April 2024 | poetry
To go back is as hard almost
as forward.
We all got a little silence lodged
in our molars some time
in middle school, mostly.
Field trips to the museum of future affairs,
long bus rides, behind the glass
our taxidermied bodies
in frozen poses of parenting,
pharmacy lines, conference rooms.
On the ride back we did not discuss it and also
there was no ride back.
We lived there in the museum, locked in,
setting fires in the courtyard to keep busy.
No one came for us
and we liked it that way.
Wrapped our fists in the curtains,
broke the glass,
hauled out our own effigies.
Only warmed them by the fire.
To go forward is much
harder than backward but also less impossible.
They came for us, pounded on the doors,
begged and begged.
We would not budge. Not locked in
but them locked out.
The smoke they thought
was signal was just s’mores.
In the basement canned food
for any number of eternities.
Draped our arms around
ourselves and sang songs
we didn’t know yet.
The silence dried up,
our teeth gleamed, a new silence
came to cushion us.
It was different, springier,
a shared give in the air.
Oh, sure, there must be lots we’re missing,
but we’d just be missing more
out there. We’ve seen enough.
No season left to tempt us.
Katherine Tunning lives in Boston with her partner and a highly variable number of cats. Some of her recent poetry has appeared in Red Rock Review, Prime Number Magazine, and The Westchester Review. Her work has been nominated for the Sundress Best of the Net anthology and the Pushcart Prize and awarded the 2020 Penn Review Fiction Prize. You can find her online at www.katherinetunning.com.
Katherine Tunning
April 2024 | poetry
Up county, here in Mount Kisco, the men
from across the tracks wait patiently
at the station every weekday morning,
not for a train, but a day job, seated
on the edge of the sidewalk or against
the fence, near where cars enter to drop off
or pick up, all expectantly catching
the gazes of incoming drivers,
signaling silently, Whatever it is
you have to do, I can do it for you.
By noon, many head home to emptiness,
their wives away to serve as maids for
the more well-to-do. I wait for the train
from the Bronx that brings my housekeeper.
Jim Tilley has published three full-length collections of poetry and a novel with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. His poem, “On the Art of Patience,” was selected by Billy Collins to win Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Four of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His next poetry collection, Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe: New & Selected Poems, will be published in June 2024.
Jim Tilley
April 2024 | poetry
I.
The Buddhas
tell us not
to think of
a heaven,
of a hell…
This breath comes.
That breath goes.
Then nothing.
II.
Klara Dan
von Neumann,
drove from home
to the beach—
walked into
the surf and
III.
Woolf wrote:
“Dearest, I
feel certain
I am mad …
again… I
am doing
what seems best…”
IV.
Sylvia
sealed off
the kitchen
with towels
to stop gas
from drifting
into where
her children
were sleeping.
V.
Lao Tau says:
“Heaven and
earth are not
humane. They
regard all
as straw dogs.”
VI.
The next day
morning came.
nothing at
all changed.
Straw dogs
don’t bark.
William Waters is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston Downtown. Along with Sonja Foss, he is coauthor of Destination Dissertation: A Traveler’s Guide to a Done Dissertation.
William J Waters
April 2024 | poetry
In the Peabody Library reading room, a ramshackle longing has liberty to roam,
While the rhetoric of busybodied reality bustles without and within
The center of self-knowing. Beneath the architraves scrolled with Grecian ghosts,
And over the bookcases crimped dense with Virgil’s deeds,
Twenty centuries of ‘I Am’s impartially abided to this place divorced of time.
Beside the domesticity of books, the graduate students sit, talking contentedly
Of matters related to weather, and ‘she loves you not’s’ of restrained importance,
And have exiled vellum-spined Kipling, Coleridge, Cranes’ consciousnesses
From their all-important talk, then to someplace as unreached
Within these twenty centuries and five floors of domesticity,
Below whose atrium the unconsoled words of creation
Retire into their dreadful humanity, read through perhaps and put away –
I search in heed for the truest ‘kings of infinite space.’
Wandering the columns of the Peabody,
Bordering a prodigiously fat shelf set aside for the modernist thing,
Certain truths seem forgivable to readers of certain breeds.
To chance upon a no more commonplace volume of Auden –
I turn to his ‘September 3, 1939’ two days, eighty years after the occasion
And chance upon some lady’s no more commonplace tow-color of hair,
Doubtless, having been collected by some stranger into a blonde plait,
A stranger whose limerence had left it truer bookmarked beside the verse –
‘For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.’
A young poet whose work can be best described as “allowing the glory of the mundane to permeate our understanding.”
Maxwell Tang
April 2024 | poetry
It was spring, no I mean dusk, and the killdeer began stepping up out
of intricate doors in the field.
They sported unseen fires beneath their downy vests.
Their presence had been warming the soil before the corn crop, except
for their dead sisters, brothers who had joined the soil.
No, that was in my dream, before the part where the covers had parted
and a voice I didn’t recognize asked a question.
It felt like an ancient alphabet trying to spell some message.
It left a churning in my belly for the rest of that day, and again the day
after.
And the killdeer, that first night, had yet to break their wings.
They had no fear of owls, nor of hawks in the morning, after
daybreak.
And the toe prints they left in the muddy swale read as the myth of
Osiris.
Steve Fay began life twelve miles from the Mississippi River in western Illinois. Since the mid-1970s, many journals have published his poetry, which lately appears (or is forthcoming) in: Closed Eye Open, Comstock Review, Decadent Review, Jabberwock Review, Menacing Hedge, Santa Clara Review, Tar River Poetry, The Dewdrop, TriQuarterly, and Watershed Review. His collection, what nature: Poems (Northwestern UP, 1998), was cited by the editors and board of The Orion Society as one of their 10 favorite nature/culture-related books of the 12-month period in which it appeared. He lives among wooded ravines and a donkey pasture in Fulton County, Illinois.
Steve Fay
April 2024 | poetry
It has been forty years.
he in New York me in San Francisco.
erasing him with ease for forty years. yet he is coming
and wants to meet for a drink. really?
does he regret the divorce and realize he fucked
up by sleeping with Sally and Sara and Sue?
spending weekends shuffling numbers in his fancy office
on the thirty-sixth floor. but honey
my heartstrings have moved on. happily
Married to a marvelous man. and what
would I wear? certainly not my usual jeans or sweats
that make me look dowdy. which I definitely am. but
certainly not a tight sweater over sagging boobs.
certainly not scads of makeup. which I would have to buy.
I don’t want to fire up his remorse. or do I?
vengeance sweeter than Christmas pie. especially pecan.
rolling the taste on my tongue like a butterscotch disc.
what about the bills for two-hundred dollar “massages”?
Yet we did have some good times, didn’t we? I finger
my rosary of memories. breathless in Florence
standing before David. Coins tossed
in Trevi Fountain. but honey do I really want
to reminisce? do I really want to spend strung-out nights
worrying about what to wear? and fretting
that faint embers might gleam again? flaring
with a word, a look, or even a friendly kiss.
maybe best to say I am busy.
for the next forty years.
Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
Claire Scott
