Poetry
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“Danger” with Artwork by Sally Doyle
Underneath this room is danger. You can feel it when you walk across thefloor. This evening you feel it as you sit in your small chair reading. But stillyou cannot name it. The other members of your family who are staring attheir phones don’t appear to be concerned at all. You stop reading to listen,and rumination turns into trance. Right at the moment when you are thinking,“Someone has been abandoned,” a woman wearing a surgical mask enters theroom. -
Three Poems by Peter Spagnuolo
Above: “The Repast of the Lion” by Henri Rousseau
Cartographer
The monkeys scold that I lost my way, I’ve gone
mad on the march through you, a hand on the whip—
your impenetrable wild I leave undone,
and tame your jungle waste—but wrecked my ship,
so I must spread you open, with no way back.
My rivals tell I’ve grown too old to play
the boy explorer, yet at that perfumed crack
where wells a secret font of youth, I lay
with my discovery, -
“26 Letters Refuse to Whisper” by Lynne Jensen Lampe with Artwork by Carrie Wilmarth
Above: “UNTITLED,” 2020. Oil on Wood Panel, 9 x 12″
As for saying goodbye, we don’t know how.
Shoulder to shoulder we keep on walking.—Anna Akhmatova
_As for saying goodbye, I know howbut don’t want to surrender to thesechanged lives & cautious moments. COVID-19,death-o-matic, that’s what I call you. A period jabbed into the heart of a sentence.Each day I look out my window & -
An Unobservable Force Will Never Reveal Its Face by Brianna Noll
I thought the invisible
hand of the market
a velvetine fist,
viridian and calculable
like vectors of rain
in a dark winter.
I diagrammed its force
on the bedsheets
when I couldn’t sleep
so it was always
with me—a flutter
of huge wings
that would block
out the sun if they
weren’t so invisible.
I began to listen instead
to the wings of the hand
of the market, -
To Childbirth, by Jasmine Bailey
In our hava nagila,
my chair tilted into fire—
you savored my burnt hair,
the way I look
compelled. What didn’t I give
that you asked? That’sa rhetorical question.
I presented the dowry
of nerves, muscles, blood,
a hope chest of napkins
no longer white.The chrysanthemum
is more than chlorophyll and cellulose.
But a woman on the rack,
a woman in love,
is a secretless animal.*
Jasmine Bailey is the author of two poetry collections from Carnegie Mellon University Press: Alexandria (2014),
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Five poems from “Nomad” by João Luís Barreto Guimarães (translated from the Portuguese by António Ladeira and Calvin Olsen) Artwork by Anthony Ulinski
In the photographs of others
I am present in the past of lives I
have no knowledge of (men who saunter to the north
women who are headed south) in
photos
that tied me to several foreign cities
where my face remained retained
by mere chance. A photo is memory
(like a map
is voyage)
in them I’m anonymous at the corner of
a scene
just because I crossed that square
at that time.
