This month we welcome back TC stalwart BRAD LEITHAUSER, who honors us with new work, including the title poem of his new collection from Knopf, The Old Current.
—John Hennesy
New work by LEAH FLAX BARBER, ROBERT CORDING, PETER FILKINS
Table of Contents:
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.
Works by JEN JABAILY-BLACKBURN and DIANA KEREN LEE
Table of Contents:
Archaeological, Atlantic
By Jen Jabaily-Blackburn
A morsel of conventional wisdom: Never use the word
boring in a poem because then they
can call your poem boring. The boring sponge can’t
do everything, but can make holes in oysters, & for the boring sponge, it’s
enough. I miss boring things like gathering mussel shells
for no one. I miss being so bored that time felt physical, an un-
governable cat sleeping over my heart. I have, I’m told, an archaeologist’s
heart. I have, I’m told, an archaeologist’s soul. An archaeologist’s eye, so
Poems By G. C. WALDREP, ALLISON FUNK, and KEVIN O’CONNOR
Table of Contents:
Below the Shoals, Glendale
By G. C. Waldrep
I am listening to the slickened sound of the new
wind. It is a true thing. Or, it is true in its falseness.
It is the stuff against which matter’s music breaks.
Mural of the natural, a complicity epic.
The shoals, not quite distant enough to unhear—
Not at all like a war. Or, like a war, in passage,
New Poems by Our Contributors NATHANIEL PERRY and TYLER KLINE.
Table of Contents:
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.
This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.
By Li Zhuang, Cynthia Chen, Chen Du, Xisheng Chen, and Jolie Zhilei Zhou.
Table of Contents:
This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.
By WU WENYING, SU SHI, SHANGYANG FANG, YUN QIN WANG, and CAO COLLECTIVE.
Translated poems appear in both the original Chinese and in English.
Table of Contents:
New Poems by Our Contributors MORRI CREECH, ELISA GABBERT, ANNA GIRGENTI, and GRANT KITTRELL.
Table of Contents:
The Others
By Morri Creech
The children that I have never had follow me, late, through the vacant corridors.
They whisper there is still time, time for the quarter moon to nock its black arrow
New Poems by Our Contributors NICOLE COOLEY, DUY ĐOÀN, and JOHN KINSELLA.
Table of Contents:
Covanta, A Detail
By Nicole Cooley
The incinerator smoke an incision in the sky.
My daughter no longer small yet still I want to swallow her back into my body.
Sky a scalding.
My daughter asks me to stop saying, I wish this wasn’t the world you have to live in.
In my dream my girl is the size of a thumb I catch between my teeth.
Sky all smoke.
In the morning, men wearing masks drag our cans out to their truck.
In the morning, out the kitchen window, I wish the wide street rivered.
By MEGAN PINTO
Excerpted from “even in silence”
My father is perseverating, moving around the edges of rooms. On repeat, he asks, but how will
we pay for it? How will we pay for it?
He follows me, my mother, then me, then my mother. Inside my childhood home, there are only
so many rooms.
On Christmas Day, I bake a loaf of frozen bread. I feed slices to my father with my hands, then
catch each chewed up bit he pushes back out with his tongue.
He is speaking.
I am numb.
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Celebrating 15 Years