Poetry Award Research Articles

“Cured, I Am Frizzled, Stale, and Small”: Jungian Individuation Realized in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies

Robert Lowell’s Life Studies won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1960 and is credited with initiating the confessional poetry movement, which included followers and students of Lowell such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. In Life Studies, Lowell channeled his 1950s experiences with bipolar disorder and mental health hospitalizations into poems such as “Man and Wife”, “Waking in the Blue”, and “Home After Three Months Away”. Lowell’s hard-won Life Studies triumph, though most recently analyzed through socioeconomic and “divine madness” lenses, can also be understood through Carl Jung’s individuation concept which posits that self-realization can be attained through the reconciliation of one’s own conscious and unconscious mental processes. This article argues that Lowell’s Life Studies poems, when examined through Jungian individuation, enabled Lowell to achieve self-realization, and paved the way for mentally ill individuals to learn how to achieve psychological wholeness through art.

The Spread of t he Thousand Islands Poetry Society in t he Philippines

The Thousand Islands Poetry Society is the most famous modern Chinese poetry society in the Philippines. It has promoted the understanding of Chinese poetry culture among Chinese Filipinos, promoted the development of Chinese Philippine poetry, and given Chinese Philippine literature a place in Philippine literature and incr eased the visibility of Chinese Philippine literature in the Philippines and in East Asia and even in the world. This article will start with the establishment and cont ribution of the Thousand Islands Poetry Society in the Philippines, introduce the member s and works of the Thousand Islands Poetry Society in detail, and explore several characteristics of the Thousand Islands poetry, such as the wandering spirit of the po et, the rootless, the homesickness, the expression of family affection, the care for the world and the Philippine characteristics. It is further found that Thousand Islands Poetry Society spreads Chinese Filipino poetry by publishing literary supplements, books, disseminating Wechat public accounts, holding lectures on Chinese Filipino poetry , interacting with Taiwanese poetry groups, and setting up youth poetry awards. The colorful activities have given more room for the creation of Chinese Philippine poetry, inspired the creation of Filipino Chinese poetry, and showcased the unique poetic ch arm of Filipino Chinese poetry.

Four Contemporary Love Poems by Zhang Zhihao

Zhang Zhihao (张执浩), poet and novelist, was born in 1965 in Jingmen, Hubei. He graduated from the history department of the Central China Normal University in 1988. Author of nine poetry collections, several novels, and some influential essays, Zhang has won numerous poetry awards, including Poet of the Year (2014), the annual Chen Zi’ang Poetry Award (2016), and the Luxun Literary Prize for poetry (2017, Chinese equivalent to the Pulitzer). He is currently editor-in-chief of Chinese Poetry, a quarterly poetry magazine in Wuhan, China. The four poems translated here center on the theme of genuine love and the yearning for such love; they provide an opportunity to access the writings of a major poet in the contemporary Chinese poetic landscape.

:Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century

:<i>Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century</i>

A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson by Major Jackson

Reviewed by: A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson by Major Jackson GK Schatzman MAJOR JACKSON A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson Ed. Amor Kohli. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. 2022. 184 pages. IT IS MY SEMI-PROFESSIONAL opinion that anybody reviewing a book of essays must wrestle with the question, "Who on earth buys a book of essays?" My documented admiration for Major Jackson—Harvard Review poetry editor, award-winning poet (most recently of The Absurd Man and Roll Deep), and here revealed to the book-buying public as a meticulous critic and astute cultural observer—does not exempt A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson. Sporting musings on the craft and culture of contemporary poetry; deep-dive research on both anthologized and less-taught twentieth-century poets; and—crackling fresh as good vintage vinyl—energetic early publications from a music and culture beat in the high days of Philly's '90s hip-hop scene, Jackson's latest offers more than just a glimpse of his proverbial bookshelf and record cabinet. For teachers, it's a unit-worthy syllabus of poets whose work intersects and mutually inspires throughout the last century, with discussion questions to boot. For scholars, it's thoughtful research on poets like Countee Cullen and Lucille Clifton, a sharp-eyed breakdown of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry award letter that made Gwendolyn Brooks the first Black woman recipient, and a short, persuasive thesis on the historical poem as a defining national genre. For Philadelphians, it's cultural history, the kind of bottle-aged testaments most writers can only dream might still deliver the zeitgeist's funky tang decades down the road. Culture vultures of any feather will enjoy the journey through the popular emergence of slam poetry (in "Black Poetry: A Beat Beyond") and the reverent hype of an old-school hip-hop revival at the Trocadero ("Living Legends"). For critics, of course, it's a giddy chance to catch a younger Jackson at our own task, writing low-key ekphrastics as he turns his metronome ear and poet's tongue on [End Page 64] someone else's art. Philly jazz hip-hop pioneers The Roots burst off the page as Jackson wrangles "genius" into ink in the prescient "Liner Notes": It's an eventful moment to hear [Tariq Trotter] on "Essaywhuman?!!??!" "rap scatting" one minute in the tradition of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong and with stark ingenuity change to a ⅞ rhyme scheme that sounds like Charlie Parker's horn jumping in and around a bebop landscape. Arguably, these pieces in the book's "Entryways" section are a ringing answer to the question Jackson poses in "Poetry and Influence of the Nonliterary Variety": "How do I explain to those young people [that] inspiration and entryways into poems are a function of how much of the world one takes into one's self?" Most irresistible are Jackson's reflections in "My Lyrical Self" (2019) and "A Mystifying Silence: Big and Black" (2007). The former posts pithy encapsulations of Jackson's ambitions as a poet: "to dramatize my life into song in what I call 'the lyric self,'" born from writing that truly sits at "the center of language" and expresses "a human voice, an authentic self … in the moments of figuration, image-making, in the syntactical arrangement of words into linguistic phrases, tones, and silences, for it is there that great emotion resides." He continues, "All the poems ever written are attempts to add one's own sound to that collective cry of humanity." "A Mystifying Silence," then, develops ideas on the racialized ethical elements of the "cry" (and of the silence) in contemporary poetry. Jackson surveys a collection of poems containing representations of "blackness" and Black bodies ("I collect these poems as others collect poems about dogs or jazz," he explains) to handily catalog "the insistent lack of imaginative language to describe the full spectrum of people of color" in poems by authors like Elizabeth Bishop and Tony Hoagland. Regarding Hoagland, he writes, "Yet, I would rather have his failures than nothing at all. At least his poems announce him as introspective in a self-critical way on this...

The Era of Discontent by Brianna Noll

Reviewed by: The Era of Discontent by Brianna Noll Phill Provance (bio) the era of discontent Brianna Noll Elixir Press http://elixirpress.com/the-era-of-discontent 104 pages; Print, $17.00 Reading Brianna Noll's second collection, The Era of Discontent, is akin to taking an elemental bath in water essenced by the natural, spiritual, and [End Page 140] astral realms. There is a hint of something, a sense that at any moment in your reading of the collection, perhaps by the next page, by another poem, or even line, there might be that sought-after mysterious ingredient the author requires for a sudden Philosopher's Stone epiphany. There is a controlled yet almost desperate search in these poems for meaning in the larger world, what we see of it right in our faces and what we cannot (but suspect might exist) see out in the universal—something of poetry leveraging Raymond Williams's affect theory to knowingly lead us to comprehend through feeling the incomprehensible, what Anahid Nersessian has called "calamity form." Of course, admittedly, Nersessian's critical focus on romanticism might make this assessment at first seem far-fetched, but such a superficial assessment of Nersessian's work and Noll's would deny the reader fuller insight into Noll's theme as a meta-response to contemporary criticism that very blatantly draws parallels between our own period and the late Enlightenment, beginning with its title. That this thoughtful assessment and commentary on our times has already been well received, as winner of Elixir Press's 20th Annual Poetry Award, is hardly surprising. In the collection's introduction, contest judge Jane Satterfield (Her Familiars and Assignation at Vanishing Point) offers: The Era of Discontent is populated with scientists, saints, artists, and visionaries … the poet's reflections on the natural world interrogate our complex relationship to the environment and offer a glimpse into deep time; such concerns are viewed through a fabulist lens that underscores their powerful reach. There is perhaps no better example of this than "The Fir and a Bramble," it encapsulates Noll's power as a transliterator of the world. After describing an aura of light from a mountain forest being distilled into a taming essence for a dog, Noll writes: … Little creature,when you believe the world isa circus act, you don't need to spythrough peepholes or waxnostalgic to see that anything [End Page 141] is possible. But you will needhelp getting over the hurdleof yourself. Only then can you findyour retinue of waiting birdsto plait your hair and open youreyes and lift you, like Poseidonon his war-chariot, above the glowof the evergreen treeline. To be sure, we don't always wish to be "along for the ride" when inspiration strikes a poet, but in this case, to be present when Noll experiences what she transmutes into the totality of this poem would have been a grand gift. Noll is seeing something for us, receiving and translating past first glance into the deeper truth, the several truths that are always there yet are missed by us on so many levels. Promising an explanation of the present through the lens of history, the collection moves us to an emotional sense of what we can only otherwise intellectually understand obliquely. We are introduced to this notion in the collection's first piece, "Perenelle Flamel Contemplates the Cosmos": One day, we'll discover a planetwhere the rain is made of glass,and we'll remember that everything shares constituent parts, materia prima.I have the makings of glass, of earth,in the fist of my heart. That materia prima—the original substance of the universe—makes up every line of the collection, reminding us of our molecular kinship with the world and with one another. But while the work contemplates what makes the world and makes up the world, it also evokes the Romantics in its appreciation for the omnipresent power of an apocalyptic destruction in which "we are / stars, and all we need is a catalyst / to reveal our common, our hidden, glory." Further hints of such destruction—our smallness in it and its...

How do we protect the mutant from annihilation by the "normal"

How do we protect the mutant from annihilation by the "normal" Andy Jackson (bio) and Gaele Sobott (bio) Keywords poetry, disability poetry, Andy Jackson, Gael Sobott, sloth, fractal, DNA, helix a sloth-slow strength stretches like lines of longitude / sighing through my lingering life and other lives before / oh above and parallel to mine gently curving / a fierce kink in meridians of knowledge / systems fixated on fixes without a north / still our limbs think or south / our minds reach outward / unplans into fractal / ever-shifting maps brokenness / surveyed by genetic engineers glittering in the face / searching for repeat palindromesof maskless eugenecists / about thirty letters long each side this double-helix of fragility / of the midpoint a snip here and genius a twisted ladder draws us up / a snip we wake up into our / there bodies / deformed deviant / real dirty unworthy of / the earth life laughter curiosity / calling to us fromclandestine desire what we've been / our wounds what we are to become / a promise against being erased / we ghost the agencies and clinics who defines / revolting in our flux our suffering / this new illness / abnormal wellness / we are custodians / continuous realms of blemish all this / our power as bruised endangered infinite / and sweet as a persimmonentangled for the helix there is no outside and no other [End Page 693] Andy Jackson andy jackson is a poet, creative writing teacher, and the inaugural Writing the Future of Health Fellow. The poem "how do we protect the mutant from annihilation by the 'normal'" was written in collaboration with Gaele Sobott as part of this fellowship. He has co-edited disability-themed issues of Southerly and Australian Poetry Journal, and his latest poetry collection is Human Looking, which won the 2022 ALS Gold Medal. Gaele Sobott gaele sobott is a writer who lives on Dharug land, western Sydney. Her publications include Colour Me Blue and My Longest Round. Gaele received a 2020 fellowship from the City of Sydney to create internationally award-winning animated poems. She was shortlisted for the 2021 Queensland Poetry Awards Older Poets Mentorship and received a 2021 Varuna Writers Space fellowship. She is the founding director of Outlandish Arts. Copyright © 2022 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

When I take out the picture of my mother

when I take out the picture of my mother LM Brimmer (bio) [ See PDF for formatting of the poem. ] with her mother and my sister I remember howexile is a legal amendment that can also be felt. i was omitted. ellipses an ekphrasis of my inherited custom frame. in a mirror I remain concealed. old film too afraidto be revealed. here every pixel is flesh-elision the wrinkles i have, She has, too. my/Her mother's chin… & now I'm yellowing on Kodak, refused a flash-marked birth. undeveloped, afloat in my mind, unused exposures expire before i've been made. the new sacrament. where gloves & jackets squint back at the lens from the house front. unseasonable hurriedly aimed, handled thing discover me blindfolded. kept. weapons fire in-between faces & out of frame. it's me, hardwood softened by proximity to the sea. am i her memory? One yearning to be adapted. O, teach me how to return from the tide where every picture is a tightly closed eye! the next thing i know the nurse has tied my arms & i'm alone in an awful naked room, island of punishment, birth hovers the rupture along my windswept coast. my clouded elegy. had escaped that palace, the tunnel, & had skipped the boat – [End Page 167] yowl for my restoration with the skill of a marineanimal— sea my opaque corneal current. look, eye have become the zookeeper & the zoo. [End Page 168] LM Brimmer LM Brimmer is an artist & educator living on Dakota land in Minneapolis. Co-editor of the anthology Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose and Pride (MHS Press, 2019), their writing has appeared in The Alliance of Adoption Studies and Culture Journal, La Raza Comíca, Impossible Archetype, Gasher Journal, and Quarterly West. In 2021, their work made semi-finalist for Newfound Journal's Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and was long listed for Frontier Poetry's Award for New Poets. They attend the MFA program at Randolph College as a Blackburn Fellow. Copyright © 2022-2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Triptych

Triptych Mee Ok Icaro (bio) Keywords poetry, Mee Ok Icaro, triptych, bodies When I was small likea selfish ideaI would pick pieces of his hairoff my smooth girl-bodyswollenin the dark placeswhere he had become light a vague orifice the sizeof an omphalosbefore my child-hands covered mysecret face like a psalmist’s silkover the velvet ordinary [End Page 421] Mee Ok Icaro mee ok icaro is an award-winning literary prose stylist and occasional poet. She is the winner of the inaugural Prufer Poetry Prize, runner-up in the Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Contest, and a finalist for the Scott Merrill Award for poetry as well as the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe Magazine, Georgia Review, Bennington Review, River Teeth, Witness, Pleiades, Michael Pollan’s “Trips Worth Telling” anthology, and elsewhere. She is also featured in [Un]Well on Netflix and is attempting to write a memoir. Copyright © 2022 The Massachusetts Review, Inc

Tommy Pico's Fugitive Forms and the Poetics of Queer Indigenous Life

Tommy Pico's Fugitive Forms and the Poetics of Queer Indigenous Life Will Clark (bio) When TOMMY PICO, a queer poet from the Viejas Reservation of the Kumeyaay Nation in Southern California, won the 2018 Whiting Award for poetry, the selection committee praised the "inventiveness" of his "contemporary epics." Framing PICO'S book-length poems through a Western genre, the judges describe PICO'S work as a "forceful … interrogation of myth and cultural expectations and self" that is novel for connecting sexual exploration to histories of Indigenous dispossession.1 In celebrating PICO through the veil of a Western genre system, however, the committee obscures the Indigenous genealogies and queer Indigenous poetry that inform PICO'S composition. Yet, the very coloniality of the Whiting Award committee's evaluation unwittingly illustrates a crucial analytic for the way Indigenous writers exist athwart colonial spaces. [End Page 523] That is through what Indigenous critic GERALD VIZENOR calls a "fugitive pose": an Indigenous strategy for hiding in plain sight to combat either outright erasure or the tokenization of Indigenous life in U.S. culture, politics, and history.2 As VIZENOR explains, U.S. narratives have long obscured the "real" experience of Native life behind a "cultural pageantry" that obfuscates the present-day lived experience of Native peoples.3 In this environment, as MARK RIFKIN elaborates, longstanding presumptions of extinction have relegated Native peoples into a "static" past, maintaining the dispossession of Native peoples from land, political power, and cultural visibility.4 In the face of ongoing dispossession, the fugitive pose fosters Native cultural practices that are purposefully "elusive" to the settler imaginary.5 Moreover, as VIZENOR argues, this latent agency is critical for an Indigenous practice of "survivance" that combines survival and resistance to renounce "dominance, tragedy, and victimry."6 PICO'S work deploys such a pose: it enacts a survivance that remains fugitive to the gatekeepers of mainstream poetry who value novelty to the Western tradition more than Indigenous genealogies. The modes of resistance afforded by the fugitive pose for queer Indigenous people, however, remain obscure. Examining his recent book-length poems, Nature Poem (2016) and Junk (2017), I show that Pico presents a sustained argument insisting that fugitivity and Indigenous queerness are deeply interconnected phenomena. In this, Pico answers a call by scholars of queer Indigenous history Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen, who suggest that queer Indigenous subjects experience a dual fugitivity that needs further articulation in both queer studies and Indigenous scholarship. On the one hand, although the "diversity [of queer Indigenous knowledge] has been cited as an inspiration for GLBTQ identities," queer critique tends to ignore the "dissent lines that activists, artists, and scholars have already built," leaving Indigenous experience an asterisk.7 At the same time, Driskill and their [End Page 524] coauthors attest to an unmet need for Indigenous scholarship to uncover how the diversity of queer Indigenous sexualities offers distinct, if understudied, knowledge by which to decolonize scholarship and public life alike.8 Because of the ongoing obfuscation of queer indigeneity, contemporary Driftpile Cree Nation poet and scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt calls for a more declarative presence than that offered by a fugitive pose. As Belcourt explains, queer and trans Indigenous peoples face the most "acute and world-shattering" violence and require active demands for knowledge that "queers and indigenizes freedom" itself.9 Not only is attention to queer Indigenous experience necessary for the decolonization of Native life, but what Belcourt describes as the "non-sovereignty of the sexual" offers a method to construct a world for queer Indigenous people that moves beyond cultural and political forms that propagate Western domination.10 This undertheorized conjunction of queer and Indigenous fugitivity is what Pico's poetics embody, creating an evasive space to envision the present and future of queer Indigenous life. But Pico's poetry does more than merely testify to queer Indigenous conditions—it broadcasts that experience into the public sphere through a form attuned to the contradictions of literary history and twenty-first-century media, with a goal of reshaping the horizons of modern poetics through the image of queer indigeneity. As such, Pico's approach to contemporary queer indigenousness...

Bosworth Field

Bosworth Field M. Cynthia Cheung (bio) Centuries of winter ploughingand continuous progress have leveledthe ground—no casual observer now wouldthink about how much iron our ancestors laid down.Iron, having lives of its own, moves cyclicallyin and out of bodies, like rain. It's true, if you combedthe land, you'd find old Romancoins, Tudor hat pins—just thingspeople lost. But iron returns to the earth invisibly—nobody abandons steel to the aftermathof crows and foxes slinking afield, countingthe dead. No, blood seeps through the soiluntil it's swallowed. It's like breathing, almost,how we've forgotten that this rusted marsh stillexists everywhere—an endless ice-limnedsurface, ripening its crop of faces. [End Page 237] M. Cynthia Cheung M. Cynthia Cheung is a physician whose writing can be found in The Baltimore Review, RHINO, Salamander, SWWIM, Tupelo Quarterly and others. Currently, she serves as a judge for Baylor College of Medicine's annual Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Awards. Find out more at www.mcynthiacheung.com. Copyright © 2022-2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Contributors

Contributors

Baroque Tradition in the Poetry of Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki. Reconnaissance

Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn Dycki (born 1964) belongs to the group of poets whose work has been awarded many times in prestigious literary competitions; the poet received, among others, The Nike Literary Award (2009), the Gdynia Literary Award (twice: in 2006 and 2009) and the SilesiusWrocław Poetry Award (twice: in 2012 and 2020). His poetry has been systematically elaborated on the themes of madness, disease and the obsession with death. When writing about death Dycki refers to the baroque tradition. Therefore, the aim of this article is an attempt to interpret the works of Tkaczyszyn-Dycki in the context of questions about the Baroque tradition and its various continuationsin contemporary Polish poetry. Dycki certainly refers to the Baroque (or more broadly the Old Polish tradition), but this Baroque undergoes a far-reaching metamorphosis. It is an obscure, non-obvious Baroque, functioning rather as a specter haunting the language, through which Dyckifights for his own speech, still watching death.

Style In Literature: A Stylistics Analysis of the Poem "The Sari" by Moniza Alvi

This paper probes a stylistic analysis of poem of eminent Pakistani English Poetess Moniza Alvi. The well-known poem by Moniza Alvi is titled"The Sari." Alvi received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry in 2002, and Bloodaxe released Alvi'sretrospective collection, Split World: Poems 1990–2005,in 2008. Her voice is restrained, indirect, fantastical,kind, and unique. She possesses a special understanding of cultural and emotional splits. Here,the researcher tries to approach Alvi's poetry "The Sari"from the perspective of stylistics. The paper also analyses the poems using linguistic methods in order to elucidate their meaning. It is significant to emphasize that many who teach and research the English language and literature find stylistics to be a very helpful scientific field. Whether English is your first language, second language, or third, stylistics can help native English speakers as well as overseas students.Both linguistic and literary talents can be acquired.

The Scavengers: Houston, February 2021

The ScavengersHouston, February 2021 Amanda Auchter (bio) Keywords poetry, Amanda, Auchter, nature, snow, animals, camping, scavengers We placed the lantern in the snowbecause we wanted beautythere. It was the second nightof animal tracks across the lawn.The lantern was small, a battery inside.The snow was neutral to our coldness,to the way we melted iciclesto drink, to flush our toilets. We keptvigil with the lantern, fed the scavengers,watched the sky blue. We were hungry.Animals holding the light for heat,scratching the garden rot. Thiswas a new silence—the fire we failedto make, the lantern between the azaleas,water in a teacup. The snow, shaggyin the pines. The scavengers returnedeach night for scraps of oatmeal, raisins,the lantern’s faded light. Whatever survivalthey could pick up and carry away. [End Page 393] Amanda Auchter amanda auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the 2012 Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at The Huffington Post, CNN, American Poetry Review, North American Review, Shenandoah, Tahoma Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project. Copyright © 2022 The Massachusetts Review, Inc

Otherland

Otherland Mee Ok Icaro (bio) they find her shivering stained t-shirt over wild bare legs in an alley my mother's body in the shapeof unknown food chewed by a scatter of teeth I never saw her mud-matted fishing-wire hair but my brother offers to send me the picture he took of her when he showed up like a heart attack that day thatgathered into years when she was lost a child with the senior's special schrödinger's mom dead (not dead) her missing body chiseled to ice under a bridge every timeit snowed No I hear myself say leave me my memories of her before she ate dumpsters without underwear spare me the mouth that once spun my lullabieswhen she was all bare-footed earth-skulled lunulae I have so little little girl in me left [End Page 33] my mother knew my name the one she gave me talked to me same as her father gone ten years nowseen him last week in her ceiling I need to tell grandpa the birds oh I forget their names are waiting for their packages of weatherand string and blue china dishes the ones we use on easter he knows the one I am with you now, mother, feeding you five cheese ziti from olive garden while a woman frothing at the head rocks and screams your brokenstare two eyes two punched out windows one for each vanished son you hallucinate the only way to get them to visit you ice in my sockets melting down my cheeks I leave you in a confusion happier than truth punch the code steel doors open leads to the firstthread of hallways past motionless wheelchairs bouquets of pissneurotic light bulbs flickering dark in this cement palace where you will die in the corner next to a phone that never rings a folder squeezing a single slip of paper with my namedate and time in small handwriting that proves that yes, mommy I saw you [End Page 34] a woman in muted scrubs asks me if I am your daughter tells me you are her favorite that you write me lettersbackwards in the swatch of window near your bed because you say I live in the tree outside your forever room you write to me like a child on a fogged car window messages to a passing stranger speeding down an unpaintedhighway because grandpa visits you in the sky but I, I live in your tree [End Page 35] Mee Ok Icaro Mee Ok Icaro is an award-winning literary prose stylist and occasional poet. She is the winner of the inaugural Prufer Poetry Prize, runner-up in the Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Contest, and a finalist for the Scott Merrill Award for poetry as well as the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the LA Times, Boston Globe Magazine, River Teeth, Bennington Review, Witness, Pleiades, Cincinnati Review, American Journal of Poetry, Michael Pollan's "Trips Worth Telling" anthology, and elsewhere. She is also featured in [Un]Well on Netflix and is working on a forthcoming memoir. Mee-ok.com Copyright © 2022 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Where Is Yazbek?, and: Island of Rabbits

Where Is Yazbek?, and: Island of Rabbits Ruth Awad (bio) Where Is Yazbek? In front of the water my lovebright as a beach ball! Loud as a dinner bell!Sweet as a fig! I'm finding new ways to mournthe lives I didn't live. And Teta is dying,gone to the mountains to haunt my ringand divine the Turkish grounds in my cup.I wish you weren't dead! I wish you weren't dead! Let my future appearlike a lover's hands. Like a face framedby train window and open the heart.Before she died [End Page 178] she fevered with visions:Where is Yazbek? Here, the cup says, a kettle, a journey,a pear. You'll have success in the city, a whole rabbit of it. A sawto split brother from brother. A great wheel at the cusp,you're traveling somewhere soon. A mountain for your joy, as muchas your palms can carry— old friends will gather andyou'll gossip over argileh smoke and your days of beingimmune to wonder are over,just like that. Island of Rabbits To the west of Tripoli, an island once overbred with rabbits during the French mandatenow has no rabbits and a unesco designation because an excavation revealedbaths from the 13th century and a freshwater well and the remains of a Crusader-era churchwhere people were massacred. It was a long time ago, but you can still see the placesthey burrowed. The rabbits, I mean, though the people, too, wanted tolive like a rabbit wants to live. [End Page 179] Ruth Awad Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American poet, a 2021 nea Poetry Fellow, and the author of Set to Music a Wildfire, winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Her work appears in POETRY, Poem-a-Day, the New Republic, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Copyright © 2022 University of Nebraska Press

Marvelous

Marvelous Margaret B. Ingraham (bio) I marvel athow fullthe light becomesas it empties itselfon allit falls upon. [End Page 134] Margaret B. Ingraham Margaret B. Ingraham is the author of a poetry chapbook Proper Words for Birds (Finishing Line Press), nominated for the 2010 Library of Virginia Award in poetry; This Holy Alphabet (2009), lyric poems adapted from her original translation from the Hebrew of Psalm 119; and a full length poetry collection, Exploring this Terrain (2019). Her work has received recognition through an Academy of American Poetry Award and a Sam Ragan Prize. properwords@gmail.com. Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press

Plaster of Paris

Plaster of Paris Mark Irwin (bio) The chocolate melting in the sun. I untie the bow, take the clear wrapper off,smudging the dark on my fingers. I remember asking her the name of the elephant,before she died. She was the last one who would know. Years later, clearing outthe house, I found the plaster cast of her hand that I'd made in art class. I dusted itoff and thirty years later began to paint it as it was—the pink-flesh tones, a pencilto make the knuckle-lines more-fine, then some white on the crescent fingernails.In Paris later, I discovered that the plaster powder is named from the calcium sulfitemined near Montmartre. The elephant's name was Charley. Six-years old, askedto feed it, I stuffed the entire plastic bag in his trunk. When I returned to the zoowith my father, 14 years later, the elephant remembered, dousing me with water.I keep the plaster hand in a sweater drawer. The resemblance too striking to keepout. It reaches slightly upward while slightly closed, as if it's caught something.The body's clock of blood and bone. I'm eating the chocolate now. My handdark and sweet with it as I keep folding and unfolding the map of Paris. [End Page 182] Mark Irwin Mark Irwin is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Shimmer (2020), A Passion According to Green (2017), American Urn: Selected Poems (1987-2014), and Bright Hunger (2004). Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, two Colorado Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, and NEA. Copyright © 2022 Pleiades and Pleiades Press