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
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
