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October 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors

October 31, 2024 Poetry

New Poems by Our Contributors NATHANIEL PERRY and TYLER KLINE.

Table of Contents:

- Nathaniel Perry, “34 (Song, with Young Lions)” and “36 (Song, with Contranym)”
- Tyler Kline, “Romance Study” and “What if I told you”

34 (Song, with Young Lions)
By Nathaniel Perry

All the young lions do lack

bones. They lie wasted on grass,

cashed out, exhausted and un-

delivered. A poor man cries

eventually. A troubled

friend cries eventually.

Garish and spent, the sun

hisses in the hot sea.

In the hot sea fishes

jump toward the sun. They don’t

know any different; your face,

loony lord, is always

mixed with the sun. The lions

nod off again in the faces

of it. I can see them all,

prone in the grass like people;

quiet, like people who are

resting. But in this place

sorrow, somehow, is often

transformed to joy, which is cruel,

unmaking the point of sorrow.

Various boneless lions are

wasted on the grass,

exhausted (lacking what

you were supposed to bring them),

zeroed out, and desolate.

36 (Song, with Contranym)
By Nathaniel Perry

I suppose I am abundantly satisfied

with the fatness of my house, your house I mean,

landlord that you are, of the olive garden,

and of the highway, the town, and the whole scene

here, really. I pay your rent; I devise no mischief

on my bed. The place is actually pretty nice,

a fountain in the garden, windows’ broad smile

looking out on the tidy yard when it’s rimed with ice,

or is lolling in summer’s hammock, or is sexually

charged with spring, or filled with autumn’s floods.

Brittle floods, someone once called them, leaves

filling the corners of everything with the moods

of water, the moods of the river of your pleasure,

by which I assume we mean your will, not joy.

It’s funny how words can contain their opposite,

pleasure at once a freedom and a ploy—

a garden something bound and original

where anything, but certain things, should thrive;

the difference between loving-kindness and loving

like the vowel shift from olive to alive.

Romance Study
By Tyler Kline

I’m pushing a shopping cart full of mannequin heads through a ‘93 nor’easter.

I’m feeding an orchid three ice cubes.

I am paying to sit in a room so quiet I can hear my own blood.

I’m thinking of my dad wishing his heart into a dead dog so he could bury it.

I’m proving to the computer I’m a human because I’m good at identifying crosswalks.

I’m nailing wainscoting to the treehouse from my dream journal.

I’m pointing out the park with your Vicodin & wisdom teeth stitches.

I am washing your breasts like two miniature sports cars.

I am trademarking the way your bike lays on the lawn like poof! you’re gone.

I’m hearing that everything’s in repulsion, that when I sit in a chair I’m technically

hovering a tiny, tiny bit.

I’m feeling like the past is a horse without a face.

I’m saying that when you kiss me it’s like a bomb going off in a dictionary factory.

I’m sitting behind home plate humming Modest Mouse & giving you the signal to steal.

What if I told you
By Tyler Kline

I let him dare me—the boy with Guns

N’ Roses CDs & the guts

to ask his father for a nose ring.

That I sprinted across his yard

like a mustang careening

from a burning barn

while the boy closed his left eye

& pressed the BB gun’s trigger, once,

as putting in a contact lens.

Fourteen & already

my lostness a different kind.

How later in his bedroom I cracked

the magic 8 ball,

gulped the dark water

locked inside. He wanted to know

the future. If this summer was

the summer he’d finally get laid.

He trusted me: I wore dress shirts

to school & was still afraid to curse.

Who was I to lie to the boy

who hit the joint & said

God came to him one night

like a butcher hook scraping his spine?

When his mother offered

to wash my grass-stained jeans,

I wore his.

I said concentrate & try

again after he pressed the subject,

needing to know if he went all the way

this summer, would he be

any good? I wish I told him that

The future is an ominous sound.

It’s a horse falling

into its own grave.

Tyler Kline is a writer from Pennsylvania whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Narrative, and Poetry Daily. He recently earned his MFA at New York University where he was a Jan Gabrial Fellow.

Nathaniel Perry is the author of two books of poetry, Long Rules and Nine Acres, and a book of essays on poetry, Joy(Or Something Darker but Like It). He teaches at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and is editor of Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review.

More to the Story

October 21, 2024 Essays, Issue 28, Issue 28 Essays

By MICHAEL DAVID LUKAS

My Grandma Betty’s garage, like the rest of her house, was always neat and well-labeled. The tools hung in their places. The floor was swept clean. Along the walls, DIY wood shelving was stacked high with boxes labeled according to their contents. Herb Toys. Xmas Decorations.

Somewhere amidst all the old slot cars and yearbooks, up by the rafters in a far corner, were three produce boxes filled with ephemera from her childhood in Toledo: a trophy from the Maumee River Yacht Club, a 1911 desk calendar printed by her adoptive father’s plumbing and heating company—“We’d like to be your plumbers just the same as Dr. Jones or Dr. Brown is your doctor”—get-well cards, bank books, newspaper clippings.

Real Estate for the Blended Family (or What I Learned from Zillow)

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By ELIZABETH HAZEN

The houses are photographed with light in mind:
The sun, they say, is shining here. The filter

hints at lemons: fresh laundry on a quaint
old line. The “den” becomes the “family room”

where we’d play rummy and watch TV, the square
footage enough to hold all of our misgivings.

Little Women

October 21, 2024 Fiction, Issue 28, Issue 28 Fiction

By MEGAN TENNANT

In December, one of those nothing afternoons after Christmas, my younger sister Ruth returns to the holiday house, where I am bored with extended family on the stoep. The guests get up, ready to greet them, while my dad finds chairs for her and David. But she pauses with a funny look on her face, as if she’s remembered a dream or eaten something sweet, and says she’s engaged. Now everyone rises, and I make my own lips follow in a smile. David is bashful behind her, accepting hugs and handshakes. I’d like to ask him why he didn’t tell me he was going to propose, ask my parents if they knew. Of course they knew.

Wedding Vows

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By WYATT TOWNLEY

Falling is an art. No one, not even the preacher,
can tell you the way to your knees in the night.

Watch the rain. It practices its landing
on everything, drumming the roof, the car,

the pond. Watch the leaves, each a teacher
of twirl, the dance from branch to grass.

From window to pavement, the man was laughing
all the way down. However he landed, it was

hardly over. Now he’s called wise.
Walking is falling forward. Running

is falling faster. Watch the dark. It falls
so slowly while the sun yanks the rug

out from under you. At night some fall over
a book into a story. Some fall

for each other. We have fallen all the way
here. We could do it in our sleep. And we do. We do.

Wyatt Townley is Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita. Her work has been read on NPR and published in journals of all stripes, from New Letters to Newsweek, North American Review to The Paris Review, Yoga Journal to Scientific American. Her latest book of poems is Rewriting the Body. More at WyattTownley.com

[Purchase Issue 28 here.]

A Humble Invitation from Your Floor Supervisor

October 21, 2024 Fiction, Issue 28, Issue 28 Fiction

By DOUGLAS KOZIOL

It was an early afternoon in mid-July, the sun at the height of its powers, and while Laura was stirring a gin and tonic, her co-workers were stretching their picket line across the parking lot of the New Epoch shoe factory. Sitting in a wicker chair on the stained deck of the palatial home of the floor supervisor and his wife, a cool breeze sweeping through the overhanging trees, her ears buzzing with the chirping of birds and the bubbling of the pool filter, Laura told herself she never wanted to be here. She knew any deal between workers and management had to be made with the backing of the entire factory floor. Otherwise, the bosses would try to pick them off one by one, like lions to lagging gazelle. Still, it had been decided she would accept the supervisor’s offer to negotiate over dinner, if not to strike a deal, then at least to feel the man out.

The screen door to the house screeched open, and Laura turned to find her supervisor’s wife, Fatimah, stepping out onto the deck with a tray of charcuterie and a pair of fresh drinks.

Return of the Puffin

October 21, 2024 Essays, Issue 28, Issue 28 Art, Issue 28 Essays, Studio

By JAMES K. BOYCE

Photos by TIANNE STROMBECK

On July 4, 1981, something caught Evie Weinstein’s eye as she was washing dishes in a tidal pool on Eastern Egg Rock, a treeless island off the Maine coast. An Atlantic puffin, a football-sized seabird, emerged from the pea-soup fog with something dangling from its beak. Evie dropped the dishpan, grabbed the binoculars slung around her neck, and saw that the puffin had a beak-load of fingerling fish. She had been waiting for this moment and knew at once what it meant: the bird was bringing food for a chick—a puffling, as they are called in children’s books—the first to hatch on the island in a century, and the first seabird hatched anywhere as the result of a conscious human effort to restore them to a place from which they had been exterminated.

A Day Revisited

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By ROBERT CORDING

I’m standing in the exact spot
of this photograph, looking at the past—
my middle son, still alive, lying on the rug
at my feet in my oldest son’s house.
On his wide chest, his niece, weeks old,
sleeps, adrift perhaps in the familiarity
of the heart’s steady beat, her memory
of him formed mostly by this photograph.

Akoloute (Sequi Me)

October 21, 2024 Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry

By ELIZABETH L. HODGES

Tracing dusty footprints, you can be led
to fornix, to tombs, the circus and bars,
to my lupan, my cell, my earthen bed;
what waits is not secret—see what I are?
I’m not a barmaid, an actor or slave;
I’m not being cursed because I had sinned—
I’m earning my keep in this grisly trade.
For that I am traif, but come along in.
I’ll lead you to places you’ve never had;
to hell in a basket: one bloody as.

Ponderosa

October 21, 2024 Fiction, Issue 28, Issue 28 Fiction

By SHANE CASTLE

Laughlin learned to hear on the hobby farm in Montana. One late afternoon, the summer he and Cassie bought the five hillside acres outside Helena, he was setting wood posts for the new corral when he heard a sound among the ponderosas toward the top of their property. It was like nothing he’d heard before. He walked up the drive toward it. A breeze was swaying the tops of the trees, and he heard it again and imagined some kind of Mylar weather balloon, blown off course, deflated, stuck in a tree. That’s what the sound was like: someone blowing a taut edge. He remembered being a kid, his family visiting Meema and Peepa at their old place on Animas Creek. He remembered Peepa teaching him and his little brother, Tyler, to blow blades of grass like kazoos. Laughlin looked and looked but found nothing. He walked a while among the tall ponderosas, at times certain he was right under it, only to look up and see nothing, and it went on this way until that moment when dusk turned to dark, when, abruptly, the sound stopped.