Aidan Cooper

December 2024 Poetry Feature #1: New Work from our Contributors

December 12, 2024 Poetry

Works by JEN JABAILY-BLACKBURN and DIANA KEREN LEE

Table of Contents:

Jen Jabaily-Blackburn: “Archeological, Atlantic” and “Velvel”
Diana Keren Lee: “Living Together” and “Living Alone”

Archaeological, Atlantic
By Jen Jabaily-Blackburn

A morsel of conventional wisdom: Never use the word
boring in a poem because then they
can call your poem boring. The boring sponge can’t
do everything, but can make holes in oysters, & for the boring sponge, it’s
enough. I miss boring things like gathering mussel shells
for no one. I miss being so bored that time felt physical, an un-
governable cat sleeping over my heart. I have, I’m told, an archaeologist’s
heart. I have, I’m told, an archaeologist’s soul. An archaeologist’s eye, so

Waters of Reclamation: Raychelle Heath Interviews Caroline M. Mar

November 11, 2024 Interviews

RAYCHELLE HEATH sits down with CAROLINE M. MAR to discuss reconciliation, poetic form, and Caroline’s new chapbook, Dream of the Lake.

Raychelle Heath: Dream of the Lake is such a beautiful read, and I have so many questions. Our first encounter with the lake takes us through the stages of drowning. So I’m wondering, how do you see that as an entry point into the world of the book? And why did you want the reader to encounter the lake this way first?

Caroline M. Mar: That’s a good question. I had been trying to write poems about Lake Tahoe for several years and the poems were not working. They were very sentimental, or I couldn’t get beyond “Gosh, it’s so pretty.” Because it is really beautiful. It is spectacular in a way that defies description. It was easy for me to get lost in all of the beauty of it, but I knew that that wasn’t complicated enough. I knew that I was trying to ask some pretty complicated questions of myself, of my reader, and of the landscape.

Wedding Vows

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By WYATT TOWNLEY

Falling is an art. No one, not even the preacher,
can tell you the way to your knees in the night.

Watch the rain. It practices its landing
on everything, drumming the roof, the car,

the pond. Watch the leaves, each a teacher
of twirl, the dance from branch to grass.

From window to pavement, the man was laughing
all the way down. However he landed, it was

hardly over. Now he’s called wise.
Walking is falling forward. Running

is falling faster. Watch the dark. It falls
so slowly while the sun yanks the rug

out from under you. At night some fall over
a book into a story. Some fall

for each other. We have fallen all the way
here. We could do it in our sleep. And we do. We do.

Wyatt Townley is Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita. Her work has been read on NPR and published in journals of all stripes, from New Letters to Newsweek, North American Review to The Paris Review, Yoga Journal to Scientific American. Her latest book of poems is Rewriting the Body. More at WyattTownley.com

[Purchase Issue 28 here.]

Forever Red

October 21, 2024 Catalan Portfolio, Fiction, Issue 28, Issue 28 Fiction, Translation

By TINA VALLÈS
Translated by SAMANTHA MATEO

Whenever there’s any discussion of the hunger that marked the years following the Spanish Civil War, I’m reminded of the story about my paternal great-grandmother and the apple. My father says her name, halting at that g that separated her from all the other Annas. Maria Agna. No family dinner passed without mention of that apple. But, after so many years, I can’t quite remember if it’s an apple or a peach. My father always said the basket his grandmother carried back from the field emitted a potent scent, but I don’t think apples smell strongly enough that you could pick them out while driving in a truck a couple of meters away.

Akoloute (Sequi Me)

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By ELIZABETH L. HODGES

Tracing dusty footprints, you can be led
to fornix, to tombs, the circus and bars,
to my lupan, my cell, my earthen bed;
what waits is not secret—see what I are?
I’m not a barmaid, an actor or slave;
I’m not being cursed because I had sinned—
I’m earning my keep in this grisly trade.
For that I am traif, but come along in.
I’ll lead you to places you’ve never had;
to hell in a basket: one bloody as.

Ponderosa

October 21, 2024 Fiction, Issue 28, Issue 28 Fiction

By SHANE CASTLE

Laughlin learned to hear on the hobby farm in Montana. One late afternoon, the summer he and Cassie bought the five hillside acres outside Helena, he was setting wood posts for the new corral when he heard a sound among the ponderosas toward the top of their property. It was like nothing he’d heard before. He walked up the drive toward it. A breeze was swaying the tops of the trees, and he heard it again and imagined some kind of Mylar weather balloon, blown off course, deflated, stuck in a tree. That’s what the sound was like: someone blowing a taut edge. He remembered being a kid, his family visiting Meema and Peepa at their old place on Animas Creek. He remembered Peepa teaching him and his little brother, Tyler, to blow blades of grass like kazoos. Laughlin looked and looked but found nothing. He walked a while among the tall ponderosas, at times certain he was right under it, only to look up and see nothing, and it went on this way until that moment when dusk turned to dark, when, abruptly, the sound stopped.

Letter to Archilochus

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By MAURA STANTON

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog
knows one big thing.
—Archilochus, 680–645 BCE

Well, Archilochus, I guess your lyre
might help me mock, and maybe mourn, this loss—
today I broke the frosted Elvis glass
I bought at Graceland when the symposium
of poets toured the mansion.

In Montgomery County

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By THEA MATTHEWS

Maryland, 2020

My partner wears the panopticon,
and I carry the rope. Hungry
for the rush, the chase, we locate
the missing black calf
about two-tenths of a mile
from East Silver Spring.
He’s wearing a long-sleeve
jersey T-shirt, navy blue jeans.
He’s three and a half feet tall,
and I can tell his age means
nothing to him. In his mind,
he treads with no care.
The report says he threw
a basketball, knocked over
a computer, and ran off
the school premises.
He looks at us, begins to wail.
My partner grabs him by the arm.
There is no crying! I taunt.
To lasso a calf, cowboys
must first use their weight
to hold the animal down
and then tie the legs together.
Does your mama spank you?
The boy shakes his head.
I tie the boy down with––
She’s gonna spank you today.
I’m gonna ask her to do it.
He wails even louder,
and screams, “No!”
He’s hyperventilating.
I command him to stop.
When the mother arrives,
I affirm point-blank,
We want you to beat him.
Beat him down to size,
the size he fits into a curb drain.
Beat him with your hands.
You can smack that butt, repeatedly.
My partner pulls out his handcuffs
to handcuff the boy,
the boy whose wrists are like
two thin stocks of red tulips.
My partner affirms,
These are for people
who don’t want to listen
and don’t know how to act.
The boy feels the cold steel of erasure,
of his name replaced by numbers.
The boy needs to learn,
or else…
We warned him.

Thea Matthews is a poet, author, and editor of African and Indigenous Mexican descent. Originally from San Francisco, California, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. Read more at TheaMatthews.com.

[Purchase Issue 28 here.]

Forbes and Martha

October 2, 2024 Dispatches

By SARAH CARSON

Genessee County, Michigan

On the night hike through what Wikipedia calls the picturesque 383-acres of the For-Mar Nature Preserve and Arboretum, a man in ISO rated cold-weather cargo pants plays barred owl calls from YouTube, then recruits a kid with a headlamp to hold a Bluetooth speaker to a dogwood tree. I imagine the owls shake their heads in their hollow, that somewhere else in the dark of fallen branches, salamanders yawn, a doe wishes her fawn would settle.

Paper Summer

September 30, 2024 China Portfolio, Fiction

By YUNHAN FANG

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

By the summer of 2009, I found I was thinking less and less about the Wenchuan earthquake the year prior, in which 87,000 people had died, my father among them. That year, on the day of Xiazhi, I met a girl called Thirteen. We spent the night together, having sex and talking until the sky turned the color of moonstone.