When Opening Day Happens Before Easter
Adam Clay
Strange how circuitous a voice can become
when it’s missing for so long—
I hear it mostly in churches, each lily bloom
not like a burning candle
but literally aflame. I felt a feeling
behind the eye, and Samantha
jokes there’s no such thing
as feelings or time,
and like always
and forever,
she’s right on all
fronts. In the mirror,
my hair looks less gray
than I remembered
from last night.
Memories try—
A single baseball pitch
on TV sinks
a hook into the heart,
an accidental fastball
so beautiful there’s
no one to tell it to.
Ode to I Don’t Know
Maggie Boyd Hare
My husband asks how I feel about sex,
says, I’ll go first, I’ve been turned on.
I’m thinking about women again.
Crepe myrtle in the middle of the street’s
slow turn to saturation in late summer.
Last night I dreamt I was in a theater with her
alone, our bodies turned to the screen and we
wouldn’t touch. I kept thinking, we could here,
in this dark, we could kiss until the lights go up.
We’re sitting on the kitchen floor.
I say, avoidant, say, Even when I touch myself,
my head separates from my body.
I’ve felt this before, I’ve felt this eternally.
Last summer a jellyfish stung me—
I’m always tuned to what might happen
beneath the surface, what’s coming for me
that I could never stop. I worry
when it’s beautiful. In the ocean,
when I touch him, the fear settles.
Bobbing three feet out in this impossible
clear green crystalline, I see my body,
and my blood goes saline, fingers curl in
fear, it’s not the waves, or the tow, the force,
it’s this small thing, the sting, the feeling
that we might have known.
When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows
Paige Lewis
what I really mean. He paints my name
across the floral bed sheet and ties the bottom corners
to my ankles. Then he paints another
for himself. We walk into town and play the shadow game,
saying Oh! I’m sorry for stepping on your
shadow! and Please be careful! My shadow is caught in the wheels
of your shopping cart. It’s all very polite.
Our shadows get dirty just like anyone’s, so we take
them to the Laundromat—the one with
the 1996 Olympics themed pinball machine—
and watch our shadows warm
against each other. We bring the shadow game home
and (this is my favorite part) when we
stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled
my husband grips his own wrist,
certain it’s my wrist, and kisses it.
Domestic Conversation While Reading the Paper on a Sunday Morning
Dave Harrity
Incredible. First, it was the moon, next it will be Mars
& then all eternity. What a human adventure.
See—a fixed point of light far away, forever & ever. We are the amen.
Don’t you want to be the amen?
All I want is to be here early enough—to see
sun still rising, the birds rehearsing their hidden dances.
I don’t want to discuss the burlesque undoing of what it means
to fly from this earth before we attempt to fix it.
You’re entitled to an opinion, but you can’t deny
their aggressive agenda is effective, if not inspiring. One doesn’t need
to agree to appreciate…
Says the man who resists even cutting the grass. You don’t
even seem to care for what’s nourished by light, for the delicacy
of starting over or learning ancient steps. Why care at all about
billionaires settling elsewhere?
Why can’t you have a little bit more faith in the process, the
hand’s invisible guidance? Like them—like me—you can have anything
you set your hands to. All you have to do is put a bill
down directly in front of you, say the market’s incantation,
& work hard, & then you will have it.
If our problems disappear, it isn’t because of a spell. & besides,
how could I believe in a thing so esoteric. Would rather
Two step three step flex them wings when I’m looking
at the yellow swells of the jonquils breaking through
on that hill. Something so…
Watch—I will show you. See this greenback? I will put it down
between us & say the words. You will see, just stay here.
No, you can see it right now—the whole world is rising, swollen
with a potential you seem to want to forget, the most
luminous invitation. See that streak cut against the bare trees, whole
fields of flowers pulling back their hoods, lifting their bright chins
the same direction?
Afterimage
Morissa Young
My first great mystery was the sun.
I wanted to understand its blinding
haze, the warm bath on the floor. I wanted
to see its freckles, magnetic and charred,
rays that dotted my skin with my own sunspots:
my jaw’s constellation, crumb on my lip,
patch on my back like a fairy circle,
summer’s dregs. I wanted to know its real,
corporeal shape. Eyes wide, unblinking,
searching for its outline until my vision
flashed bronze, ochre, mauve, coronas of blue.
I closed my eyes, pressed my fists against them,
watched colors flood the inside of my lids.
I searched for an answer but none came.
I’m Only Dancing
Chris Ketchum
At ten, I meet myself in the mirror of my sister’s vanity, squeezed into the tiny corset of her pale blue dress, Cinderella’s image printed on the breast like a brooch. My little-boy pecs puff out like cleavage. The tulle skirt brushes against my thighs, rising above the knee, billowing around my Fruit of the Looms as I prance down the staircase to the dining room where my mother lights a candle before dinner. She laughs to see me skip across the hardwood floor, turning and twirling on the ball of my socked foot—and when she does, I know I want to keep her laughing. I’m not sure why, but I speak in a higher voice, with a lisp, and she laughs harder, and as I’m preening, brushing my cheeks with the back of my hand, leaping into the air like the hippos in Fantasia, I notice the tears—how they run down the corner of her nose, wetting her upper lip. I don’t know why she’s crying—maybe I’m really that funny. So I keep dancing.
Landscape of the Video Game
Mario Chard
Before the poster in the firstborn’s former room
(two warplanes circling in a frozen doom
that never touched),
unmoved though the firstborn
grew,
unclaimed trophy left to scorn
the nextborn’s game,
Landscape,
before I drove
I dreamed of finding you.
Before I found the grove
of planted trees up Tapper’s Loop where I could stop
my first car in the shade,
before the night a cop
flashed his light there to catch the bodies in his beam
but let me dress,
I already learned to deem
the next stage earned by motion or its permanence
inside your screen;
already traded innocence
for pixelated speed,
the predetermined bet,
the race and track restored,
all my lives reset.
I call them back to me —
Maggie Smith
flimsy selves of the past,
some vellum-thin, clearly
unfinished. Not fleshed out,
not fully—only children
really, stopped in time, still
tottering about in their
mother’s high heels,
meaning mine?
I didn’t know them,
their little plots forgotten
just as they began
to rise. I didn’t know
what any of them,
any of us, would become
in the end, which is not yet
where we are.
I call them back.
I’m ready, I tell them.
I think I know now
where we’re going, all of us,
together. I think I know
where the story is going.
Come back, come back,
I can finish it.
To Write a Poem About a River
Michael Bazzett
use tadpoles for commas
maybe the wake of a muskrat
for an em-dashlet it steadily
flow like ribboning
weedslet your mind fall open like water
-lilies flaring white
tongueslet it mellow back to a time
when your body fed
off the sunfeel your spine grow long
as your belly slides
the silken mudfill an ink
-well with dark water
carve a fountain
pen from hollow rushlet roots
split the sodden
leather of your soles
let cattails
burst and coast the wind
let your delicately veined
flesh become flesh
delicately veined
with lightlet water rise and fatten
into nectar
through your stem
drink the rainhold your mouth
up to the skyand drink the rain—