Celebrating 15 Years
New work from ELIZABETH METZGER, MATT W. MILLER, ANNIE SCHUMACHER, and MARC VINCENZ.
Table of Contents:
- Elizabeth Metzger, “Never Finished”
- Matt W. Miller, “Cleveland”
- Annie Schumacher, “Pasiphaë”
- Marc Vincenz, “A Tribute to Whom”
Never Finished
By Elizabeth Metzger
Before we thought in lifetime obligations
we gathered on an island
with everyone who ever loved us.
You led me deep beyond the rocks.
Out of myself you held me
as they watched. I felt you float up hard
with all that salt. They did not know
what they were witnessing.
My wetness under water
silent as a star pointing all directions.
How you edged your fingers in
they could not see, of course.
Then they all ran toward us in the water
announced the death of someone you
looked up to as a child. You were taken
from me right then. The rest
of our marriage went on like that:
me grieving you
Cleveland
By Matt W. Miller
What do you feel like? my wife asked,
and she was talking about where to go eat,
but I said, without knowing why, I feel
like Cleveland. That is, I felt like my impression
of that city. I haven’t been to Cleveland
in years. The mistake by the lake. The Flats.
Dogpound. Lebron. Trevon. Rock Hall of Fame.
A baseball team with a different name now.
It seems in my memory a rough and rusty place.
But I don’t mean to bust on Cleveland.
Like in the Outkast song, I’m…just being honest.
Maybe it’s the sound of the name, I wonder.
Like, I feel as if I’m a land split down the grain.
Or am I all etymological, from the Old English
cleofa (I looked this up later), a slope, a scarp?
Maybe it’s just that I am scarping into old age,
rolling down some hill to that last great lake.
Maybe I feel like a river famous for catching fire
more than a few times. Or am I a city that was once
something but is not that anymore, that tries
in fits and starts to be something again, reborn
as new and beautiful? That one hits close.
Is it because I am tired and cranky? Cleveland,
are you tired and cranky? Are we all just second
cities, tired and cranky? But Langston Hughes
lived in Cleveland. And Mayakovski and Hart
Crane. Plus, the two guys who created Superman.
There’s breweries and museums too. I have good
friends who live in Cleveland. Kind people,
who laugh and cry and are hopeful about what
may come next. My wife says I should visit them.
Pasiphaë
By Annie Schumacher
Pasiphaë is notable as the mother of the Minotaur.
Afterwards, I staggered away on the path, the smell of wine
tumbling through dark pines, coupled with the distant sound
of old bells. He had John Wayne authority; I wore white leather.
Broken hearts are hungry to be animal, and I gripped his hide
with mine, as if it belonged to me. That’s how young I was.
Photo by Flickr Creative Commons User M.J.Ambriola
A Tribute to Whom
By Marc Vincenz
Oh, you genius, you beehive,
you spark, you contiguous line—
all from the same place of origin
where there is no breeze.
All those questions posed …
take no notice, the image
is stamped on your brow, even
as you glare in the mirror,
as the others are orbiting,
the day is melting—and yes,
we tried, in the smoke, lounging
on the divan to ask for both.
How could we grasp
your learned teachings? You lived
on the other side of the wall.
Your postal system isn’t working.
Bring out your best glasses,
decant, pull out your moth-
eaten clothwares—the ones ravished
by life. You know you know the man
you bought them from.
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Going Is Forever and Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poem-a-Day. Her essays have been published in Boston Review, Guernica, Conjunctions, PN Review, and Literary Hub, among others. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and a co-editor of PROMPT.
Matt W. Miller is the author of Tender the River, finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Provocateur Award, and a finalist for the Jacar Press Julie Suk Award, the New Hampshire Poetry Society Book Award, and the Poetry by the Sea Book Award. Other books include The Wounded for the Water, Club Icarus, selected by Major Jackson as the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize winner, and Cameo Diner: Poems. He has published work previously in Narrative, Rhino Poetry, Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, Southwest Review, Florida Review, Third Coast, Adroit Journal, and Poetry Daily, among other journals, and was a winner of Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Prize, the Poetry by The Sea Sonnet Sequence Contest, the River Styx Micro-fiction Prize, and the Iron Horse Review’s Trifecta Poetry Prize. He is recipient of fellowships from Stanford University, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Matt lives with his family in coastal New Hampshire.
Annie Schumacher is a poet and translator based in Barcelona. She serves as poetry editor and audio editor at The Cortland Review. Her work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as a work-study scholar and by the Our Little Roses Poetry Fellowship. Her chapbook, Vineyard Elegy, was shortlisted for the 2023 Poetry London Pamphlet Prize. Recent publications can be found or are forthcoming in Poet Lore, The London Magazine, Moon City Review, SWWIM, On the Seawall, California Quarterly, and Poetry London. She is originally from Fresno, California, and is at work on her first full-length poetry collection.
Marc Vincenz is a multilingual translator, poet, fiction writer, journalist, editor, musician and artist. He has published many books of poetry, fiction and translation. His recent poetry collections include The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, A Splash of Cave Paint, The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars, Faery Ecology, and forthcoming in 2026 from White Pine Press, No More Animal Poems. His translation of award-winning Swiss poet and novelist Klaus Merz’ selected poems, An Audible Blue, won the 2023 Massachusetts Book Award for Translated Literature. He translates from the German, Romanian, French and Spanish.
