Letter of Long Grass
We urge whomever responsible
To address this matter very
Urgently; there is danger,
And if not addressed
A team must be dispatched.
Look--let bees tangle
The leggy oregano, let spiders
Spin in wild blades of rough;
Let each wasp bring
Its blessing of sharp attention
To heal what has been mown.
Seaweed
I.
Kelp, I learn at the aquarium,
have holdfasts to anchor them,
stipes like stems, bladders to lift
blades to the sun. I try to trace
a line to its end, but it moves
like memory, bleeds into other
lines, and the whole view sways,
dizzying. Fish cruise between
dark and light, thoughts in salt-water.
II.
For these two women to harvest
seaweed, they must venture
into bitter surf with sharp
knives, wrestle the living ropes,
cut them free, twirl them
into baskets that they then
must keep from the sea.
They load the boat heavy,
steer home while the sea pulls.
III.
We ignore storm warnings, afraid
we’ll miss our chance. Vacations are
rare as reunions, and we’re taut
cables stretched from ship
to foundering ship. We arrive at a beach
piled with seaweed, ugly and shocking.
But what’s familiar about this smell?--
natural as chemical signals, as beach,
storm, the salvation of a weed
absorbing surge.
Assistant Editor Morgan O.H. McCune recently retired from Pittsburg State University in southeast Kansas. Now based in Topeka, she holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis (1991) and an M.L.S. from Emporia State University (2002). Her poems have been published in River Styx, Flint Hills Review, and other places.
At the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
When I take her daughter
onto my hip in the Egypt room,
my cousin says babies are the best
tour guides if we will only follow
their eyes to the dizzying
spread of ceiling tiles, thin,
needle-sharp arms of lights
straining to us, the nearby slope of
some woman’s neck, the warmth
in her pale hands. And in the
gift shop, a tiny water wheel
turns and turns and turns. Her baby rejects
my two offered fingers in favor of her own
palm. She is everything she needs.
Mass Shooting
i go to Lucille
Clifton again, to
“the times.” on my bed
in a chiffon dress, soft
to the floor, i eat
chocolate-covered
pomegranate.
the body
can feel good things
too. we can make
a home here.
ear buds without music
muffle even the
silence. i am
so full and so hungry.
i eat in the bath.
i almost text
my ex. i am
lonelier
than i can ever remember
feeling.
i collage. i want
to finish, push,
make something. so I
make myself
stop. feelings
just have
to be felt.
it is hard to remain human
but we are, and
i am.
Assistant Editor Katelyn Roth has a master’s in poetry from Pittsburg State University in Kansas. Her work has previously appeared online at Silver Birch Press, in Apeiron Review, and at Heartland: Poems of Love, Resistance, and Solidarity. Currently, she lives in Columbus, Ohio where she is an MFA candidate at Ohio State University.
I drive to the city
to a park, which are different
in the city (city park), and sit
in sun that only looks warm
(because sometimes
things only look warm), and the guy
in the offroader next to me
gets a beer from his trunk
after a while and we sit
side-by-side in our cars, not acknowledging
each other, him drinking his beer
in a ballcap, me nursing a new album
on the radio, and the couple in the long grass
just ahead
is kicking a soccer ball
and trying cartwheels. I feel
as if there is nothing
I could more reasonably be doing
than watching the thin cat hunched
on the treacherous side of the railing
of a balcony across the street.
(I can’t know this,
but at home, my dog is yowling
at every pass of the neighbors
overhead. Who isn’t yowling
at things passing just overhead?)
You will ask which songs on this
new album were my favorite—always
the saddest ones. I wish I could connect
over easy, simple, human things, like the beer,
like the ballcap, like a soccer ball
and the sharp coolness of the grass
under-palm as I circle myself over it,
but the saddest songs are my favorites,
it must be agony and nothing else, and his beer
must be a sad beer, and his cap must be
to hide his tired eyes, and the couple must be
on their last attempt to reconcile, and
the cartwheels must be a frenzied swipe
at what is always just overhead.
Assistant Editor Katelyn Roth has a master’s in poetry from Pittsburg State University in Kansas. Her work has previously appeared online at Silver Birch Press, in Apeiron Review, and at Heartland: Poems of Love, Resistance, and Solidarity. Currently, she lives in Columbus, Ohio where she is an MFA candidate at Ohio State University.
Then I Woke Up
Then I woke up, my memory remade,
still slender as the dream of the chickadee
outside the bedroom window.
Then I woke more and wandered
through the garden, the coral azalea
releasing its lurid scent indiscriminately
over the just and the unjust,
the young ones and me, the unsure elder.
I thrice awoke, reeling to the perfect homily
of Nature and her unbound truths
masquerading as a slow walk around the yard,
her small prophets the mourning doves
and tree frogs, her flowers calling bees
to their mumbling tasks, life aiding life
unceasing.
They preached this to all who would understand
in this time of separation and dread:
even apart, we are all still a dazzling bouquet
just waiting to happen.
To RBG
When a dam breaks open,
the wound in the lake’s exit calls valiantly
to refill, to settle amid the flood,
to change the story downstream.
The truths you revealed were curled up
in the depths and mud like a sturgeon
all along. Even in crisis,
even in our collective grief for your loss,
there must come a new field of sight.
We are the hopeful salmon smolt,
shaken free to seek, unseen,
the sea ringing through our combined synapses.
We must ride that turbulent tide,
we are part of your lake wherever we swim.
Blaze
What can you do when feelings
are too loud to lie still and be trapped
on paper?
What can you do when your wild-horse soul
imprisoned in its small corral grows wings
no fence can hold?
What can you do when your fiery heart
ignites the cold agate squeezing its rage out
in the center of your chest?
Scrawl upon the sky!
Soar!
Blaze!
Jennifer Pratt-Walteris an elder and Crone making her way by recognizing the everyday miracles found in the small or mundane. She is a musician, poet, photographer and soft-hearted farmer. Jennifer has three grown children and disabled husband.
Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals asTheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s chapbook prize is named in her honor. She expects her next collection, The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark) to be out in a few months.
we had been born free footed made from frothy cascades
had ourselves borne chains we had never before named
mother or daughter simultaneous particles and waves
suspended lights burnishing in the texture the harmonics
of one dilating chord that approaches pulses and ricochets
splays through and lashes staccato shivers into shade
you may walk as brisk as you like while we haunt this earth
everyone must wait on the tides
clenched teeth foaming at our ankles
burgundy points of sea urchin spine
they tell me perspective is a vanishing line
Carrie Nassif (she/her) is a queer poet and psychologist of the rural Midwest. Her chapbook, lithopaedion (Finishing Line Press) is forthcoming. Other poetry is in Comstock Review, Concision, and Gravity of the Thing; and anthologies including, Slow Lightning: Impractical Poetry, and Written There: The Community of Writers Poetry Review 2022.
Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals asTheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s chapbook prize is named in her honor. She expects her next collection, The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark) to be out in a few months.
Maybe She's Born with ItHave you heard of that girl who
graffitis in Kabul? They say she’s
Afghanistan’s only female graffiti artist.She’s not there? he asks. You mean she lives
here, where the paint in her can is no
threat, where the pigments can’t
haunt bearded men who peer between the cells
of pork, paintings, and pigeons as pets
and shout It Is Forbidden. Here, where girls
can fly kites, take orders at drive-
thru windows, or prosecute ex-
football players. They can study
the musculature of a hand, which can cup
the tender nub of the clitoris or strike
the cheek, can set a broken finger or sketch
its knuckle lines and nail beds,
embedded veins that give life to picture
and person. And anyway, yes, this girl, this
woman, Shamsia Hassani, (say it
right), still lives there, where they kill
the pet pigeons. She still gifts
her faceless models with thick lines
of eyelash, that feminine flutter. She still risks
makeup, music, and the hope
of the snowy,
winged
pappus.
This Was My Alarm This Morning song lyric from “Bowl of Oranges,” Bright EyesI had to hold hands
with a stranger
on a flight cause they
were too scared
to land, the radioman
crows from his pink
and snarling mouth
of loam. Like he’s so great
for deigning to hold a stranger’s
hand with all its wrinkles, germs,
hangnails, hidden pins of poison
in the fold. I’d rather be like Conor
and his bowl of oranges
and his doctor. Just hold my
hand. I think that that would help.
Handholding can’t cure
ugliness or illness, but
my heart might sigh at the press
of palm to palm, the income
of your skin
to the surface of my
exhalation
or kingdom.
Jaclyn Youhana Garver is a freelance writer and editor from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the communications specialist for a national marketing organization. She won a trio of honorable mentions in the Writer’s Digest’s Annual Writing Competition in non-rhyming poetry in 2021 and 2022. Her poetry chapbook, The Men I Never:, is scheduled to be published by dancing girl press in 2023, and her contemporary fiction is represented by Savannah Brooks of KT Literary. Her story “The Butterfly Catcher” will appear in This World Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Horror Stories About Bugs, out this May.
Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals asTheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s chapbook prize is named in her honor. She expects her next collection, The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark) to be out in a few months.
Remember that the population of dreams can be recast. Errata. For the shark stuck in the snowbank. Read: Power. The lover who receives a name can always become the rabbi, the clockmaker. The maternal tug of the heart is the one we can tie bricks to our feet for, walk into the cold lake. Do it lovingly, with silk separating the big toe from the rest. For our mothers, finally, will we open our fists? Show what we’ve been holding? For ornithologist, read unemployed. For EMT, Insomniac. Maybe we like to sleep with people to pretend that death doesn’t happen alone. Don’t show me the other side of the machine. Please cover your logic board. There are tiny pills like little planets that will turn off your mind. Do you really want the job? Wouldn’t you rather turn out the light and practice for your greatest show yet? Everyone will say, she was always beyond all that. She was always part here and part deep in the seaweed, the lake moss. Walking with a fearlessness earned by breaking, over and over, with grace.
Letter from the End of the World
What do you do to get through the day?
The sight of war: schools, churches, malls,
garlic festivals and my uterus.
Reality being unbearable, we prefer
to dance with death with salt
on the rim. The earth is burning
so why are we drowning? Where can I melt
my argument, how do I excavate this hard
metal I’ve swallowed like a question mark?
I blur enough to get my child out of bed
and off to school to learn about conquests
and hide under desks. Get out of bed
my friend texts me when I can’t sleep.
Get something cold from the fridge,
roll it in your hands and try to breathe.
Caitlin Grace McDonnell was a New York Times Poetry Fellow at NYU where she received her MFA. She has published poems and essays widely, including a chapbook, Dreaming the Tree (2003) and two books of poems, Looking for Small Animals (2012) and Pandemic City (2021) She lives with her daughter and teaches writing in New York City.
Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals asTheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s chapbook prize is named in her honor. She expects her next collection, The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark) to be out in a few months.
Path
Sometimes
the way is clear
marked by those
who came before us
each carrying
a stone or two
to lay along the path
to say here I was
here is the way
the warmth of each
hand fades but
the light-touched
stones still radiate
Holding
Today my daughter
and I walked to the edge
of the retaining pond
down the street
the first time she
has left the house
since a week ago
when she fevered
and coughed and we
stared at her sample
slowly wicking up
the white candle
of a test strip and
a single pink line
came into focus
still we quarantined
masked and isolated
but being outside
we could bare our faces
to each other again
and she said look
look and my breath caught
beneath the leaf-studded
iced-over surface
of the pond vibrant
unexpected orange
at least a dozen koi
alert and swimming
in the dead of winter
sensing our approach
with a few measured flicks
of their white fins
the bright flames
of their bodies
disappeared
into murky gray water
and suddenly
I remembered
that I could breathe
Hyejung Kook’s poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Other works include an essay in TheCritical Flame and a chamber opera libretto. Born in Seoul, Korea, she now lives in Kansas with her husband and their two children. You can find more of her poems on this site, and even a selection of poems she gues-edited.
This selection was selected by editors Laura Lee Washburn and Morgan O.H. McCune.
Time
A cardinal calls, desperate lust
masquerading as bravado, counter-
point to the beep of some heavy
machine in reverse. The coffee
goes cold. The dog lies
across the screen porch doorway
oblivious to the robin
hopping two feet from her nose.
The day is waiting. The boats
are turned belly up. Tomatoes
green on the vine. Tomorrow’s
not worth discussion.
You, with your book in your hand,
it is time for your la-la-la’s
your mi-mi-mi’s. A flash
of red followed by a darker,
similar shape makes its way
into the greening trees.
Thrall
I like to walk the river far
from the bridge into the sound
of no traffic
hearing a kingfisher dive
or water snake slide
in S’s on the surface
I like to see no colorful
kayaks, or canoes, pass me
wading crotch-deep into holes
where carp hold their fins
feathering the current
knowing no one anywhere
walks like I do
subject of all I survey.
The World and Oysters
He brought rakia and she brought flowers.
The food was good. They left with colds.
He brought flowers. The rakia was good.
He left without eating, walking home in the cold.
The food was cold. There were flowers.
She was cold. There was rakia.
He brought food for her cold.
They drank rakia. Bees moved in the flowers.
He drank warm rakia with honey
for his cold, called her flower when she brought food.
He went without food to buy her rakia.
She was a frozen flower with bee-stung lips.
Three Rivers
I. Night Noise
Smoke rises in horns
on a herons’ wind.
All night the mud groans
as the river sweats.
We hear the moon
scratching its cradle.
Stepping from our tent
onto this pelt of sand,
all is still
except the slight
panting of smoke.
II. Commonplaces at a Wake
The rain’s mourning
holds the river enthralled:
the drizzle’s starched talk
with the soughing mud:
“Tomorrow… A better day…
“No, no… A long way from
happiness, but… The sun
will rise… Some compassionate
gesture...” The river
who barely knew the departed
watches the mud,
knows that surface
acceptance of solid advice
belies the cold scream
that is building.
III. Coldwater
West of our town, the bones
of the river lie whitening.
Nights we hear mud weep
regretting a lover’s leaving,
perhaps even the loving,
as the distracted moon
hums above. We
know the river’s secrets,
are ours. We smile
through soiled lips,
our streets coils of skin,
the bones of our hearts
cradling thorns awaiting
evening’s exhaust and desire.
Singing down the sun,
we make our sad ways
to that trickle of solace
knowing what we have done
we will again.
William Sheldon is the author of three books of poetry, Retrieving Old Bones (Woodley, 2002), Rain Comes Riding (Mammoth, 2011), Deadman (Spartan, 2021), as well as a chapbook, Into Distant Grass (Oil Hill, 2009). He plays bass for the band The Excuses.
Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals asTheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s chapbook prize is named in her honor. She expects her next collection, The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark) to be out in a few months.
Ladies Home
Hummel statuettes in a lit
mirrored cabinet. A candy dish
of hobnailed glass shaped
like a Victorian woman’s boot.
Tatted doilies on armrests and
crocheted afghans draping sofa
backs. A cuckoo clock just off
the hour despite winding
with those little hanging
pinecone chain weights.
I still see and smell the
bric-a-brac of ladies’
homes, the curtain swags
and fanned magazines
on coffee tables and
all the kitsch
that pitched me into
neutrals and bare surfaces
for such a long time.
Now somehow I buy bright
hand blown glass vases
I fill with flowers. I cover
the couch with throw pillows,
and even though I don’t host
teas, I’ve come to understand
my great aunt’s mismatched
set of frilly filigreed cups.
I used to want to travel
light and lean, all clean lines
and possibilities. But I found
myself tethered in place
and the days grew so long,
my mind so burred with shards
of thought that scoured
spaces were no longer places
of ease. So I invited color in.
I painted. I hung up rugs
and art. I cultivated
my own clutter.
I moved myself in
and I felt fine, less
a mess, even
better than fine.
Amy Sage Webb-Baza is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emporia State University, where she was named Roe R. Cross Distinguished Professor and directs the Donald Reichardt Center for Publishing and Literary Arts. She is managing editor for Bluestem Press and Flint Hills Review. She publishes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and is author of Your Own Life: Kansas Stories (Woodley Press, 2012).
Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals asTheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s chapbook prize is named in her honor. She expects her next collection, The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark) to be out in a few months.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 