The Archaeoetymologist Recovers Bliss from the Riverbed

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.

Annunciation

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.

It’s good we’re characters in a highly implausible children’s book or we’d be goners

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. 

Regarding the Feeling of “Having Come through Some Things”

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.

A Question of Months

    Every season has its simple vision     It’s a woodpecker

when the head moves     Pears ripen in dishwasher steam

  The fence on the swampy part falls you can walk on it

Broken tail light painted red     Roof you can jump from

    Tape painted over     To treat exclusively the incurable

  This opens the mouth from inside

*

    I outlived memoir     It’s like angels’ obsession with flight

It’s all flight to angels     Hit the roots against the shed

  and that was that     Onion grass and ice in the river

it also is     I meditate when nothing else will do

    Been meditating more     Petals mistaken for rocks falling

  I heard the falling sound and ran and turned

*

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.

Analog

Words for the various levels of hell.
Words for the forest, the trails worn against it.
To name such places was to name limbo,
the way shot through with longing and starlight.
Each journey begins with loss
though when young we were taught to call it setting.
Then, to list it with other devices.
To touch it and put it down when we’re done.
On the floor, a mess of needles and soil.
Under the moss, rocks and water.
In the corners our forms moved
against each other, if movement was right
for the chosen word.
It’s important to write the ending first.
Not that you met someone else
but that frost is an alternate ending for night.
They called it the end but this was a circle.
Wasn’t the beginning a forest?
Wasn’t it dark?
In the underbrush branches shuddered.
Birds called how they do
when animals move through the distance below them.

*

Michael Goodfellow is the author of the poetry collections Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography (2022) and Folklore of Lunenburg County (2024), both published by Gaspereau Press. His poems have appeared in the Literary Review of Canada, The Dalhousie Review, The Cortland Review, Reliquiae and elsewhere. He lives in Nova Scotia.

Synthetic Girl

Some edible heiress, lapsing as hot
wax, her lavender bones
spooning with glacial, inconsiderate drape:
encased, transparent, opaque, and primmed.
Yet the I slithers inside the skeletal drift,
imagining fresh, glowing aspirations
like the pricking wound of embarrassment:
ah, beauty dissimilar, slinky in dissent,
a revoked invitation. She is far and unfair,
a petulance enviable for its mobbish acquiescence.
Ghost, Euridice, what of his singing rocks
assembling the staircase to the basement?
I’ve heard of them, but did you?

*

Annie Goold is from a small farm in rural Illinois. She graduated from Cornell University in 2017 with an MFA in poetry. She is currently pursuing an MS in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Eastern Illinois University. She lives and writes in Champaign, Illinois.

Uterus Revolt

“[Women] already make all the people […] You make all the humans. That’s a big fucking deal.”
Joe Rogan, Strange Times Netflix Special

Year one would be mostly medical:
midwives, doctors, hospitals, NICUs.

The diaper industry would take a hit.
All uteruses in quiet agreement.

The second fallout: downsizing daycare.
The silent shockwave of kindergarten.

1.5 million kindergarten teachers in the US
set up to enjoy a solid extended vacation.

Let’s set the record straight:
there is no miracle rib.

Babies grow in utero
and burst out of vaginas.

What happens when the government can no longer
procure babies from female bodies?

An IRB would frown upon growing
Homo sapiens in petri dishes.

Historically, power belongs to the oppressor.
Religion: a primer in female suppression.

Maybe, like Mary, we should all aspire
to parthenogenesis. Virgin birth.

No earthly penis is worthy of uterine holiness.
The sacrosanct womb holds no place for patriarchy.

*

Angel James is an easily distracted creative person from a sleepy, rural river town in Central Pennsylvania. She earned her Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in English and a graduate certificate in Institutional Research and Assessment. Angel’s first book of poetry, Becoming Friends With Chaos, a collection of works inspired by the life and music of Bob Dylan, was released in 2022. You can learn more about her at angeljamescreates.com. 

Pantocrator

You can look God straight in the eye
It’s not fun

but don’t flatter yourself, it’s not a challenge. It’s outside of what is restricted
It’s outside of what is forbidden to you. And it’s outside of all that hates you

You bring your slack jaw to it

The Eucharist was insisted upon
Christ and man provoke each other now

(Christ the provocateur)
(Emily the provocateur)

That is the Christ-Man’s perpetual
motion machine

And I haven’t even decided yet
I’m just looking. I’m trying to think

Christ Pantocrator looked at me from the Eucharist
Yet I willed it

But we knew each other. And there was a stress on nothing. Which I resent
And I had to carry that home with me

I have inherited a pallor, a gait, a watchful eye
Not a brilliant eye

*

Emily Tristan Jones was raised in the subarctic and prairies. Her poems have been in Harvard Review, Denver Quarterly, Dalhousie Review, and several other journals. Her first book of poetry, Buttercup, will be published by Verge Books (Chicago, 2024). She is an alumna of the University of Chicago, Banff Centre, and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She lives in Montreal where she edits Columba. 

The Feeling Again

Foxes run borders
of vision. Draping
moss and calling
birds—it was long
before I felt
the cold depress
my dress & through thread
paired ivories. What it was
I was thinking I hadn’t
said, the feeling
again come over
me. Dreams of
children every night, looking
like you we
sang the Kyrie & luciferous
corners echoed
woozy. All our prayers
to a god unearthed.
A god who is & is & is.
Nothing more.

*

J.J. Starr-McClain is a poet and writer in Springfield, Massachusetts. She attended the New York University creative writing program and has received support from Wesleyan University and the Community of Writers. Her work can also be found in The Common, Cosmonauts Ave, Juked, The Journal, and elsewhere.