To settle while trying to say what cannot be said
precisely. As in. We were not entirely finished.
So. Love. To travel the slick road we scattered with salt. To try
to leave our sweepings under the rug. Moments
All summer, I sit on the porch, my son appearing, disappearing. Walls of rain or night, of larkspur, bleeding heart. The stone floor long ago lifted from the lion’s den.
Translator’s note: Having children is a way of remaking oneself.
By J.J. STARR
towns / she liked the fields this way and up close
they come up with tassels swaying gold-beamed wind-socks / in their way
their green so bright you’d think / the whole field a fruit ripe
enough to bite into / and the clouds so perfect and numerous and floating
like a fleet of wish and cool whip / something for the angels to rest on
she would say / and mean it as the towns came upon us like unwrapped
trinkets with a single grocer / and at least one saloon
no matter the dry Sunday / the kind of places men hung
around smoking with one / inevitable woman weathered
as a mailbox / leaning into the side of the building
By AFUA ANSONG
Praise this Saturday which permits me to wash with my hands (I detest this).
Praise my dirty clothes, the ones I leave for my grandmother who starts the cycle with cold soapy water.
Praise the rinse, the rush upstairs to the open roof. There, the clouds open as I hang and hide my American jeans from my neighbors who don’t even trust the wooden pins to work.
By VALERIE DUFF
Keep that smile
barbed, the wire
the horse leans against.
Birds crack seeds
on the other side of your glass
door. The body, blind, curves
Neither pretty nor homely, fat nor thin, Bernice Gardener was a middling girl, all her fenders straight but no chrome or pinstripes. With a few ounces of vinegar, some colored powders or a curling iron, she might have done well with boys. Bernice, though, didn’t alter her pale skin and left her brown hair straight, aside from an occasional colored hairband. She wore jeans and print blouses or modest dresses her mother constructed from dime-store patterns. Though she tripled the outside reading assignment and earned the highest score in her English class, her teachers dismissed her as a mind of no consequence because she read The Thorn Birds, Peyton Place, and Gone with the Wind. She had pondered the term “making love” until she bought Valley of the Dolls in a used bookstore because she wondered why the girl on the cover seemed so pleased to be in a martini glass.
“Portrait of a Man,” ca. 1470. Hans Memling (ca. 1430-1494). The Frick Collection.
Hans Memling, ca. 1470 (Frick Collection)
I know this man,
or feel I do,
or think I could—
as though his face
effaced the centuries
between us,
By AMA CODJOE
for Betty Shabazz
Who, when they killed her husband, was carrying
twin girls—not in her arms, but in an armless
sea, with bits of blood as food. She covered
1.
Now, the Grundig in this dealer’s window screaming,
the silent oval speaker like a Munch,
and I hear it on a Sunday as I best recall:
Normally along this straight back road in Idaho lay only quiet flatlands stippled with clumps of yellow grass, but today the prairie was bustling with cars and RVs and people gathered around camping chairs and telescopes. We were all here to see the Great American Eclipse of 2017—not only the first total eclipse of the sun to cross the country from Pacific to Atlantic in a century, but the first to grace the mainland at all in thirty-eight years. Since thirty-eight happened to be the median age in the United States, this meant roughly half the people readying to see today’s eclipse hadn’t yet been born the last time, and half who witnessed it then, in 1979, had since died. My husband and I, driving down the road in a blue compact, were a man and woman on the sadder side of the median, but only by a few years, so we weren’t used to it yet. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t decide how much this was worth, witnessing a total eclipse of the sun. I feared I might have lost the ability to distinguish true excitement from an admirable effort to keep life exciting.
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