To My Living Wife

By Sarah Anderson

I did not know how to be dead at the beginning. Someone came to tell you right before our child was born. The airplane crashing, the force, they must have said.

No sign of the plane, only a glistening Chesapeake Bay. You are too empty to forgive me. I shout at the asphalt the wheels never hit.

My love, a crippled animal hides itself, heals itself alone. I see you have joined the fog, chestnut tree, November. The branches have what they need. To forgive me, the water, the accident.

My great uncle served on the USS Intrepid and was chief experimental test pilot at Chance Vought Aircraft in the late 1940’s. He was killed flying an XF7U-1

Find more of Sarah’s work on here site at www.thewordbarn.com

Bill

By C. Quintana

I named my inner critic Bill,

then he became my colleague

Sparkling grey eyes; salt-and-pepper hair—

Why are you here, Bill? Why are you hurting?

Across my desk in the ivory armchair—

Smile an inch from crying

I named my inner critic Bill

My inner critic Bill named I

I, Bill, inner named critic, my

Critic Bill named my inner I

The Riot

By Lily Nord

the Dudes pour lavender syrup you made by hand

into their tea with reckless abandon

say the Ito En you drink tastes like dirt

and I tap your leg- trade sushi rolls across the table laugh

at the top of their lungs pouring air into the tent

you and I, dead sober, are flying

four feet from the riot floating

behind our own heads

and I can see what you want in our mind’s eye:

ham and roast beef bitter cheese thick bread

but you watch us eat our rolls and curl up

under my shoulder

Discover more of Lily Nord’s work on her website at lilynord.com

TEN ALBUM COVERS

By Major Jackson

1.

The future is a nameless, blind piano man

fingering some groove out

of dead art from the Roman Empire.


2.

This summer, I did my best to forget

the moon, pale-faced traveler

of the skies, but remained a prisoner

to his dusty metaphors.


3.

When I can’t sleep,

I count all my likes.


4.

This morning I read Zagajewski

who recently vanished into a quantum

of light. I think I treasure most his clarity

which like my belief in art seems endless.


5.

On the kitchen counter, right now:

three sunflowers in a clear vase stretching

the day into a single filament of wonder.


6.

No one knows why sometimes

when reading a book, the face contorts

into a golden wildfire at night.


7.

What I am talking about is my funeral

where all the pallbearers are Yoruba priests passing

my body once again through a field of summer.


8.

The fate of the living is to abandon their accents,

our first instruments, then to return

home years later to retrieve them.


9.

Tack this up on your wall.

I want you to feel this energy,

cellphones smoldering

over a city.


10.

A fox is a suffering creature

fossilized in the fingers

of a piano player, exploding

into a feverish rift,

drowning God’s silence.

mel, melit, mellifluous

By Lydia Kegler

A way of looking at body with hidden petals exposed, a way to become intimate with the perfection of anatomy. My work is a process of gilding the parts of body that have been historically marginalized. Certain places in the body are coated in shame, kept underground, wrapped in a fear of the nonbinary, the mystical, the queer, the feminine, the sexual. Where we observe preciousness in the biology of the blossom, we can too come to cherish the anatomy of the uterus, the clitoris, the labia, all of the glands, all of the organs. We can allow ourselves to be moved by the organs that persuade us to open and close. I intend to provoke a multifaceted understanding of anatomy. To have reverence for the human body, and how it is fitted together with incredible proportion. With gold leaf I paint the shrouded areas of pleasure. Glittering over all of the skin, blood and bone that has been colonized is returning to what is innate, what is due to us in having a body.

Check out more of Lydia’s work here.

Two Poems By Sylvia Jones

Turning the Head of a Rake On Its Side

Robitussin & tourmaline. I licked Gwendolyn Brooks’ grave in a fever dream. I wasn’t afraid of

dying on the flight home. Dextromorphathan, I was better with words when I wasn’t with them.

Little is new—written small, on a mirror in Philadelphia next to the hole in the wall in the

shape of my running body. One ear then the other. Barely visible in the dust of the standing

crowd. So much is different but I am not better. In my literary dreams, Carl Phillips plays me—

playing myself. Norman Mailer gives me a handjob. During intermission Susan Sontag whispers

in my ear that she has to go to the bathroom. Perhaps this is blasphemous, but Phil Levine is

there too. I swear to God. In the bathroom with Susan together in perfect unison reciting Auden.

On a Line by Wojahn

Put a sparrow in the poem and make sure you do not become this sparrow

Put a sparrow in the poem and make sure you do not become this sparrow

Put a sparrow in the poem and make sure you do not become this sparrow

Put a sparrow in the poem and make sure you do not become this sparrow

Put a sparrow in the poem and make sure you do not become this sparrow

Put a sparrow in the poem and make sure you do not become this sparrow

Put a sparrow in the poem and make sure you do not become this sparrow

Put a sparrow in the poem and make sure you do not become this sparrow

Put a sparrow in the poem and make sure you do not become this sparrow

Put a sparrow in the poem and make sure you do not become this sparrow

Put a sparrow in the poem and make sure you do not become this sparrow

Put a sparrow in the poem and make sure you do not become this sparrow

Put a sparrow in the poem and make sure you do not become this sparrow

Put a sparrow in the poem and make sure you do not become this sparrow

Headline Poems

By Lior Torenberg

Headline Poem Form:
Line #1: A headline
Line #2: Something you remember
Line #3: Something you forget
Line #4: A realization

Headline Poem #1
Here's the best way to worry
The avocados are busy with rot &
my glasses have sat untouched for a month.
Disuse can be a totem, too

Headline Poem #2
Maybe we’re too horny
The spines of certain books,
the summer-plump of fresh oranges
Touching can feel like being touched

Headline Poem #3
What we pretend to know
can kill us. So can too much water.
You never drink water, I guess
you never felt the need

Headline Poem #4
How to stop giving bad advice:
fill the bird feeder with seeds & suet &
leave the coop half-finished all winter
A year can only hold one season

Headline Poem #5
Doctors are being told whom to save
I wanted a bright blue cast, a fracture
like the wing of the bird you nursed to health.
It seems that every bird I see is blue.

Wandering Land

by Josh Aaron Siegel

After Land by Agha Shahid Ali

There is no moon here since my father left across the sea. No light to guide me out of the valley when the others have shuffled away. 

At night I push my ear to the wall so I can listen to the families that surround

me knees between my arms waiting for the sound. 

Will the crowd hold their cries When

milk returns to this blessed land? 

As my father says the lights of the old town streaking the whites of his eyes –When milk turns to yogurt there is no going back not even in dreams– 

I go out past fields by stone roads where shepherds point to the sky as a greeting. I go to the hill that looks out over the water and trace my finger along the horizon line. 

Each night I swear the line inches upwards. Maybe the water will take over the sky and surround the missing moon, surround the lights in my father’s eyes, surround me until we can’t see to see 

At the moment the heart is drowned, Where does

the home live on, oh Promised Land? 

–Not even in memory– says my father –can the home live on– because no matter where the bombs drop, no matter where fate points her wrinkled finger 

We are all heading arms outstretched to a land where memory has no place but there’s no stopping the images from holding me in place, 

the white capped men who sold candied dates, the cellphone sales woman who tried to move away but couldn’t 

the girl who wore jeans 

These wanderers pull my hands down connect my fingers to the pavement until I can no longer raise my arms 

Another Communion

by Alejandro Villa Vasquez

I am in that stellar world again

surrounded by archangels, by sugar rivers.

My mother pink with pregnancy.

Where the world — oh, hug me — is

a tamarind as it never was.

Never not since my father was

Ha-mes, not Jaymez;

not since my mother’s manicure, little red mirrors

reflecting the American sun in the South.

Rose and robin’s egg melt like corn flour.

This ground sings.

Only the small strike of an accent

could speak our language as it was.

I spread to hug the belly of the mountainside.

The vision swift, impossible I admit.

Sleep fails and that world burst 

loud as a belt on the leg.

The real, white sun rips me back

a child is being beaten —

I drink the vinegar of truth

like my First Communion,

while azure-pinched eyes watch:

what can you teach a body

by Raisa Tolchinsky

a bird caught in a stairway only knows how to fly upwards

even when the only way out is through the black iron bars

of the gate on the ground floor

 

still, we kept batting at it with a broom,

my brother and i, although

for many years i did not understand

there was nothing to do but wait.

 

the first day of track season

the coach scrubbed the starter pistol's

orange plastic parts: stirrup pin,

hammer,

plunger spring,

caliber

weighed each piece in his palm—

 

the gun is just as important as the running,

he said, the running is less important than knowing

when to run:

nose to asphalt on the track

my little ritual, imagining myself

fast-twitch wings.

 

when i heard the shot on howard st

when i saw the boy stumbling forward

from that blue square of sky i felt no fear

 

had already started running,     had trained for this

without knowing it was what i had been training for,

no time to think

how this gun

had a bullet.

 

now i cannot stop thinking of how

i should have run towards him—

 

for months i have walked into red punches

thrown tires, whipped chains

preparing for 2 minutes

of stepping willingly

into the hardest part.

 

after my first fight, e. & i on the locker room floor.

i said, bring me back

from the dead.

bring me back.

& when the blue bruises appeared

on my back,

i could not trace their source.

what is the difference between hurt and hymn?

between praise and hunger?

how many days did we return home to find the bird

still in the stairwell,

mistaking windows for exits?

(sound of wings tapping glass)

the flying upwards is in their bones,

they will do it even if

it kills them

Play Therapy

by Meisha Rosenberg

“Sniper,” asserts my six-year-old son. His police survey the Lego family of the empty wooden doll house. Stand-ins for us mutely stub about: mother, father, son, and, playing the part of our German Shepherd mix, a Schleich replica. “Wait,” I say, “You can’t arrest someone if you don’t have a witness.” The therapist has told me to do this, to insert my comments, help my son learn other perspectives.

The wind outside pushes clouds, making their shadows fall on the doll house. “There must be some mistake,” I simper, not knowing any other voice for a mother, nor when I began filling and emptying cups, mornings all so early.

The police follow the two-inch Lego father, although there are no stairs for him, in his checkered red shirt, 3 o’clock shadow, no-knee legs that pop off. We follow, rising to the attic, where the officer scans us with his ultrasonic detector. “Drugs,” my officer-son concludes.

How does he already know?

How willingly we go into the Playmobil van, where I negotiate for our release. My talk of rights is not acknowledged by the spy, flamboyant in orange and white—the Lord of the disco with surveillance headgear—recruited to be taxi driver. After he drops us off, the police shoot him.

Our figures get home, feed the dog, and, collapsing on the floor, see there are no locks or latches and the wind and clouds pass through us.

On Half Moon Beach

by Joey Gould

I will love you again 

dear me     you stumbler

you swimmer     you walking

past the boy calling your name     hey

I will write of calling     you will 

right the need     to be called of the need

of that need     someone loved your love

but not you     can I ask you

not to feel like you always have to ask     

having circled yourself too long     looking 

down     a pile of lanky sticks     auguring 

every time you butterflied a dead breast

looking in the fridge for out-of-codes

instead of lunch     auguring sour

spoilage     circling against your own

call song     dear heart I don’t want you 

to be sad     anymore I wish

you’ll be happy     you survived


listen:     try to swallow 

a compliment     don’t take it 

to the windshield     unfortunate 

cicada     catch it   keep those words 

in a jar on the stand     where you lay 

your wallet     bring it to the beach

take off your shirt     go wading

with it     introduce it to your sadness

so they can be friends

Earth Time

by Shuyi Yin

The gaze of the moan birds flare

through shadows of godless moonlight.

A tortoise carrying his black and yellow shell

hears the summon from the sea waves

and crawls slowly across the midsummer

grass with its one thousand years'

practice of asceticism.

A cliff awaits.

Drops of lavender oil

trickle down into the sea, as it stretches

of canvas, unbreathable.

Underneath lives a jellyfish called Lonesome Tom.

He has no eyes, no ears, mouth, heart or brain.

No bones, no spine. He never feels lonely.

Yesterday, he paved his floors with gold

and drank a bottle of vodka,

then went to a funeral of red sea urchins

like the one two hundred years ago—

Koi Hanako's.

She once had a room carpeted

with screaming light.

An owl picks up salt and stone from the seabed,

pecks a robin’s eggs, enters the bellies of the ducks,

digs deep into the marrow of the dragonfly.

Two Poems by Miranda Dennis

Too Many Boys in the Basement

One is enough, and anyway, they’re men.

Kudzu not lichen. Lichen not human.

Human not tulips. Tulips not loam.

To be only loam, to be ready at the touch

for one replication of the universe.

A lightbulb to resemble the daylight,

the daylight eager to erase the night,

night to settle, sure of itself, as a man

in the yard grabs dog by the collar,

drags dog to the ground. Dog of highest

heaven, I’d rather elevate the dog.

 

Fall Off the Bone

That’s what the roast is supposed to do, so it does.

Oh that I were as well-behaved.

*

If you pray to the bone will you learn

what the bone knows? Or will

you just be the letterhead

on naked paper? Will you

finetune your cuticles

to catch degree by degree

the shift in wind? How will

the spirit sing in your heavy

heart? How will the garden

untended make song

out of streelights?

How low does an alley go

before it meets the sea again?

What is the railroad’s rattle doing

to one loose bulb?

*

Your body is wrong. Your body is wrong as a machine full of lead. Your body doesn’t know

itself. Your knee turns out. Think of your body as a landmine. Think of your body as knotted

garden hose. How could God live in your palm? How, when clenching in your sleep? How, when

you slap an alarm to wake yourself up? If your body knew itself, you’d be up to feed the

chickens before dawn. You’d be someone’s pastoral landscape, wrought in oils so thick you can

taste it, taste the river shuddering through fertile soil. You’d be the sunset at a woman’s back as

she calls to her children, somewhere out of frame, who are skinny with summer, a Catherine

wheel of knees.