New work by LEAH FLAX BARBER, ROBERT CORDING, PETER FILKINS

Table of Contents:

• Robert Cording, “In Beaufort”
• Leah Flax Barber, “School Poem” and “Cordelia’s No”
• Peter Filkins, “Trains”

In Beaufort
By Robert Cording

At a rented air B&B, I am sitting on a swing
placed here just for me it seems,
or just to carry off my worries and sorrows
as I rock slowly, back and forth, taking in
the shifting colors of the Broad River that circles
this marsh pocketed with cut-outs of water
and long inlets that circle round and round
as if it were one of those spiritual labyrinths
that bring calm as the center is reached.

The tide comes in on a wind that bends
the marsh grasses from east to west,
and when a cloud rushes over
like an eclipse, their four different greens,
ranging from silver to tawny-yellow, turn grey
with hints of purple.  The tidal current is
so strong there are little whitecaps sailing in
the same direction as the marsh grass. Cloud,
sun, cloud, sun. And now the water’s bright

Charleston blue, the wind sweeping over
the water, over the grasses, over
the hairs on my arms and legs until
I am all sensation, this overflowing moment
uncontained, like this great white egret
here this whole time, but hidden in the center
of the marsh grass, that now lifts its wings,
flapping at first against the wind, rising,
then finding a current of air on which to glide.

School Poem
By Leah Flax Barber

Summer used to be life
Now it’s death

And winter     which used to be death
Is more like sleep

September’s excitements
Its dead kinds of beginning
Where one accepts the end

I love the vernacular     but
I can’t say

I don’t like Latin     its punishing intelligibility
Making a farce of this age

First you get your best thought

Cordelia’s No 
By Leah Flax Barber

You don’t want all my love

How much would you pay for it?
You need to feel the danger

To be influenced by everything ever
To move between absolute seduction  
And confusion

I was thinking of the goddess      of course
The violence and fraud

Humiliate me in front of the government
I’ll win     living

The illusion of ending is art

Trains
By Peter Filkins

That side of the lake
the rumble and screech,
steel wheels

scything the chuck
of boxcars and tankers
edging the shore,

spangle of light
on water at sunset,
the engine’s throb

freighting towards home.

                .

All night long
it bucked and surged
past the window

and my breath
fogging the glass,
a yellow moon

headlamping
through mist,
the tunnel of sleep,

towns racing past.

               .

Down at the crossroads,
warning in the bell,
beams lowering

on traffic before
the whomp of air
followed by the zing

and clack-ety-clack
of hammered rails
spiriting out of town

into another week

               .

Or here
on a footbridge
spanning the chasm

of an Acela’s
soft whoosh
thrusting through space,

a back now braced
for the passage sharp
as the arrow parting

the horizon’s flat line.

Leah Flax Barberis from Chicago. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Conjunctions, Peach Mag, and Reading in Translation. Formerly Writing Program faculty at UMass-Amherst, she is an assistant editor at Conjunctions and a Rubenstein Scholar at the University of Chicago Law School. She lives in Hyde Park, Chicago.

Robert Cording has published ten collections of poems, the most recent of which are In the Unwalled Cityand a prose book on poetry, Finding the World’s Fullness. Recent poems have appeared in publications such as the Georgia Review, Hudson Review, The Common, Agni, New Ohio Review, The Sun, and Best American Poetry 2018 and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, 2022 and 2024. 

Peter Filkins has published five collections of poetry, most recently The View We’re Granted and Water/Music. The translator of Ingeborg Bachmann’s collected poems, Darkness Spoken and Elias Canetti’s The Book Against Death, he is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim, a 2023 Fulbright, and 2024 NEH Public Scholars Award. His poems, translations and reviews have appeared in The Yale Review, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Poetry, The New Criterion, and numerous other journals. He is at work on a biography of Ingeborg Bachmann for Yale UP and teaches at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and the main campus of Bard College.