New Poems by Our Contributors NATHANIEL PERRY and TYLER KLINE.
Table of Contents:
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- 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.
