Poetry

Indoles and Aphrodite

By LAKSHMI SUNDER

Aphrodite was whipped from the sea, spun from the foam of Oranos / Uranus.
In science class, I’m laughing at Uranus / your anus. Now, I’m cornered in timeout.
He wants me when I’m fresh, for my curves. He wants me when I’m fermented,

for my composting capabilities. I can grow something made from him.
But the daughter would be born with the worms, and it doesn’t take much for
worms to molt into Medusan snakes. Aphrodite was worshiped as a goddess

Indoles and Aphrodite
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Sunnyside

By JANUARY GILL O’NEIL

                        —for Joseph O. Legaspi

And when you whispered under your mask, I don’t think I can stand these two young lovers, bright as the low winter sun shining through the dingy subway car windows, I knew what you meant: maskless, giggling, boy holding girl by the waist, taking selfies on a gray seat made for two. We sat across, letting their tenderness reflect on us: her back to his chest making a hearth of their bodies while the train snakes its turn over the elevated tracks. Hi-rises loom over gentrified streets, the graffitied walls, a sign for $0.99 pizza—how old neighborhoods create a new belonging. Nothing jostles these two as they attend to their own happiness, not the train’s hard lurch, its rumble and squeal, this couple at the beginning of their desires, you turning to me with your brown eyes in the day’s last light as we approach our final stop.

Sunnyside
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At Basilica Notre-Dame

By MICHELLE LEWIS

 

To say you cannot stand inside the sky and still see its blue
is a way of understanding longing. But here in Penne-d’Agenais,
my favorite lesson doesn’t hold: step over the threshold and
you are all in, Hail Queen in Latin exclaiming from its underside
above a carousel of vibrant glass. It isn’t ancient, but it is pleasing
for a Sunday. Nor is it really a basilica—just a church no one troubles
to diminish. Our guide jabs his thumb at the confessional smiling, and
I mime looking at my wrist, mouth, How much time do they have?
Nothing is very beautiful. They say it’s where a shepherd sheltering
in the ruins prayed for a goat and one appeared. Our pilgrimage is
for foie gras and wine. All day I think of how last week when I left
someone, I turned and they were still there waving. Of Plath writing,
The train leaves a line of breath. In truth, I’m desperate for a world I can
touch: limestone dissolving along the cave’s joints, parched earth that
extends the salvia’s roots. Not even we would exist without constraints.
The last time we saw each other, we had sex in the extra room then
made the bed to look untouched. You smoothed your hand over it like a
benediction. I crossed into the open air, your eyes flints of mica through
the glass. The far / Fields melt my heart. I would have left my whole body
there. Would scatter what was left over the plush acres of tobacco in
the Lot-et-Garonne, over the cherry trees hung low with fruit, to know
how it would feel to love this wildly, without purpose, and be forgiven.

 

[Purchase Issue 27 here.] 

 

Michelle Lewis is the author of Animul/Flame and the forthcoming Spare. Her poetry has appeared in places like Bennington Review, Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, Hunger Mountain, and Denver Quarterly.

At Basilica Notre-Dame
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April 2024 Poetry Feature: New Metamorphoses

By ALAN BAER, CARLIE HOFFMAN, CAMPBELL MCGRATH, and FARAH PETERSON.

Table of Contents:

  • Campbell McGrath, “Hendrixiana”
  • Carlie Hoffman, “A Condo for Sale Overlooking the Cemetery in Kearny, NJ” and “Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen County Community College”
  • Farah Peterson, “Daedalus in Exile” and “Pasiphaë’s Grief”
  • Alan Baer, “Orpheus”

 

April 2024 Poetry Feature: New Metamorphoses
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Translation: Poems from The Dickinson Archive

By MARÍA NEGRONI
Translated by ALLISON A. DEFREESE

Poems appear below in English and the original Spanish.

 

Translator’s note:
The Dickinson Archive is a series of 72 short meditations exploring the creative process through the lens of New England poet Emily Dickinson’s lifework and words. Dickinson said she was in the presence of poetry when “I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.” The Dickinson Archive is a book that elicits such responses. Its poems, based on a few of the 9,000 words that Dickinson used most often, get under our skin and into our bones—whether our internal scaffolding is thick as a mammoth’s tusk or delicate as the rib of a songbird. Though María modestly describes the book as a “tribute,” the unique and unconventional pieces in this archive showcase Negroni’s own experimentation with form and language. Moments in these translations where word choice or grammatical structure may give the reader pause are not accidents; they are examples of Negroni at her finest as an experimental writer forging a cadence, locution, and syntax all her own. The Dickinson Archive is a book about play and creation. What light and lightness to translate such poems, to join this dialogue between women that spans continents and centuries, to channel the spirit of Emily Dickinson’s work through María Negroni’s words.

Translation: Poems from The Dickinson Archive
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New Poems from YOU ARE HERE, edited by Ada Limón

By ADAM CLAY, KHADIJAH QUEEN, ROGER REEVES, ANALICIA SOTELO, and RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ

To kick off Poetry Month we’re bringing you selections from Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s new anthology, You Are Here, out this month from Milkweed Editions.

As part of her signature project, “You Are Here,” 24th US Poet Laureate Ada Limón has commissioned fifty-two contemporary American poets to observe and reflect on their place in the natural world. The resulting anthology of original poems is a timely portrait of the myriad ways the natural world speaks to us and reflects us. Some of the poems included here contend with the destruction of nature, while others consider its abundance and resilience—and some do both at the same time. While these poems emerge from deeply personal perspectives, together they reveal that nature, like poetry, is universal—and that our interpretations of the natural world are grounded in the nature of our humanity. They also serve as a call for readers to take in the nature all around them, wherever they are. 

(from the Foreword to You Are Here, by Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress)

New Poems from YOU ARE HERE, edited by Ada Limón
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March 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems by Our Contributors

New poems by our contributors DAVID LEHMAN, MATT DONOVAN, JULIA KOLCHINSKY DASBACH, and GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL

 

Table of Contents:

  • David Lehman, “Honor Code” and “Rhode Island is Famous for You (for Denise Duhamel)” 
  • Matt Donovan, “Looking at the Statue of Athena in Nashville’s Replica of the Parthenon, Waiting for Something to Happen”
  • Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, “What does the vulture say to the snowman(?) or how my son is learning to tell jokes(.)”
  • Gray Davidson Carroll, “November 19, 2022,”
March 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems by Our Contributors
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