spelled my name. Fed imitated  
a hunched babushka. At the airport later,  

he battled a spitting officer  
on my behalf. We are happy  
to speak English, the woman said  

on my Riga layover. I had addressed her  
in Russian and knew no better.  
This world, I knew, would pass me by. 

***

Eileen G’Sell is a poet and culture critic with recent contributions to Fence, The Hopkins Review, Current Affairs, Hyperallergic, Reverse Shot, and other outlets. Her first full-length volume of poetry, Life After Rugby, was published in 2018 by Gold Wake Press, and in 2019 she was nominated for the national Rabkin Foundation award in arts journalism. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Slugs were all they could talk about
on Austrian television when the barbed
wire snapped between Hungary and Germany
and nobody noticed, including me, immersed
in baseball and Grandpa dying. Now we know
this wire was restrung, of course, a pre-meme
gleam in the eyes of extremists, for
plyers-led eighties-bred head-of-state selfies.

Last spring that film on Gorbachev quietly nudged
me to tears. Last spring I rushed through Battery Park
with no clue where to turn, of whether the movie would be
bad or good or the last one I’d see in an April.
I miss April. I miss Gorbachev. I miss rushing through
streets swarming with strangers. All we can talk about
now is how empty the hours are, how shallow each day
that pools below our eyes when we share the sun with no one.

***


Eileen G’Sell is a poet and culture critic with recent contributions to Fence, The Hopkins Review, Current Affairs, Hyperallergic, Reverse Shot, and other outlets. Her first full-length volume of poetry, Life After Rugby, was published in 2018 by Gold Wake Press, and in 2019 she was nominated for the national Rabkin Foundation award in arts journalism. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

At the edge of apricot season, bellies flailing.
The people starve for tangy fruit at its peak
all dolled up for the corner store, swept clean.
You send out a mayday, with no minute
at wrist to wonder the receiver. The
whole town’s undone. Stripped of that
time of year. Gone is the good condition.
Few are the souls basking in glory. But you
spring the ripest down the road without
a trace, finger-licking.

***

Janelle Solviletti lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Horn Pond Review, The Feathertale Review and The Somerville Lyrical. Janelle is the author of two self-published poetry collections, Euphony (2021) and The Cameo (2020). For more, visit: https://www.janellesolviletti.com 

INFRACTION
Night keeps falling in the epic. Rushes clutter a cutting room floor. Alone and lost on
terra pharma, under the hex of a murder ballad deep within the trees: a sexy black
car from the interwar years, polished and slightly skew-whiff in a ditch. What is it
doing there. What am I.

ESCALATE
A saw blade off in the distance keens the circular, kerf cut anthem of our time. Groin,
gluteal, hamstring pull, a headache behind the eyes. Police in flatlock seam
formation, the future encoded as debt (read: doubt). Mostly I can’t see the fir trees
for the forest. Which is on fire.

POLAR STRATOSPHERIC
Infomercial weather all day: rattletrap rain through the downspouts, magnolias
thrawn by a hurricane-warning wind. My daughter’s eyes are ivory black, a dataflow
of nacreous clouds that sklent the ultra-sky. I switch on a light at the back of my
mind. The light is darkroom red.

THE ESCAPEMENT
Dusksmoke along the electrified field: a scalable landscape, in the wuxia ruins, Laffy
Taffy daffodils like a triggered Claymore mine. Sun-kissed and sin-cussed, I walk
around the neighborhood, in the game-theory atmosphere, a six-pack left on
someone’s off-world porch.

LULLABYSS
Flash grenades and facial rec tech, eerie aftermaths, eldritch hymn of sirens on the
heavens, razor-burned. Ilium: a fleet of morgue trucks parked out back. The descent
of carmine darkness brings a sorrow from far away, and absences that will not show
themselves. Or go, or stay.

À LA ANTANANARIVO
The snow drapes a swath of organza over the glade. Trapped emissions, the
gelignite sun—a Mandelbrot set in the beast coast sky—a crow on the deck with a
teleprompter look. I’m a taxi that cuts its lights and motor, when rush hour stalls
uphill, or hurries down. To save on petrol.

MATINEE
Given that the horizon has been removed, I’m no longer bodied here, nor now, in
proximities of wherev, whenev, of glassine frost on the sill. Halfway down the
hallway wall, diaphanous plants are dancing within a fidgety, trapezoidal frontier: a
silent film screened by the sun.

THE ILIAD
I picture the low-flying choppers as Ares, who crashes to earth in book XXI. Struck
with a rock by Athena, his body spans seven acres, to give you a sense of scale. In
the post-solar, metallic wald, where the era is now, but not, the air above the hospital
glows like a toxic chemical spill.

***

Andrew Zawacki is the author of five poetry books: Unsun : f/11 (Coach House,
2019), Videotape (Counterpath, 2013), Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman
House, 2009), Anabranch (Wesleyan, 2004), and By Reason of Breakings
(Georgia, 2002). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New
Republic, The Nation, and other international journals, as well as the anthologies
The Eloquent Poem, Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century,
Walt Whitman hom(m)age, The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, and
Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. In addition, he has
published four books in France. His translation of Sébastien Smirou, My Lorenzo,
received a French Voices Grant, and his translation of Smirou’s See About
earned an NEA Translation Fellowship and a fellowship from the Centre National
du Livre. A former fellow of the Slovenian Writers’ Association, he edited
Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 and edited and co-translated Aleš
Debeljak’s Without Anesthesia: New & Selected Poems. Coeditor of the
international journal Verse from 1995 through 2019, he coedited The Verse Book
of Interviews as well as Gustaf Sobin’s collected poems. A 2016 Howard
Foundation Fellow in Poetry, he is Distinguished Research Professor of English
at the University of Georgia.

Like moonlight, like sunset, these night terrors are unlike anything our songwriters say. Like black-and-white Italian films, no one can agree on what they just saw, but arguing about what they mean is a big part of why we have movies and Italy and points of view. When it is warm, night up and sprouts the bodies of everyone’s lost relatives, like the Alps. Early in the morning, when cop cars and utility trucks are parked driver’s window to driver’s window like old couples in hospice, these curses earworm their way into your breast, so that you wake up to your oldest child neither sitting nor standing, like a man under fire, like the audience fleeing a performance, mouth and eyes wide, sound asleep, finger pointing directly into your truth.

***

Benjamin Paloff‘s books include the poetry collections And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011), both from Carnegie Mellon. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Conduit, New American Writing, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and others. Twice a fellow of the NEA, he is associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Michigan.

There was a stillness in the woods, though not the daily stillness of the woods. They’re rarely still. The wind moves the leaves. There are birds and birders moving, too. In woods I hear the whispering people speak of. Old scripts of parting pretend that love is meant for passing on. In woods I, too, am sometimes passing too quickly toward a point that is beside the point of being in the woods. Bright antimatter, the way out. But within, this time, there were invisible circumferences on the ground, which is hardly ever truly still. Get down close and it’s all mites and grubs and mayhem. In the woods, within this one time, the stillness smelled like the cold coming off my father’s tough-guy leather jacket when I was still little and he still came home, cold that wanted to change but couldn’t on its own. Most mornings, the stillness in the woods listens nervously to the conspiracies of voles, the bats sighing in their flat modernist houses. There are other stillnesses like mint, like Teflon, you cannot get rid of, stillnesses for sale in the hotel lobby that do not pretend to get you but still fit neatly over any average-sized ear. But in the woods I found a stillness upon and over and somehow through the earth. We felt our presence echo through the trees. We called out to one another in our warmest indoor voice.

***

Benjamin Paloff‘s books include the poetry collections And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011), both from Carnegie Mellon. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Conduit, New American Writing, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and others. Twice a fellow of the NEA, he is associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Michigan.

(Amateur Astronomy 5)

I sought you in the Sea of Shadows, I looked for you on the Lake of Tears. Many a crater I crossed named for a body of water with neither body nor water to be found. I followed the whorl as if patterns always mark the reasonable path. The decedents marching slowly along the stacks reminded me that the exile passes through hell before finally seeing the stars, so I peered into the coal sack, which was like staring into night, and the cat’s eye, which was like staring into night. I peeled back the veil and called to the ghost, I spent hours watching the engraved hourglass. I tracked the arc of Suprematism across the erstwhile heavens, and the refractions offered little relief. Next time, Dante, just look up. If art is born of pain, leave me artless with the butterfly and the tarantula, with their unreliable reflections in the pond, the soup, the drink. I discovered nothing but the faith that behind each nothing there’s a light, a wave, a burst making its way in silent joy across creation, with the patience of catastrophe. I know it is coming with an important message just for me.

***

Benjamin Paloff‘s books include the poetry collections And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011), both from Carnegie Mellon. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Conduit, New American Writing, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and others. Twice a fellow of the NEA, he is associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Michigan.

Everything about this book is extra-ordinary.  From creation to publication, which, in many senses is a frozen moment in an ongoing conversation. It is critical to understanding this work that both artists are equally acknowledged and considered, even as they express their responses to the world and each other in the different languages of words and paint. 

The two artists were friends before they collaborated, so had a sense of each other before they began. Spurred by the pandemic, Streeby asked Haight to respond to some poems from his unpublished manuscript that was still “open to changes.” Within the manuscript were a series of poems called “Frameworks.” Haight proposed responding with “Alcoholic Crepuscles” (both artists have battled addiction) in watercolor, tempera, and gouache.  Rather than stop at that standard point of ekphrasis, the dialogue continued.  Streeby let Haight’s work “hold the narrative line” and selected or wrote new poems to send back to Haight. Haight, in turn, chose “details” from his paintings.  Streeby wrote his own “details” to add to the conversation. 

In this  captured moment of the conversation, Streeby opens with a poem; Haight closes with a painting.  As the introduction clarifies: “At each exchange, there is an intersection, a tension, a rupture between our languages and our memories, our own stylized selves expressed through our languages that results in new islands, new continents of awareness.”

It is important to ‘experience’ this book, not just read it, both as an artifact of the ongoing conversation and as a combined work of art in two languages.  This complex layering reveals itself through the work. 

Streeby opens with “Framework: A Vessel, Notes on a Grecian Urn”: “We should stay how it starts, shouldn’t we?” He continues by referencing the language of painting: “Wet clay and water, finger-formed—should say it’s spun, formed from a controlled force, built over a locus.”  The conversation begins within the poem, within the opening part of the body of work.  Readers have seen Haight’s paintings on the title leaf and on the page before the Table of Contents, but this poem is the true opening of the work.  When readers turn the page, the first painting within the work is revealed as two female figures, one with a face, one without, one standing facing the viewer, the other in a broken-legged arabesque, head turned to the viewer, but without features.  Pink, yellow, and yellow-green predominate.  The conversation has begun, but readers must explore to discover what this conversation means to each.  Readers have, after all, joined the conversation forming that triangular connection among creators, the work, and readers.  The connection unique to each reader.

Some poems appear as prose poems, but the colon is used almost like a line break, echoing the title Tension : Rupture, where the colon is presented with a space on either side.  Sometimes, the poems are in paragraphs, sometimes a solid block.  Sometimes, a poem is accompanied by a detail, as in “Concerning the Fox, Liber Monstrorum,” followed by “Detail: Liber Monstrorum,” a poem in couplet form.  “Detail: Heliotrope” is physically wide open, words and short phrases almost scattered on the page with extensive white space. On closer inspection, there is a specific structure to the poem where indention and the trail of words and phrases down the page leads readers to correlate words and spaces, to understand spaces as words in themselves.

One of the more fascinating poems is “Letter from a New City to an Old Friend” (sic).  Some words and phrases are also presented with strikethrough lines.  Readers are given two versions at the same time: a work in progress, reflecting the nature of this evolving dialogue between the artists.  Readers can read all the words, including strikethroughs, as the earlier version of the poem followed by reading the poem without the strikethroughs.  The last line of the poem gives the time span for the versions: NoV16, 2009– 6.1.2019    a ten years now.

The conversation, which began at the start of the pandemic, has not been in progress that long, but some of the work spans a longer time.

The content of the written text is also wide-ranging.  Addiction is common to both artists and embedded in the work, but there is much more.  The first title “Framework: A Vessel, Notes on a Grecian Urn,” references Keats and the romantic tradition of ekphrasis.  The “Notes” at the end of the work explicate other references—to Lorca, Jericho Brown, and others, in the tradition of poets. T. S. Eliot comes to mind.

Streeby dives deeply into individual words and their meanings and implications.  In “Detail: λ ε γ ω,” for example, he writes “Reason grows from the root of legos, / And if we can’t say a thing, logos can’t be there:” This is followed by a series of lines of X and Y in upper and lower case. He concludes: “So breath’s form’s the crux then? Everything’s there.” The importance of saying “a thing” is key to understanding conversation.  Hence the attention to individual words, their meanings, and the nuances and implications. 

Haight’s work also “says things.”  The word “crepuscule” from the Latin crepusculum means twilight but can refer to sunrise as well as sunset—sunrise, the golden hour, sunset, the blue hour. Many of Haight’s poems center on yellow and blue.  The figures are often wraith-like, reminiscent of the figures that weave above the world in the works of Marc Chagall.  But these figures, despite their ephemeral quality, are grounded, the limbs particularly large, feet and toes almost those of old people.  The painting most directly connected to addiction is the responding to “Ela” and “Detail: Garnet” on the previous page, but it appears opposite “Letter from a New City to an Old Friend.” The painting is yellow, blue, and purple and depicts drinking from a large bottle through wide, long straws.  These figures are primarily faces, one with closed eyes, one with wide eyes, a third upside down.  A succumbing, an orgy. The impossibility of stopping.

The intention is for a painting to follow a poem, but often the following painting sits opposite a different poem, making the collection more fluid as paintings flow from the previous poem into the next poem at the same time.  As the work evolves, readers are encouraged to question reality, what is said which hearkens back to “if we can’t say a thing, logos can’t be there,” limits (“I limit the infinity of the world by the variable of what calls to me from it,” from “Tonic Key: A Rose”), and language (“Language is a good example,” which follows directly from the previous quote).  In “Tonic Key: A Rose,” Streeby also writes

“Language is a conspiracy between two people, and it’s always only two,

Necessarily: the speaker and the hearer, no matter the scale; the words

hit your ear only, process in your mind only. Your space, your time.”

Readers can hear both speaker and hearer by absorbing the conversation, but readers actually see not hear them—the paintings and the words on the page.  The artists saw their creations as they passed them back and forth.  This raises the question of how much they “talked” to each other in the course of the work, i.e., if the “conspiracy” of the work also included “the speaker” and “the hearer” as well as the sight of paintings and words. 

In the last poem, “Self Portrait through the Eyes of a Photographer,” Streeby invokes a different medium. Haight grew up in Perris and Hemet, California. In the “Afterword” by Jane Ursula Harris, she writes that “These places have the shape-shifting contours of daydreams and nightmares alike, and while some are based on photographs, they are like palimpsests seen through the shimmer of memory.”

The reader learns that medium of photography underlies some of Haight’s contributions to this conversation.  Memory is a third medium, one that Haight, Streeby, and readers possess and can apply both to the creation and the understanding of the work.

Tension : Rupture takes time to grasp and understand.  Time well spent.

***

Aline Soules’ work has appeared in such publications as the Kenyon Review, Houston Literary  Review, Poetry Midwest, and The Galway Review.  Her books include Meditation on Woman and Evening Sun: A Widow’s Journey (chapbook). She also writes book reviews which have been accepted by publications such as Tupelo Quarterly (https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/reviews/) and Heavy Feather Review (https://heavyfeatherreview.org). Find her online at http://alinesoules.com.

Your day chased a runaway dog, your neck
the yanked leash you rub. But relief spies
on itself, synapses jam their shots. It takes
foreign incursion, muster of fingers, to rip
the cord, propel the graceful fall to oblivious–
she could rub suds in your eyes, rake
fingernails down your scalp, hold your head under
water. How delicious the forgetting:
you pay her to make you
a thing in her hands.

***

Evelyn Schiele is a poet and short story writer and a retired community college marketing administrator.  Based in a northern suburb of Chicago, she has traveled extensively throughout Europe. Her poetry and fiction have been published in Willow Review.

You and I go together like the ampersand symbol and the number 7 key. Maybe that placement is why I consider ampersands lucky.

Was it Mom or was it Granny who taught me that when a street sign or telephone pole or person passes between two walking shoulder to shoulder, always say “bread and butter” as a form of reunion on the other side?

O coordinating conjunction of revolutionary parity! Joining two or more clauses of equal rank!

Perhaps I like pub trivia for its exquisite purity, an elegant realm where facts are facts, evaluated only by the metrics “right” and “wrong.”

Some things I don’t mind taking jointly: Ice cream and cake. Wait and see. Whereas I’ll take the pens and leave the pencils, take the potatoes and leave the meat.

Yesterday I decided to go for a run, and then I tripped and broke my hand. Would that I could eliminate that second and third and but I can’t. In one instant I was a person who had lived 41 years with no broken bones and the next I was struggling to stand and walk home.

Is it acceptable to begin a sentence with and? And how! Though prejudice lingers from a bygone time.

He used to be so handsome, and now…

Those personality tests like the Meyers-Briggs can be deceptively encouraging of binaries—much more either/or than and. I’m an ENFJ, but the extraversion rests on the slightest majority, hovering between 51 and 53%. Whatever kind of vert you are, I will probably like hanging out with you.

Ecosystems and continuums. And so on. And so forth.

Physicist Max Tegmark argues that time is an illusion brought on by perception, not something fundamental to the universe. “We can portray our reality as either a three-dimensional place where stuff happens over time, or as a four-dimensional place where nothing happens—and if it really is the second picture, then change really is an illusion, because there’s nothing that’s changing; it’s all just there—past, present, future.”

A poet I follow on Twitter used the bottom of her coffee mug to make a Venn diagram: Radical acceptance and compassion vs. fuck around and find out.

What Tegmark means is that “life is like a movie, and space-time is like the DVD” where “nothing about the DVD itself that is changing in any way, even though there’s all this drama unfolding in the movie.” In that sense, I am always a) about to break my hand and b) breaking my hand and c) walking around with a broken hand simultaneously. Interesting concept, but I still have to get surgery to put two pins in my finger this Wednesday.

I like being a person alone in a room and I like being in expansive company.

Little kids intuitively grasp the improv-troupe credo of Yes, and. Like if you say “We’re playing store,” they’re like “Yes, and these birch leaves are the money.”

The plot twists and turns like a surgeon’s scalpel.

***

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a founding member of Poems While You Wait, and the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s, 2017) and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (Penguin, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Atlantic, the North American Review and elsewhere, and her latest collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, is coming out from Texas Review Press in Fall 2022.  She teaches at DePaul and her next novel, From Dust to Stardust, will be published by Lake Union Press in Fall of 2023.