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.

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