New work from GEOFFREY BROCK, GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL, DOLORES HAYDEN, JAMES RICHARDSON, and JULIA LISELLA.
Table of Contents:
- Geoffrey Brock, “Song”
- Gray Davidson Carroll, “Truth or Dare”
- Dolores Hayden, “Coming of Age”
- James Richardson, “Transports”
- Julia Lisella, “The Geese of Medford, Massachusetts”
Song
By Geoffrey Brock
Sing, O furrow-browed youth,
of the contrails scoring the sky,
bright as lines of cocaine
until, as they age, the eye
loses them to the blue…
Sing of the thin-skinned planes
that made those ephemeral clouds,
and of all that each contains:
the countless faceless strangers
with places to leave or to go,
their tranquilized pets, their baggage,
those little nozzles that blow
streams of rich, warm air
smuggled from way down here
into the frigid, unbreathable
lower stratosphere…
Sing, in your fresh-peeled voice,
of our unquenchable lust
to slip our surly bonds—
our sign: “The Stars or Bust”…
And when your song is done,
hold its final, tonic note
till the last wisps of oxygen
slip from your aching throat,
and in the silence that follows—
as darkness displaces the blue,
making it hard to tell planes
from stars blinking into view;
as the earth, like a rheumy eyeball
knocked from a cyclops’ socket,
hurtles through spacetime in circles,
blind as a Congreve rocket—
whatever you do, don’t stop
to ask whether you were right
to have sung at all. Inhale
and make a new song about night.
Truth or Dare
By Gray Davidson Carroll
2017. The first time
I kissed a boy
it was late
summer, the world
getting ready
for the small death of fall
We were on the couch
I still had braces
Our friends all around
chanting
Truth or dare
Truth or dare
Dare
Dare Dare
And I was so excited
and so scared
that I couldn’t stop
laughing
and my jaw jumped
up
and down
so his tongue caught
on the metal of my mouth
and for a moment
we were two boys
held together by something
beyond our control.
Coming of Age
By Dolores Hayden
One loud click of the camera and you
enter adulthood with the headshot
on your learner’s permit at the DMV.
Legal today, you adjust the mirrors,
test the horn, grip the wheel, press start.
Hands at ten and two, eyes on the road,
you’re rolling. You stop for a light,
signal to make a right, flow
onto a busy arterial without a sideways
glance at the scrapyard where
excavators jaw on grilles, hoods, fenders.
I’ll ride as your passenger for just a month more,
you’re ready to accelerate
into life without parents nearby.
Eye the odometer, dear daughter,
you’ll drive half a million miles
in your lifetime, the distance
from Earth to the Moon, and back.
Transports
By James Richardson
The car smelled all winter
so mellow and autumnal
(too sweet for metal)
that we wanted to give in,
breathing deeply
whatever mutagenic
lubricant or fluid
its sad dissolution
was finally releasing.
But we drove on,
half-pleased, half-frozen,
with the windows open
all those weeks
and weeks of spring
not coming.
What made the simplest thought
not simple?
Why did it take us so long
to find the apple?
The Geese of Medford, Massachusetts
By Julia Lisella
They gather along the muddy path
each of them a swollen version
of a past self
fat on the refuse of the human world.
Like street dogs, they sip their water from puddles
dip their bills in, then lift up and out, their necks long, bills tipped up to swallow
indifferent to us as we pass.
Their presence here in January tells us
all points on the compass are alike now.
Their waddles from ball field to bike path to moving river
remake their story of magnificent journey south
that each grew up with in their slim veins
into something less ancient.
In between pecking and grazing and shitting
maybe some of them are assigned to recall it:
their necks stiffened and strained
to meditate on the horizon growing gray and hazy.
Geoffrey Brock is the author of three books of poems (most recently After), the editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, and the translator of numerous books of poetry, prose, and comics, mostly from Italian. His website is geoffreybrock.com.
Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, transfemme writer, dancer, singer, cold water plunger and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Brooklyn by way of Western Massachusetts and other strange and forgotten places. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Waterfall of Thanks, and their work has further appeared or is forthcoming in The Common, ONLY POEMS, Frontiers in Medicine and elsewhere. They have received fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, The Good Listening Project, and Columbia University, and are currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at NYU.
Dolores Hayden’s third collection, Exuberance (Red Hen Press, 2019), was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award and the Foreword Indies Book Award. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Poetry, Yale Review, The Common, Ecotone, Verse Daily, and Best American Poetry. She’s an urban landscape historian living in Guilford, CT.
James Richardson (www.aboutjamesrichardson.com) is most recently the author of For Now from Copper Canyon Press, which will publish Near Distances, his new and selected poems and aphorisms, in Fall/Winter 2026.
Julia Lisella’s latest collection of poems, Our Lively Kingdom, was named a finalist in the 2023 Paterson Book Prize and Grand Prize Finalist and Poetry Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her other collections include Always, Terrain, and the chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly, The Common, Nimrod, Pangyrus and many others. She has received writing residencies at MacDowell, Millay and the Vermont Center for the Arts. She teaches at Regis College and co-curates the Italian-American Writers Association Literary Reading Series in Boston. For more, see www.julialisellapoetry.com
