Poetry
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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. -
Devil’s Parlor Trick by Charlie Clark
It is only now that you recall the emperor
scorpion he at parties would take out and with
two open hands on the granite kitchen countertop
bait into stinging him the pain the gag once the tail
stuck in raised up until like eight scrambling
ends of lace it hung from the thick pink turning
purple at the puncture and like chirping fan
blades the laughter in the windless air of the airless
little kitchen coming from the heady smear of faces
to whom nothing lasting had been revealed
watching what he’d done be undone be gently
shaken back into its tank and how he allowed
each to test the pulse of the darkened ring already
growing stiff there in the center of his hand
*
Charlie Clark studied poetry at the University of Maryland.
