It was March 2023, and I was alone in Wellington. The creative writing class I’d traveled there to teach had ended. Antipodean summer was ending too, night falling earlier, rain dripping from the lemonwood trees, the gray surface of the harbor whipped and wrinkled by a wind that roared ceaselessly through the Cook Strait.
—after “My Husband and I Fight about Robots” by Sara Burge
Mother’s on her way back from the Fayette waterpark,
where the kids don’t know how to be lazy in the lazy river.
Mother’s trying to float in her tube,
and they’re knocking into me like we’re bumper cars.
In the background, Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.”
By TINA CANE
Today’s lively experiment was supposed to be about the virtues of olive oil
and the simple yet sumptuous lifestyle of Italian nonnas maximizing their wellness
by just being themselves but no sooner had I embraced the integrity of handmade
bucatini and a schmatta than did my mind migrate towards questions about the source
of self-regard and whether there really are any self-evident truths
I was in my car
It’s minus forty outside, and on Baba Lena’s glassed-in balcony the towels have dried stiff and I stand them up on the couch like snow cranes flying north and breathe in their frozen freshness. On a warm winter day of minus twenty Celsius, we could go buy ice cream. Rita wanted to come to Baba Lena’s too, but she is in the hospital. When we have a cold, mama makes us breathe hot steam from boiled potatoes, but Rita leaned too close and scalded her throat and her voice is gone and it hurts so much she can’t even swallow.
I would happily trade places with her if I could have Aleksey as my best friend.
I don’t know what this means.
It’s just before 8, and my darling
cat pounced behind the recycling mound
and emerged with a mouse. She carried
it up to my room to begin her dirty work,
the quest to kill without wounding,
bird song laced the particulate air
wind emptied the pines of their whistle
a cloud roamed aimless arriving somewhere
the creek lapped away at its trestles
By DIANE MEHTA
You can’t risk too much Jenga in a lift
but when you leave her, put your foot down,
exit to the steady earth we merely balance on—
you risk collapse, your knife-edge youth
retracts while you are full of spirit and mistakes.
By KAS BERNAYS
her voice crackled like a distress signal
interrupted as she told me
how in the bright haze
halfway between borders
and their certainties
the engine’s faltering stutter
had drowned under her daughters’ wails
and all desperation had coiled
into the kick of her unborn son
We wanted to say goodbye to the world we knew
so we drove the coastline north from Miami
as far as we could go. It was a farewell tour,
sure, but farewell to what? Not the ocean,
looming daily out the right-hand window,
not the water but what the water would erase.
Farewell to Florida, nipped in the bud, cheeky
and self-satisfied as a sun-worshipping infant—
goodbye, little baby Florida, goodbye!
Goodbye to Ocracoke and old Saint Simon,
Virginia Beach and Fire Island, goodbye
to all those literal-minded municipalities—
Surf and Ocean and Atlantic Cities—tossed up
like flotsam along that waterlogged littoral.
Six weeks and thousands of meandering miles later
we found ourselves at a picnic table outside
the Chowder Hut in Meat Cove, Nova Scotia,
where the final stretch of tire-rutted gravel
gives up the ghost: end of the road, folks.
By JOHN POCH
I try to wish the best for him, our rival. His lines which really amount to nothing, the phrases that his readers fawn over, “I’m here for it” or “What a time” or even single words he uses as lines like “Fair” or “Same” or “Cheers”… I shouldn’t let them get to me. He even rhymes Halloween/Thirteen in a sonnet called “Hell.” People have come to treasure the expected, lavishing praise on the nice and cute, but that is not poetry. Is there something else to it, or is it just a minor cult of personality, the same way cheerleaders are chosen? Those readers who believe in him are the ones who don’t believe in absolute truths so allow fiction in their nonfiction willy-nilly. Gossips, they know little poetry or even of poetry. They fancy themselves naturalists and italicize it. They are educators rather than teachers.
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