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.