of whiteness and the horn of plenty, if it is even a horn; if there is such a thing if destruction is ceaseless; if my son’s hand reaches for a cotton blanket or a cat’s tail, if we have our eyes on him, if I describe his hand as pillowy; if the world is a tower of breakable plates for the white son, if he is unaware of the supernatural- seeming inventions that sustain white hunger; if Hades has its own horn made of ivory for drinking; if hunger tightens the guts of others; if it is described as inevitable or accidental; if the description is written by the same hunger; if he is just a boy asking about justice at the mall; if his father and I cannot help but love his locomotive of curiosity, its erratic perpetuity, shark, shots, Mars, if we wonder how it will end; if zoo doctor, if astronomer, if madman; if we speak of the white shark, if they are nearly missing, if the bleaching of coral; if the four of us trudge upstairs at bedtime single file making train sounds are we acting as a tribe; if we fear the world; if four feels a tribe; if our son assigns himself the role of conductor; if his sister laughs, cheek against my shoulder; if I carry her body carefully like her body were glass, a white object; if tired from school, my son dreams of cities lit up and falling, fireflies collapsing, bees and honey; if at school he traces letters with happy concentration; if, using a push pin to punch out the shapes of continents he asks his teacher why he cannot punch out the ocean, why just continents, why can’t he pin-punch the ocean; if at school he pours water from a red pitcher into a bowl, spills some, threads yarn through a card; if twice yearly there is the interruption of a lockdown drill, the crackling loudspeaker, if his teacher asks anyone who is afraid to raise their hand, if she says This is for the wild animal who may at any moment enter
Copyright © 2018 Alison Powell. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Fall-Winter 2017.
Ten planes exhaled contrails, painting someone’s property lines across a sky we thought was ours. The sun surfaced, and a checkerboard shadow carved the city into hundredths before the lattice loosened and masked itself as clouds. Now we walk divided, with memory imposed upon the moment, rays wandering a graph of absent shadow, hoping to sidestep felony as we move through these unknowable territories.
Copyright © 2018 Art Zilleruelo. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Fall-Winter 2017.
low red door I enter in
the desert slaked by rain
in this a kind of format
an interstice a splice
between the sad time
and the next sad time
there was a voice that led me waste yourself
to bone gouge a barren canyon in your eye
among the shattered columns
of white astonished salt
the quenchless white horizon
above the starving-ground
I stoop to enter doorframe
weathered marked with blood
within a kind of corridor
a passageway a shunt
to lead me toward
a broken alibi
*
(what watches from the margin
your belly-knot an oval
I the zero infant
zone of wish
derivative already
compounding I accrue
in insequential snippets
accumulate your mother’s
hated face I helical
and writhing you eager
to forget the weeks
of tattered weather
what the snow gathered up in its hands—
*
according to a template compounding
I accrue
bit-torrent cryptographic hash
#humandownload #mydomain
infernal code transcription
infernal code transpose
error there is error
no mistake
*
inside the perfect ferment
of my encircled dark
I am a fern unfurling to myself
the mallet of a fist an eye
mere furrow in the fine down of my face
I am a pure acoustic ear a larva or a snail
perhaps I am a seahorse kicking
with my body toward the light—
I am all pulse and membrane
I do not know I am
tethered to the human to the body
its intent I do not know
my immanent address among the crooked objects
the dresser and the mirror
the struggle of the narrative the strangle
of the name and who am I
to monster forth from embryonic pool
that you will make
but will not mother me)
*
inside the arid cavern a woman
carved from salt her face a pox
of crystal her torso, twisted
gyrates toward the door I touch her
with my ragged hands I lick
her unclean skin remove
the single votive from my bag
I crouch to strike the matchhead
set the flame to juniper and rue
far off, a drop of water perspires
through the rock my singular
petition Sister
may I never bear
*
(what watches from the margin:
compounding I amass
relentless in the doublecloth
of night I thread
my vessels wind
my bones in this mitosis
I inspool myself
as outside on lattice the slipstich
of wisteria twines from left
to right its hook and I
incessant a day’s amalgamed blossom
we burgeon we exceed—)
*
את אלהים ברא בראשית את אלהים ברא בראשית
Bereshit Bara Elohim et Bereshit Bara Elohim et
& God was a spirit hovering over the face of the waters
& God was a spirit moving over the face of the waters
& She created alphabets & flung them flaming through the Void
& breathed them into every living thing
*
(I spread like damp through drywall
unsheathe my cloudy eye
my muscular intent
the big reveal
I force my frame through crevices
wrenching toward the light
in all my blunt & terrifying need—
*
there was a voice that led me the child
makes herself if this is so
what is it she unmakes the threads inside me
churn & snap my body turning
inward on itself how many ways
to flay it how many ways
to starve that aleph
flaming signature gone silent in my face
comprised no script that either of us knew
*
emerging through the corridor
the desert slaked by rain
between the sad time
and the next sad time
among the quenchless columns
of white astonished salt
the shattered white horizon
above the starving ground
I touch the weathered doorframe
marked with dirt and blood
in this a kind of format
an interstice a splice
I hoist my heavy pack
I make my way
Copyright © 2018 Alix Anne Shaw. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Fall-Winter 2017.
Sexy admires a good perforation: the pickle jar’s shrink-wrap that snaps open at the designated seam, the salt cracker’s occasional miracle of the crumbless break. The world is held together with such commitments, with agreements that build their undoing into their architecture. Indeed, this world cleaves. He looks at the outdated map on his wall, then at the lovers on TV. Some science says atoms never touch. Yet here they are, he thinks, two as an image of completeness. The actors, their bodies, right there in the slack of that sagging sofa. Their primetime lives sewn together by thin threads of breath beginning to fray in the flickering blue light.
Copyright © 2018 Douglas S. Jones. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Fall-Winter 2017.
Murietta says, "I want to show you the best part of being dead."
If ever desire was unconstrained....
No blanket. In their dirtiest clothes they lie supine in the dry foxtails
a mile below the Tehachapi wind farm—distant propellers whirl. From the trunk
she pulls a gallon ziplock of rotten cabbage and shrimp tails, XXX
scrawled in silver calligraphy across the bulge. When Murietta pours
the black bait to the dirt around them, dust. Scavenger weather:
stench and their stillness brings the turkey vultures circling in two by two,
gliding in non-concentrics like a slab of dough bolted lazily to the sky.
Here, amongst the homemade rank and at the end of a feathered gyre, their hands
fill each other. Fingers weave in the dirt, and they are ravenous with a cautious hunger.
Like anyone, they have each desired to be devoured.
Copyright © 2018 Douglas S. Jones. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Fall-Winter 2017.
How to love like water loves
when it’s impossible to even taste
all the ghostly sediments
each time you take a sip
Impossible to savor
the salt in your blood
the light and island shorelines
in each living cell
When even the plainest mouthful
tastes more of you than you of it
Sweetest of absences
that frees in wave after wave
debris of thought like the dead,
the drowned, the vanished, and yet
sails your lips
on a voyage toward another’s, plying
all luck and regret
Worship, splash, guzzle, or forget
It clears any difference
Stone washer and mountain dissolver
that will
outlive us, even the memory of
all any eyes touched
Wasp and cactus in a desert
Comet through outer space
Sleep among all the cloud-shepherds’ children
A love so perpetually current
it doesn’t care that you love
without even knowing you love
what you couldn’t survive
three days without
How to love like that: wild
dream-sparkler and meticulous architect
of every snowflake
Wise, ebullient, and generous
as the rain
Deepest of miracles
for a time
borrowing and replenishing
a self
overflowing with fate
From Mitochondrial Night (Coffee House Press, 2019). Copyright © 2019 Ed Bok Lee. Used with permission of the author and Coffee House Press. This poem originally appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Fall-Winter 2017.
translated by Lucian Mattison
Try to find a day for yourself on which you can
iron shirts, wash what can be washed, buy
a new pair of shoes. And this way you’ll arrive at the conclusion
that this type of day is a screen covering your nightstand’s lamp.
The light bulb says Camden Town, 1977, leather jackets,
and you see yourself kicking trash bags because London burns
inside like Trotsky in Coyoacán: the sound of
the metal stock pots against wood, this night and those to come in
gas, water cannons, skeleton keys, black boots descending
from buses, the city in a state of martial law, neck of a bottle
shattering against pavement.
Suddenly, the lights go out and on a river the king-
fisher changes its course: it homes in on the invasive,
sleek salmon.
Martín Pescador
Trata de buscar un día solo para ti en el que puedas
planchar camisas, lavar lo que se pueda lavar, comprarte un
nuevo par de zapatillas. Y así llegarás a la conclusión de
que ese día es una pantalla sobre la lámpara de tu velador.
La ampolleta dice Camden Town 1977, chaquetas de cuero
y te ves pateando bolsas de basura, porque Londres arde
por dentro como Trotsky en Coyoacán: el ruido de las
cacerolas contra la madera, esta noche y las que vienen en
gas, lanza aguas, ganzúas, botas negras bajando de los
buses, la ciudad en estado de sitio, el cuello de una botella
estrellándose contra el pavimento.
Repentinamente se corta la luz y en un río el Martín
Pescador cambia de objetivo: va hacia el salmón injertado,
pulcro.
Copyright © 2018 Diego Alfaro Palma. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Fall-Winter 2017.
translated by Lucian Mattison
I am that man that has let his time pass in notary offices,
who, waiting for his number to be called, imagines being an English pilot or
a cadaver lying in the Peruvian Sierras. Abandoned within
these four walls, the secretaries turn out the lights and let me
die in those altitudes, already so far away from he who first drew his number
and, enlisted, saw life turned into paperwork. Moving
inward, I say goodbye to humanity every morning, drying in the
sun like fruit on a roof.
Cortamonte
Yo soy el hombre que ha dejado pasar el tiempo en las notarías,
que esperando su turno imagina ser un piloto inglés o un
cadáver tendido en la sierra peruana. Abandonado a estas
cuatro paredes, las secretarias apagan la luz y me permiten
morir en esas alturas, ya tan lejanas al que tomó su número y
enlistado vio la vida vuelta un trámite. Marchando hacia
adentro, despido cada mañana a la humanidad, secándose al
sol como frutas sobre un techo.
Copyright © 2018 Diego Alfaro Palma. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Fall-Winter 2017.
translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern
An aging woman is pushing
a baby stroller
through a park of sun and dust.
Some dolls sit upright in the stroller.
Children free themselves from their parents’ hands
and run closer from across the park.
The woman walks gently
and the dolls are silent,
but strangely the children can hear
high noon crying.
They stumble and follow the stroller,
looking back and forth from the dolls
to the woman who’s pushing them.
The parents are watching the parade
from a distance;
they call their children’s names
but their voices are lost
between the sun and dust.
The woman walks
calmly, her pace is steady.
No one knows
who she is
or where she’s heading.
2/1999
From Empty Chairs (Graywolf Press, 2015). Copyright © 2015 by Liu Xia. Used with the permission of Graywolf Press.
Pleasure is black.
I no longer imagine
where my body
stops or begins.
Skin transparent.
Face speckled
by the spit
of several centuries.
All the borders stare at the same fires.
Oh Mamere,
I'm sorry.
Here I am.
Copyright © 2018 by Robin Coste Lewis. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 6, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Our father becomes one. Barrel-Chested with Longboard seeks Mate. King Father is dating. Long live the King. He asks out colleagues, neighbors, strangers he meets at Spazzio’s Jazz Night, Zuma Beach. He dates the moonlight, his reflection, the long-ago that got away. The King says Why the hell shouldn’t I get what I’ve longed for? Nip waist, taut tum. Where is she? His exile from the good stuff. You girls can’t imagine the pain you’ll cause men. Nope, we don’t & we can’t yet but we do know the King cannot consider us worthy. How could he? As women, we fail him daily. Love, I’m learning, is peeling your mind from your body, throwing one or both sad sacks of self out to sea. Love is blood & our father. I give no inch. I judge the world from the margins of diaries. Men are the problem with everything. King Father slices lemons from our lemon trees. Citrus grows in the grove beneath my bed. Mom lived in our guesthouse for three years before leaving. She peeled herself slowly off his heart like a scab. What is the point of such maiming? Now the King isn’t careful when he walks by the branches. He barges through trees & their thorns. King Single can’t remember his heart soft & rindless. The new women are beautiful, or not, or enough to get by. I watch him take a lover. She is insane. The king peels a lemon, lays each slice on her plate. She requests lime. He hands us whole fruits when we eat at the table. He takes his longboard to the ocean, kicks flat water into waves.
Copyright © 2018 Cait Weiss Orcutt. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Fall-Winter 2017.
Church of the Holy Spirit, Rohatyn 1924 You enter to escape the cold & find a canvas of St. John, his hands unsealed to write. Other icons, painted in vibrant reds, mounted on wooden walls’ slick gloss. All white men, suffering and suffered. Christ, stripped. His chest: ribbons of bone. Archangel Michael, Abraham— young boys again. You ask them about hunger. How to outrun changing flags like a child outrunning its name. A war, past, yet still humming. Your mother thinks God must be dead, but you ask the sky to show its hands. For manna to frost the cemetery’s leaning statues, forlorn rows. To frost wood, overrun by lifelines like an old man’s palms. For red water to spill forth from the Hnyla Lypa cursing below, its name already lost on new maps. You search the saints’ eyes before turning, light ivying their faces. You think a house can keep you safe. The bodies, buried. Doors that won’t spit you out. You search their hands, empty as spoons. They can’t take away what you pray. This weight: fist & bone & wail. In their silence, you hear blood, as it spins like air through a windmill’s vanes. As it coppers the chambers, makes them flame.
Copyright © 2018 Chelsea Dingman. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Fall-Winter 2017.