Poetry Journal Research Articles

Whiskey, and: Weeding

Whiskey, and: Weeding Evan Gurney (bio) WHISKEY A baptism of fire and water,its birth is a resurrection,a holy spirit for the son and father.I baptize you with firewater,he says, for the sins of fathers,for the empty bottle, the filled coffin.Oh for a baptism of fire, of water!This death is birth is resurrection. [End Page 88] WEEDING You can always find them in the garden,lurking there in the cooler shadows,setting up shop and putting down roots—soil-squatters, mulch-poachers, the illegitimate green. I squat down in professional stancefor a close inspection and calm reach,an executioner crouched and gloved,my leathered fingers itching for the kill. Gently now. A clumsy yank gives the gameaway, just a bitter salad in your hand.Gather up the stalks, lightly stretch their stemsuntil they confess the secrets of their trespass. Then a grip, a twist and tug, and up they comeclawing earth, desperate to hold their claim.By hand or hoe, I’ll have them,piling their limp bodies in mounds: corpses withering in clean weedless air. [End Page 89] Evan Gurney Evan Gurney is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. A former editor of The Carolina Quarterly, his recent poetry has appeared in Angle: A Journal of Poetry in English, Dappled Things, Relief, and Still: The Journal. Copyright © 2018 Berea College

Bright Dendrites

Research Article| November 01 2018 Bright Dendrites John A. Nieves John A. Nieves John A. Nieves has poems forthcoming or recently published in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, American Literary Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and Mid-American Review. He won the Indiana Review poetry contest, and his first book, Curio (2014), won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize. He is an assistant professor of English at Salisbury University. He received his MA from University of South Florida and his PhD from the University of Missouri. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2018) 2018 (91): 1. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-7136822 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation John A. Nieves; Bright Dendrites. the minnesota review 1 November 2018; 2018 (91): 1. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-7136822 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2018 Virginia Tech2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Little Girl Buried in a Keg of Rum

Little Girl Buried in a Keg of Rum Gretchen Steele Pratt (bio) Old Burying Ground, Beaufort, North Carolina Schoolchildren leave her their things—plastic bracelets, crayons, oyster shells, sand dollars. We know only her surname was Sloo (rhymes with snow). She had begged her father to take her along on a merchant trip to England to see where she was born. She died the voyage back. He couldn't bear to bury her at sea and so procured a cask of rum and sealed her down in the barrel. Her gravebed is strewn with Mardi Gras beads, fairy wands, lip gloss, pennies, Dubble Bubble Gum, glow-in-the-dark stars. Schoolchildren say that a penny laid at her grave is often flipped in the night. Headstones of brick, shell, or wood in the Old Burying Ground. Hers is wood, as is the buried barrel her mother refused to let anyone open. Winter rings of petals round the snow-flurry camellias. Mermaid Barbie, silver glitter, Princess Body Mist. Buried in the fetal position. We know her mother had never wanted to leave England, had spoken often of her homesickness to the girl. And so this England grew in the girl's mind. Pastures. Steeples. Hot cocoa. English pennies struck from pure silver for a thousand years. Great-grandparents buried proper in the family plot. Had sung of walled gardens and cockle shells. Her father took her to London where she heard church bells, played in snow for the first time. But then she was rolled out of the ship's hold in a barrel, carried to her fine home that still stands on the waterfront. The barrel reeked sweetly through the rooms. Why had she ever spoken of England? The rum the girl displaced soaked the ship's deck, her father's boots. Snow in the high Atlantic as he curled her in. No white burial gown, no penny to place in her wedding day shoe. Honey liquor. A keg her wooden shell in the pocket of eternity, rum loosed and seeping. Schoolchildren will bury condolences beneath magnolia leaves on her grave. Her mother would bury a length of black crepe wrapped round the barrel, the barrel, the barrel. No further children, no. Plastic beach shovel. Chamber upon chamber, a shell like a spiral staircase climbing heavenward. A fever aboard, English or ocean borne. Dolphin key chain, Magic 8 Ball, starfish, pink ribbon, penny flattened by the tracks. The endless pine-forest surround, and no Sloo [End Page 82] kin to lay beside. Her given name, a mercy, dissolved, underwater snow. Grave like a parade float, marooned, lollipops, silk roses, Silly String, buried in stuffed animals sopped with rain, flotsam of girlhood, find a penny pick it up, all day long you'll have good luck. Forget me now. A barrel and a heap and I'm talking in my sleep. Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack staked in. Pick-up-sticks. Pearl nail polish. A necklace strung of shells to keep a child close to home. Paper roll of pennies, a snowglobe. Shell like a baby's ear. Cockles of the heart. Why had she ever spoken of England? In the bury of the ship's hold, a cross of charcoal drawn to mark the barrel. [End Page 83] Gretchen Steele Pratt GRETCHEN STEELE PRATT is the author of One Island, from Anhinga Press, and her work appears or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Fairy Tale Review, and the Southern Review. She lives in Matthews, North Carolina, with her husband and two daughters, and teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Copyright © 2018 University of North Carolina Wilmington

Quick

Quick Hyejung Kook (bio) Keywords Hyejung Kook, poetry As in the brown fox which jumpsover the lazy dog, as in cut to the quick,the living, alive, from Anglo-Saxon cwic,as in Enoch cwic gewát mid cyning engla,Enoch departed alive with the king of angels,as in The Quick and the Dead, the moviestarring Sharon Stone as a gunslinger, the phrasefrom Tyndale's translation of the New Testament,as in quickening—no, not Highlander,that's the Quickening, with a capital Qand immortals and beheadings andlightning special effects—I'm talking aboutthe first stirrings of movementan expectant mother feels in her belly,the faintest flutters like butterflies,like fish swimming, or less bucolically,often confused with gas, which some feelas early as thirteen weeks but not I,with my anterior placenta mufflingmy firstborn's movements, not I, who aftertwo losses, wondered every day, is it/he/shealive? Is the third time the charm? Sometimes I feltmy every breath was a silent invocation,wanting so desperately, yet now I can't remember whenI felt it, like bubbles drifting, inner iridescence,like hope expanding, then disappearing. I don't knowif I will feel it again, but I remember it nowbecause my secondborn is sleeping curvedagainst my bared breast, and one hand restson my cheek, and dreaming, her fingers aretapping a barely felt pattern against my skin,faint and lovely and alive, quick, in this momentshe is alive, I am alive, I feel the electric chargein us, brief, improbable, like lightning striking twice. [End Page 803] Hyejung Kook hyejung kook's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Hyphen Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Poems2go, and wildness. Other works include an essay in The Critical Flame and Flight, a chamber opera libretto. Kook is a Fulbright grantee and a Kundiman Fellow. Copyright © 2018 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

First Sonogram

First Sonogram Hyejung Kook (bio) That sinking feeling, the bottom dropping outfrom your guts, as if in free fall, a shriekgrowing in your throat, but you are not falling.You are lying on an exam table, and your gutscan’t possibly be dropping out because the ultrasoundwand is gently but firmly pressed up inside youas the sonographer, fresh-faced, relentlessly cheerful,asks, “Are you sure about your due date?” “Yes,”you say, “I am. Today I am at five weeks, six days.”A tiny green cursor, shaped like an x, floatsin the upper right quadrant of grainy black,and she says, “I think I see the start of a yolk sachere.” Staring intently at the screen, you seenothing. Your heart starts racing, and you tryto take deep breaths, to keep the exhalationslonger than the inhalations, to remind yourselfthat it’s early, it just might be too earlyto see clearly, don’t panic, don’t panic,don’t panic. She moves the wand, and the imageof uterus and Fallopian tubes and ovaries appearsbriefly, absurdly, like the face of a stag,a ten-point buck at least, and you wonder,“Am I hallucinating? Am I having a babyor not?” Schrödinger’s cat. Alive and dead.Except you opened the box and looked inside. [End Page 73] Hyejung Kook Hyejung Kook appears or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She is a Fulbright grantee and a Kundiman fellow. Copyright © 2018 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Prayer should be a tunnel

Prayer should be a tunnel Jessica Jacobs (bio) my Hebrew teacher says, and I'm a pig-tailed kid again, descendingfrom a blazing Florida day to the murky depthsof SeaWorld's Tunnel of Terror: a massive glass passage through a seawater tank. Sharks glided by,fins foxed and furrowed as the edgesof old treasure maps. Far above, the inaccessible surface rippled with a chainmail of light. Prayer should bea tunnel, she says again, making an Oof her hands and pushing it out before her—my teacher, also a dancer, uses her body to create structuresin the air. It should take you there, she says. English isnot her first language, but by there, I know she means God. By tunnel, I thinkshe means pipeline, a direct channel in. A signin line had shown an elephant perched atop one of the tunnel's glass blocks to demonstrateits fortitude, to tell me not to be afraid. But I was,each shark with its hacksaw teeth was clearly meant for me, and it was only a matter of time before onegnawed its way through, bringing all the waterrushing in. And what would happen first— drowning or being devoured? For those, like me, rootedin terror, a moving sidewalk kept us in motion, easing usthrough the eerie underpass, acting just like time, which moves us without the need for usto move, which moves us whether or not we want it to.Prayer should be a tunnel, she says, but what words, [End Page 169] what melody, would let me make with my bodysuch grand architecture in the air, let me standin one place and travel both out and in, let me sink and not drown, let me wander unafraid into the open mouthand emergeunscathed yet changed? [End Page 170] Jessica Jacobs Jessica Jacobs is the author of Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press, 2015), winner of the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry, and the forthcoming Take Me with You, Wherever You're Going (Four Way Books, 2019). She is currently at work on a paired memoir and poetry collection, which explores questions of faith. Associate editor for Beloit Poetry Journal and faculty for American Jewish University's Brandeis Collegiate Institute, she lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown. Copyright © 2018 by Middlebury College Publications

Freshwater

Freshwater Mariel Fechik (bio) after Maggie Smith I sat at the edge of a lake, willing itto be an ocean, to spill itself forth,garlands of pearls waiting to wraparound my ankles and pull me in–except the freshwater kind wouldunwither themselves in the salt,become round and whole andsilvered, their iridescence bendingaround the body, the curve of thewaiting sand. I'll become bodiedthis way, full and blue as the mooncupped in your palms, pulling at thetide, instead of this stillness,this murk, this landlocked mass. [End Page 54] Mariel Fechik Mariel Fechik lives in Chicago, IL and works in a library. She sings for the band Fay Ray and writes music reviews for Atwood Magazine and Third Coast Review. She is a Best of the Net and Bettering American Poetry nominee and her work has appeared in Hobart, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, Yes Poetry, and others. She is the author of the micro-chapbook An Encyclopedia of Everything We've Touched (Ghost City Press, 2018). Copyright © 2018 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents

Tonic Exorcism, and: Cutting

Tonic Exorcism, and: Cutting Joshua Lee Martin (bio) TONIC EXORCISM Knees grown weak from kneeling, tongues wearyof even the most basic prayer, they turnedto Clayton who said he had a tonic for anything,especially the demons that bore insidethe child like weevils, moved her limbs wildlyin the middle of the night. Done-in by the screaming,her parents acquiesced, and so brought Claytonto their barn where the horses crowded the shadowsof their stalls, neighed amongst themselvesin the frightened beast-talk even the peoplehad learned to speak, watched as the childwas held down in straw the color of lanternsthat once freed this place of darkness.Her legs pinned, they moved quickly, motionedto Clayton who pulled from his coat a bottlestronger than any bible verse, the liquid primordialin its blackness, poured it deep inside the childuntil her body smoothed like a pond on the edge of winter,until her parents relaxed their grips on her arms, gave Claytonten dollars for doing what the priest could not.If it took the drink, so be it, they said as night turned cooland they made plans to buy as many bottlesas they could, vowing never to be surprisedby any demon or fallow field again, realizing then,as they all would that winter in Boone,what scripture could do and what it could not. [End Page 103] CUTTING In the afternoons the boy fumbles with the hatchetlike the razor he took from his father the day he wanted to shave the childoff of his face. From my porch I watch him swing into a pitch pine at the edgeof his field, its yellow flesh chipping with each hack, the gouge now the sizeof his thin wrists. Because he is not my son I do not gently place my hands on his shoulders,show him how to angle the blade so that the trunk will fall in the direction of his anger.Because he is not my son I do not tell him what I think his cutting means, do not pointacross the field to where, miles away, a highway snakes down this mountain,past the wilted crops and merciless churches, past his father whisky-waltzing downthe dirt drive with a woman who’s not his mother, past the kitchens stuffedwith bowls of cold rice and butter. Instead I sit [End Page 104] and watch his strokes fall harder the momenthis father kicks the front door open, screams boy, get the hell in here, the rusted edgeof his voice slashing through the wind. [End Page 105] Joshua Lee Martin A Ph.D. student in creative writing at Georgia State University, Joshua Lee Martin has been published in The Cumberland River Review, decomP, The Soundings Review, Town Creek Poetry The Kentucky Review, Iodine Poetry Journal, The San Pedro River Review, The Concho River Review, and elsewhere. He recently was a finalist in the 2016 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition, and his chapbook, Passing Through Meat Camp, was a finalist in the 2015 Jacar Press Chapbook Competition. Copyright © 2018 Berea College

Another Dimension: Sweeney Reed's Visual Poetics

Another Dimension:Sweeney Reed's Visual Poetics Brian Reed (bio) The Heide Museum's 2011 exhibition Born to Concrete offered a rare opportunity to survey the history of visual poetry—a "hybrid genre … in which linguistic structures support pictorial structures and vice versa"—in Australia from the late 1960s onward (Bohn 100). It included a range of mixed and multimedia pieces, including typewritten texts, collages, prints, sculptures, and found objects, and it featured such figures as Ruth Cowen, Aleks Danko, Jas H. Duke, Peter Murphy, ΠO, Alan Riddell, Alex Selenitsch, and Richard Tipping. While some of these individuals are well known in other contexts, Danko for instance as a conceptual artist, the exhibition spotlighted a corpus of lively, creative text-based work largely excluded from surveys of Australian literary history. Reviewing the show for Jacket2, Michael Farrell reported that he felt as if he had entered "another dimension," viewing material that, "despite the overlap with poetry in verse," seemed to "operate" in ways entirely otherwise than Australian literature studied in the academy. Indeed, although the bibliography on visual poetics in other national traditions is extensive, one will find no mention of visual poetry as a genre or practice in field-defining monographs such as Andrew Taylor's Reading Australian Poetry (1987), Paul Kane's Australian Poetry (1996), Martin Harrison's Who Wants to Create Australia? (2004), and Philip Mead's Networked Language (2008).1 Farrell also commented that he found Born to Concrete timely and compelling because it spoke to quite contemporary issues and debates within the Australian literary world: "As visual aspects of poetry become more popular there's a real excitement in discovering the visual aspects of poetry's heritage." Subsequent events support this claim. An expanded version of Born to Concrete was put on by the University of Queensland Art Museum in 2013. This second exhibition sought greater regional diversity, for example, showcasing the role of Brisbane's Nicholas Zurbrugg, and it added other important individuals such as Vernon Ah Kee, Eugene Carchesio, Gordon Hookey, and Grant Stevens. A selection of pieces from the revamped Born to Concrete then appeared in a 2014 issue of Australian Poetry Journal along with essays and reminiscences by insider-practitioners. Jaya Savige positively reviewed both the Queensland show and the special journal issue in the Australian, commending them for publicizing a "remarkable," "diverse and energetic" body of work. [End Page 195] This essay continues this process of reassessment and recovery by discussing three works by a central figure in Australian visual poetics, Sweeney Reed (1945–79). Today's younger poets have grown up surrounded by digital technologies, and they are accustomed to communicating multimodally, that is, freely blending text, image, and sound. Unsurprisingly, they no longer feel swayed by once-common arguments that visual poetry is gimmicky or unserious, that, as Wallace Stevens once proclaimed, typographical play and other forms of visual experiment have "nothing to do with being alive," "nothing to do with the conflict between the poet and that of which his poems are made" (168). Reed's poetry may predate the internet era by a quarter century, but it unequivocally demonstrates that the deep attention that humanists have long devoted to print-based texts is just as crucial—and just as rewarding—when applied to hybrid visual-verbal forms of expression.2 ________ The son of the modernist painters Joy Hester and Albert Tucker, Sweeney Reed was adopted at an early age by John and Sunday Reed, art patrons and founders of the Heide Museum. A year spent in London in 1964–65 was transformative. He befriended Ian Hamilton Finlay and Bob Cobbing, participants in the international Concrete Poetry movement, and he worked at the Institute of Contemporary Art during Jasia Reichardt's influential show Between Painting and Poetry. After returning to Australia, he began energetically promoting visually expressive poetry and text-based visual art via galleries that he ran in Melbourne, first in Carlton and later in Fitzroy. He held exhibitions, organized poetry readings, and published broadsides, catalogues, and books under his own imprint. Reed himself was not prolific. As Linda Short explains, his finished works were often the outcome of "long gestation" and "continued notation and...

Glossolalia

Patrick Kindig is a graduate student at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he is working toward a master of fine arts in poetry and a PhD in English. His poems have appeared in various literary journals, including the Beloit Poetry Journal, Court Green, Fugue, and BLOOM, as well as in AJN (October 2016). His first chapbook, Dry Spell, was published by Porkbelly Press in 2016. “Glossolalia” © 2017 by Patrick Kindig. Contact author: [email protected]. Art of Nursing is coordinated by Amy M. Collins, managing editor: [email protected].

In conversation with Steffen Horstmann

As Agha Shahid Ali's student, Steffen Horstmann studied the history of the ghazal form and began writing his own ghazals in English. Horstmann's poems and book reviews have appeared in publications throughout the world, including Baltimore Review, Free State Review, Istanbul Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Oyez Review, Texas Poetry Journal and Tiferet. Horstmann has recently published his first book of ghazals, Jalsaghar.

Stevens v. Frost

Stevens v. Frost Joshua Kotin 1 OVER THEIR LONG and parallel careers, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost published poems in the same issue of a magazine only once—the first issue of The Measure: A Journal of Poetry in March 1921. Stevens’ contribution, “Cortège for Rosenbloom,” appeared in the middle of the issue, and was reprinted in the Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1921 and Year Book of American Poetry and in Harmonium (1923). Frost’s contribution, “The Aim Was Song,” concluded the issue and was reprinted in New Hampshire (1923).1 When read together, yet outside the context of the magazine, the poems seem to stage a philosophical debate. Stevens claims that the human world and natural world are distinct and irreconcilable. Frost claims that the human world and the natural world are complementary. The debate seems readymade for the classroom. Stevens v. Frost. Who wins? Conventional readings of both poems corroborate this description of the debate. In “Cortège,” Stevens examines two responses to death—a funeral procession and poetry—and finds them lacking. In the poem’s first three stanzas (of eight total), he mocks the procession: Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead And his finical carriers tread, On a hundred legs, the tread Of the dead. Rosenbloom is dead. They carry the wizened one Of the color of horn To the sullen hill, Treading a tread In unison for the dead. Rosenbloom is dead. The tread of the carriers does not halt [End Page 81] On the hill, but turns Up the sky. They are bearing his body into the sky. (“Cortège” 10) The procession is grotesque. “[C]arriers” connotes “contagion” and “carrion.” “[H]undred legs” conjures a centipede. The unified, constant tread is a mark of groupthink. The procession cannot comprehend the truth: “Rosenbloom is dead”—and will not ascend to heaven. Eleanor Cook identifies “Cortège” as one of Stevens’ “antiheaven poems” (100). Jahan Ramazani agrees, claiming that the poem is an attack on “institutional mourning”: “Attacking institutional mourning, Stevens ridicules the denial of death not only in religious custom but also in the elegy’s formal apotheosis—the translations of Dido, Adonais, Arthur Hallam, and many others into the sky’s latest stars” (574). These interpretations accord with Stevens’ own comments about “Cortège.” In a letter to William Stanley Braithwaite about the poem in 1921, Stevens laments the difficulty of representing death: “From time immemorial the philosophers and other scene painters have daubed the sky with dazzle paint. But it all comes down to the proverbial six feet of earth in the end” (L 223). Yet Stevens does not exempt himself from ridicule. (Yvor Winters describes Stevens’ tone throughout Harmonium as “self-ridicule” [443].) In the seventh (and penultimate) stanza, Stevens imagines a poem that would accurately represent death: To a jabber of doom And a jumble of words Of the intense poem Of the strictest prose Of Rosenbloom. (“Cortège” 11) This “intense poem / Of the strictest prose” is not the poem we are reading—and not a poem Stevens is able to write. For it would be a poem that captures death—not another’s death or even the experience of dying, but death itself. This aspect of the natural world—the noumenal, the real—is inaccessible. The only alternatives to “dazzle paint” are mere fact (“Rosen-bloom is dead”) and clichés (“the proverbial six feet of earth”). As if anticipating the contents of The Measure, Stevens concludes the fifth stanza with a description of the procession treading “In a region of frost, / Viewing the frost” (10). A mere eleven pages later, Frost appears—with a sixteen-line poem about the compatibility of the human world and natural world. “The Aim Was Song” opens: [End Page 82] Before man came to blow it right The wind once blew itself untaught And did its loudest day and night In any rough place where it caught. Man came to tell it what was wrong. It hadn’t found the place to blow; It blew too hard: the aim was song; And listen—how it ought to go. (“Aim” 22) The narrative is simple. The wind blows harshly and arbitrarily...

Grandson

Grandson Robert Nazarene (bio) Why are there searchlights beneath the barn? Those are the babies, you say. What are they seeking? Un- bridled sin. Strew it everywhere. Follow the signposts to Jannatul Baqi. Bring the babies. Sledge their teeth into the rocks. Jannatul Baqi is a cemetery in Saudi Arabia where the gravesite of the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad is located. [End Page 45] Robert Nazarene Robert Nazarene founded margie /IntuiT House where he published the winning volume for The National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for 2006. His two collections are Church (2006) and Empire de la Mort, forthcoming this year. He is now publisher and editor-in-chief at the American Journal of Poetry. Copyright © 2017 University of Nebraska Press

Wedding Wind

Wedding Wind David Havird (bio) Beyond the pines, which hid, except for the chimney, a closed-off-season beachside taverna, from up on the slope where, relics ourselves, we lodged in a derelict windmill, the blue looked firm enough to float a rock without a ripple of worry. Even so, my gaze, as though white-robed, a savior, skimmed to the boat in the cove, then stepped from the solid blue of the bay to shelves of bluer schist, a pilgrim, on up to the whitewashed church on its finger of rock to exchange with the icon a kiss for a healing look from the Virgin. Wind by evening. We took our sunset walk around the wind-chopped cove, the sailboat-pitching cove, along the cliffside path despite not only the wind but also the crowd thronging the church. A wedding, yes. Among the dusty cars that choked the lot was one in a wind-whipped frenzy of streamers. The spirit aroused, of course, in us a vision of ours. By ten, electric guitars were yowling. The pines—were they dancing with wind or light from the woken taverna? The wind swelled with the odor of meat fat sizzling on coals; the taverna was smoking. Or wasn’t it thunder that shook us, that fiendish, vibrating bass, [End Page 384] and cats, the feral ones fed by our landlord to battle the vipers, serpents of lightning? In bed as though on board, we drowsily hoisted a sail too suddenly pregnant with wind—our rope-burned hands like urgent semaphores, like creaking blades up on the slope conducting the wind. [End Page 385] David Havird DAVID HAVIRD has other new work in The American Journal of Poetry and Literary Matters. He is the author of two collections of poems, Map Home (2013) and Penelope’s Design (2010), which won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. He teaches at Centenary College of Louisiana. Copyright © 2017 David Havird

Violet

Violet, and: Horse Rachel Blum (bio) These two poems will be included in my first book, “The Doctor of Flowers,” forthcoming from 3: A Taos Press. Among the themes of this collection are the loss of my daughter to pediatric cancer, grief, dream, and the experience of spirit. Violet For Michaela In memory of Isabel In temple between my daughters, one passed ten years now, so one in form and one a cloud of light still reaching for my hand, a concentration in the air, or sound from a shell ground to sand a thousand years ago— while the other takes my hand in hers, as if she feels her sister near as when they lay [End Page 153] against each other, kittens in a box of sunlight or cord connected birds— two parts of the one body— mine— soul hopes— one here and one there, and all among us this random crossing over to violet. [End Page 154] Horse In this dream I am writing in the shape of a horse, her tail like smoke or wind, her breath frost or the white energy of an angel whose spirit she mouths she is not sensible anymore— [End Page 155] Rachel Blum Rachel Blum lives in the United States, in Philadelphia. Her poems have recently appeared in American Literary Review, Taos Journal of Poetry, Confrontation, California Quarterly, and Shambhala Times. rachelblumpoetry@gmail.com Copyright © 2017 The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc

Snake Cane

Snake Cane Annie Woodford (bio) Norman Amos Sometimes Virginia Creeper,a tendril of honeysuckle or wildgrape, will wind around the limbof a young hickory and, as both grow,squeeze its spiral into the wick.Old women who tap the groundbefore they walk, ready to rap dangeron its head, tobacco farmers well-versedin the habits of serpents, carry such twisted sticks.Search for them in our tick-breeding woods—mumbo-jumbo of undergrowth, full-throatedgreen, saplings bent, knitted together with briars,mayapples pushing past skunk cabbagesand then the dying that comes with the first frost,oak leaves baked brown and sycamore platterscurling inward on the ground, poison ivydried up to one hairy vine thick as a man's wrist.Step down into the furrows of an old road bed,deer stand draped in black quiet as wildness itself,easy to miss among the doe-legged trees.Daddy sang, I'm the man who rode the mulearound the world, voice ragged as a forgottentrotline. I was born ten thousand years ago.Bright leaf tobacco cured in the smoke.I tended the low fires. Black night rustledup close to me and sometimes I caught a glimpseof a thing. The cedars breathed by the fence row.You have to find the wood first, branch of desire [End Page 76] wound round with grapevine, nearly strangledand then: growing on anyway.I'll paint it like a shining rattlesnake,body spinning up the stick.Your hand will rest on its head,devil eyes subdued, looking up at you,fangs following the way the handle bends,benign in their whiteness, polished by handsweatand the oily traces of a hundred dusty hunts—mountain feists yapping along with the rhythmof the staff, rabbit cry dark as dried bloodin the autumn wind. Silent rattles cover the endthat hits the dirt, seeking strikesin high summer's high grass,feeling a human way through deep leaves,hollow-wise, rocks holding heat,or shaking the snake-rich shadows of blackberry canesbefore the hand reaches in for the fruit. [End Page 77] Annie Woodford A descendant of mountain people who moved to work in the mills that once flourished in the Virginia Piedmont, Annie Woodford now lives and teaches community college English in Roanoke, Virginia. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Chattahoochee Review, Bluestem, Tar River Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Appalachian Journal, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Copyright © 2017 Berea College

Zero Gravity

Zero Gravity Peter Leight (bio) Zero Gravity, Peter Leight, Poetry After a few months of diminished or declining gravity, I'm starting to drift. Drifting because of zero gravity. It's not very relaxing, I think it's invasive like a species with no real competition. I'm having trouble putting my body down comfortably where it belongs, on the floor or in a chair, for instance. Nothing is holding me down, it's disappointing, it's definitely disturbing. When I try to read my eyes float out to the margins of the page, into the empty space along the edge. I'm not even angry, unable to make a fist—I'm not even holding on to the argument I'm making right now, it makes me feel young, young enough not to be here. Zero is the absence of attachment. Zero of anything is zero is the rule of nothing, it has everything it needs, I think this is where the concept of needlessness comes from. There's no need to reach for something when nothing is reaching, I believe that's when you stop reaching. [End Page 124] If my hands are swollen it's only because of something that isn't there. When you say nothing or say nothing I'm not even sure I believe you, I mean how does one love zero, as Villiers de L'Isle Adam said. When I start drifting I close the door, locking the door and putting the key away in a safe place where nobody is going to find it. I'm alone in my room, drifting around the room. Right now I think there isn't anything to do, because zero is pure desertion. When I look at my watch I don't even recognize the time, zero. Nothing is going to happen right now. Zero. [End Page 125] Peter Leight peter leight lives in Amherst, MA. He has previously published poems in Paris Review, AGNI, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Matter, and other magazines. Copyright © 2017 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Tree Watching

Tree Watching Maren O. Mitchell (bio) Named the false mimosa, the locust'sfine leaves droop in sleep,allowing rain to feed growth beneath. Between house lights and other lights of night,my locust gathers fantasies,merging with the always-wind down the mountain that determines what moves and how,with temperatures that wake skin,with sounds from land, in air— leading me in and out of wildernesses.Real enough, with thorns to not step on in summer,branches to pick up gingerly in autumn, I deliberately kill its advancing young,not needing to build my ships to discover new lands,grow grapes to brew dreams. As I hike home down Forge Mountain,blended to woods, the locust is not;to communicate, I don't climb, never made it a point to touch;but from the roof,the best of leaf cleaning, [End Page 78] our trunks are most equal,and immune, safe from tomorrow,I'm as tall as I can be. Last to bud and leaf,last to shed,faithful to the two true seasons, the fourth year it exploded—Appalachian desert tree,royally raining white blossomssweet as writing after drought. Its dryad-harboring trunk,so canyoned it could be dead,waits to crush the house from late fall to late spring; each spring I'm sure that, bored,it finally will; each fall hope it's evolvedinto evergreen, fooling all. [End Page 79] Maren O. Mitchell Maren O. Mitchell's poems have appeared in Iodine Poetry Journal, The Lake (UK), Appalachian Heritage, The South Carolina Review, Hotel Amerika, Southern Humanities Review, The Classical Outlook, Town Creek Poetry, The Journal of Kentucky Studies, Appalachian Journal, and elsewhere. Her work is forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Chiron Review, and Poetry East. She lives with her husband in the mountains of Georgia. Copyright © 2017 Berea College

Letter to an English Teacher, and: Letter to Wendell Berry, and: The Time My Uncle Took Me Fishing, and: Grandfather and His Simultaneous Eyes, and: Self-Portrait with Twine

Letter to an English Teacher, and: Letter to Wendell Berry, and: The Time My Uncle Took Me Fishing, and: Grandfather and His Simultaneous Eyes, and: Self-Portrait with Twine Jeanne Lutz (bio) Letter to an English Teacher Jeanne Lutz (bio) because today the fieldsare too wet to work inI take a walk to eagle lakeand see not an eagle but a heronstanding on a soggy logjust off the wooded shore you would knowexactly what kind of heron it isthe latin gray this or the latin gray thatbut to me this heron is simplythe color-of-rain heron and it does not seem to takemuch interest in meor what's going on in the water it is so stillthat the fishermen walking bydo not point it out the heron is a faulkner-looking birduntidylike a half-folded umbrella [End Page 115] and meI guess I'm just another evewho will never get it right I left his heartbroke my own and even though I still think the appleis the best thingthat ever happened to women that there is no paradise lostonly paradise turned down it doesn't mean I don't miss it I remember all those years agositting in your classroomlooking out the windowwhile you read thoreau to usin your low devoted voiceI watched the nunshang their laundry on the linethose long black stockingslifting in the wind and even nowwhen I am no longerthat young girlin the fluttering dressyou'd think I'd have learneda thing or two since thenbut no I get too closeas I always do [End Page 116] and the heron takes of unhurriedly sailing languidly east never quite knowingwhat to dowith its legs [End Page 117] Jeanne Lutz Meet the Author "I am so very appreciative of the strong women who raised me. I mean literally strong, the kind of strong women who could carry a tree stump under each arm while walking across the yard and chew out the milkman for parking his truck in their way. But if I am a poet, it is because of the men who raised me. The kind of men brought to their knees by the beautiful, supple world around them. My father often read Wendell Berry's poetry, stories, and essays to me. Ha!—I remember when I was eleven and my parents wouldn't let me get a horse. I actually wrote to Mr. Berry asking him to adopt me. To this day, his wisdom, all his barbaric yawping, and the peace he finds in wild things keeps me brave. And strong. My poems, then, chronicle the childhood I had on our dairy farm, explore the concerns I have now about being a smalltime, organic farmer surrounded by conventional global farmers who have given up their commitment to living soulfully in their place on the land, and they reveal the susceptible landscapes of the heart everyone traverses no matter where they live." Jeanne Lutz is the author of the chapbook Hearts and Harrows. Her work has appeared in Conduit; NonBinary Review; Tinderbox Poetry Journal; Poetry City, USA; and on KAXE radio. She divides her time between the farm and working at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Copyright © 2017 The Curators of the University of Missouri Letter to Wendell Berry Jeanne Lutz (bio) it is still winternot winter again but still winterso maybe the dark mouths of the right vowelsthe hips and shoulders of the best consonantsor even one sensual rune won't appear on this pagebut I wanted you to know I'm tryingI've gone organic non-GMOthe fencerows bang and jangle with rose haw and blue jaysmy sheep and pigs and cowslike my fields are not numberedbut given names based on character and potentialand everywhere chickens run freeI worry thoughabout it not being enoughabout the privilege of feeding othersthe fate of nature everywhereall the weeds I know I will not have...

Notes to the Name and Its Translation, and: Let There Be

Notes to the Name and Its Translation, and: Let There Be Cintia Santana (bio) Notes to the Name and Its Translation Cintia Santana Cintia Santana’s work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Missouri Review, RHINO, and elsewhere. Footnotes 1. The graffito suggests that the correct pronunciation was either lost or deliberately avoided. 2. The hammer of high wind. The editors recommend this usage in reading aloud, but others may wish to follow their own custom (e.g. tea cup clatter; rhythm of the rails; ring tone rising). 3. Historically, translations into English allude to a miniature person said to exist in the mind, with some exceptions, notably “Reading Whitman in the Grass.” 4. This rendering, on doubtful grounds, introduces an overly male emphasis through its constant use of “He.” Compare with “You are the alpha and the asshole. The f’d up aleph.” 5. “Too bad! Too bad!” (Ger.) 6. Some explanation is in order. 7. Not the palm but the shadow of the palm. 8. Every hair of thine. The euphemism has fallen out of modern usage. 9. That is, an ideal mirror, lossless. 10. Orb of the eye. Dark water. Perhaps a joke. 11. Useful in this regard is Hart Crane’s statement: “The street car device is the most concrete symbol I could find.” 12. The fever underneath the hand. 13. Here, a loud knock on the roof at night. A later folio indicates the single tolling of a bell. 14. Perpetual motion (Latin). 15. “So I go to the stranger’s body and bend. I split my lip on the bone of his cheek and lick the salt from the spoon of his back. The day breaks behind his shoulder by shades. I sleep then and sleep and wake with him to eat” (Selected Letters, p. 28). 16. “You can learn more from the shadow than from the object itself” (Military Counter Surveillance Manual, Chapter 5, Lesson XXIII). 17. Blinded and thereby granted the gift of prophecy. 18. Triangular insert in the seam of a garment. Allows expansion. 19. Originally, a summer house. Here, by extension, the nationalist movement, and even the whole façade of the temporal world. May also suggest: needle and points on a compass; godwit, knot, rail, and ruff; open pleasure-boats decorated with large artificial swans that circulate on a pond during summer months; the high-heeled boot worn by Greek tragic actors as well as the “sock” or light shoe worn in comedies; the mariposa plum, a many-colored meadow; goat path; rainspout, flip-flops in the rain; the forked root of the mandrake; the hum in the mouth; the sweet cane. 20. All the while, the body, breathing. 21. Backlit. 22. In an interview, Del Berg, the last living volunteer to fight as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade states, “It bothers me a little that at ninety-nine I might die any minute because I have a lot of other things I want to do!” 23. The extant fragment reads, “What I miss most about fishing is reading the water.” [End Page 116] Let There Be light you said. And there was light. And there was lack.Let there be life you said. And it was lush with loss. Let there be lion and there was lion. And there was lamb.Let lion and lamb be divided. Luna moth from moon. And it was so. Let there be laughter you said. And there was laughter. Lap and lick.Loin and purr. Lip. Loop. Leash—there was law. There was lynch. Látigo. Luftwaffe. Land and labor. Lather and lathe. Leave, longing, lesson. Yes, there was lesson, too.And lesser. And least. Loam and leaf. Load, ligature, and lie. Yes, there was lie. Lapse. And lake. Luck and leap. Little by little. Letter by letter. And it was late. And there was bloom. [End Page 117] Copyright © 2017 Pleiades and Pleiades Press