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.
Thirdness / Origin Story
Choice C is always the answer
if you ask me to choose between
A or B— for me there is no “or”—
there is always a slippery
“and” / which is not the same as
neither/both. If you ask me
to choose between I will answer “fish”
but not to the question “fish or fowl”
because “fish” is the answer to “boy
or girl”—
we all started out by
swimming. If you ask me “princess
or knight” I’ll
say I want to be the stuffed dinosaur
because when we play Castle
there should be a dinosaur. So many
costumes the tall ones make us choose
between from the time we are born.
Pardon me—
I am too busy swimming
to put on pants or dresses.
See my scales shimmer in the sunlight
let my phosphorescence shock you
my water-flame my
dark-shine my scorchflood—
--for Hope
Incidental
(Chemo Round Three)
“I’ve got nothing left/ it’s kind of wonderful / ‘cause there’s nothing they can take away…”
--Broken Bells / Perfect World
The industrial part of town
has never looked more beautiful—
the cement factory proof
that bodies are miracles of
physics, engineering—
My face is raining
because the steering wheel fits—
because I can hold it
today— because there is today—
because my hands are working—
my knees bend and permit
me to accelerate, brake
save my life.
Down come the gates between
me & the oncoming train—
thank you, city engineers, for this
kindness. Our trajectories
now coexist without incident—
Incidence. What are the chances
of me? I am breathing
two days after wondering whether I would
continue to do that— I’m swallowing
food. I want to wave to
the people on the passing train—
do they know how beautiful
this day is? Do they know
their knees are fulcrums
and levers?
My heart is still beating.
There was such pain
such unbearable fire
I wondered whether it was better
to be permanently
Elsewhere.
And then the cool night—
there was Mercy—
Reprieve is a beautiful word.
Today everything is beautiful
(which does not diminish the beauty
of any individual incidence)—
A seed caught in the fur
of an unsuspecting animal
and transported elsewhere—
the tree that grows is
not intentional— not on purpose—
yet it grows
with intent— such am I—
I am unlikely
and yet
here I am,
sobbing in my car
as a train full of Beauty
speeds past—
Frankie Drayus has recent work in Poemeleon, and past poems and short-shorts in Passager (Honorable Mention), Permafrost, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Ninth Letter, Third Coast, diode, ART/LIFE (including her collage art), and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, Walt Whitman Award, May Swenson Poetry Prize, and Marsh Hawk Press. She is a past co-director of the poetry nonprofit VCP, a multiyear co-curator of THE THIRD AREA, and a recent survivor of breast cancer.
Guest Editor 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 Critical Flame and a chamber opera libretto. Born in Seoul, Korea, she now lives in Kansas with her husband and their two children. Learn more at her website.
When my therapist asked what I love most about my mother, I said
My momma can sang.
My momma sangs
Like spring cinematic sequence in full bloom.
You know—like time-lapsed lilies pushing through seed & soil.
Like a satyr put down his reed pipe to hoof organ pedals.
My momma sangs like she God’s trombone.
Like she his alarm clock.
Like she cupped her hands to the hole in his side
& coated her throat with surely He died on Calvary.
When my momma sangs,
Ain’t no waiting for the good part.
It’s all peach cobbler corners.
It’s all fried green tomatoes on white bread.
The way my momma sangs snatches collars and wigs.
It will take you there & bring you back
like arc, like covenant,
like bring the fatted calf.
Like fire like ancestors shut up inmy bones. My momma sangs
There’s a lily in the valley
& Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round.
with chord change & octave riff.
Like gettin’ to the Promised Land
ain’t nuthin’ but a run away.
Like crossing chilly Jordan
ain’t nuthin’ but a run away.
Like crying Holy Ghost power
could be the report
of the pistols some Moses had hid
beneath her skirt tails.
Momma sangs with her eyes closed
like river run on.
She sangs with her head back
like river run on.
She sangs with her fists clinched
like father I stretch
like storm clouds
like death
ain’t nuthin’ but a run
in her Sunday stockings
& it’s too damn hot
in this house for stockings anyway.
A Broken Shovel for that which Will Break AgainWe are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan
--Gwendolyn Brooks
It’s a hell of a time
to find ourselves.
And aren’t we proud we
made it here together.
Big Bang to upright. Viral to virulent. And some of us are
still married
to trickle-down democracy.
This world of wedges & rails. Ode to the things
we’ve stretched like last dimes.
Ode to the bacteria in the culture. Ode to the legends of
the self, rehearsed & centered.
A hell of a way to find ourselves. Un-masked & dry.
Which is to want to believe
that living before was lush with frolic
& freedom for all, not hours
in downpours of dollar menu wrappers & near-collisions on off-ramps
owed to purpose and
here we are.
A hell of a place.
With room to muse cures for oppressions. Maybe the
light.
Maybe the light, broken & injected right into the body. Here
healing is often involuntary.
Like taxes. Like curl-patterns. Like breaking again
tomorrow is the only certain plan.
Born in Louisville, Mississippi, Jermaine Thompson learned language from big-armed women who greased their skillets with gossip and from full-bellied men who cursed and prayed with the same fervor. He’s been writing poetry since he was thirteen years old—inspired by having to memorize Langston Hughes’ “Harlem” for a Black History Program at his Presbyterian church home. Jermaine loves language for what it creates, what it destroys, for what binds in Heaven, & what it looses on Earth. Jermaine is an educator who has publications in The Pinch, Memorious, Whale Road Review, Southern Indiana Review, and New Letters.
Guest Editor 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 Critical Flame and a chamber opera libretto. Born in Seoul, Korea, she now lives in Kansas with her husband and their two children. Learn more at her website.
“No, I was not in that number, though I still have the fire and the smoke
within me, pillars of fire and pillars of smoke that guide me”
--Yehuda Amichai
Congregation, the presence of our bodies
Draws the gun closer
Even so we continue chanting
A phrase passed in the old tongue
From generation to generation—
מיר װעלן זײ איבערלעבן “We will outlive them”
When our ancestors were rounded up
Forced to silence, expected to cower
Gunfire the sole interruption
To an old klezmer tune
Loudly, they sang
מיר װעלן זײ איבערלעבן איבערלעבן
מיר װעלן זײ איבערלעבן איבערלעבן
מיר װעלן זײ איבערלעבן
איבערלעבן
מיר, “me, we, us,”
Together we are unafraid & defiant
זײ, “them,”
The hateful, with murderous intent
איבערלעבן “to outlive”
“to survive,” “to live longer than”
Outlive, for the memory of those who perished
Survive, my body proof my ancestors are still here
Live longer than, for I was there singing with them
At that time and in that place
My voice among theirs.
.מיר װעלן זײ איבערלעבן, היינט און אלעמאל
We will outlive them, today and always.
Guided by fire, by smoke,
May our singing efface
The thunder of bullets.
Samantha Landau is a Jewish-American academic, classical vocalist, translator, and writer who resides in Tokyo, Japan, where she has lived for nearly two decades. She works as a professor at The University of Tokyo and holds an MA and PhD in comparative culture from International Christian University. She completed her BA at Cornell University. She is a co-founder of the Gothic in Asia Association. Recently, she co-edited an issue of Women’s Studies on Emily Dickinson and Music, and co-organized conferences on Asian Folklore and the Gothic. Her creative writing centers on issues of identity and the supernatural. This is her first poetry publication.
Guest Editor 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 Critical Flame and a chamber opera libretto. Born in Seoul, Korea, she now lives in Kansas with her husband and their two children. Learn more at her website.
Canto of the Earth’s Song
In the flowers eye, lashes of goldenrod wink their fringe, dusting petals with the blueprints of the world.
There’s a scent on the air of a day forgotten in the woods, wilding witches drinking mead around a bonfire, acrid with the smolder of mugwort.
While wandering the murky forest, the ghostly bear searches for her phantom cub. Part shriek, part roar, too loud to be bird, too soft to be nearing motor, she moans and squawks.
The sound is vermillion and bronze, splashing the vision, filling nostrils with the pungency of crushed herbs and broken wood.
Clouds tumble over treetops like dice. Lightening prays to the sea, a crackling spark, I beg you open, take me in; I am providence, receive me.
On my last day walking this miniscule planet, I, too, will throw my cells sunward, expanding with gaseous heat, contracting like dew to land among the clouds.
Ex Gratia
I am uploading my new engagement photos.
Thoughtlessly using the same app that you and I
used all those years ago, the one that lets you
create your fantasy wedding and website. Well,
machines have memories longer than elephants,
and as I open it the screen stubbornly flashes your name
in forty-eight-point font across the ornate scrollwork headline.
My fingers click the mouse furiously, back, back, back
arrow to find the offending field still carrying your name
before my fiancé’s attention shifts away from their work,
over to my screen. It is not as if we have not all acknowledged you,
haven’t all become a strange little family: me and my fiancé,
you and your husband, the five of us (with the ghost of our relationship past.)
Together at Christmas over baked ham and sweet potatoes.
Swatting the mosquitos away from each other at summer BBQs.
Folding each other’s laundry over Starbucks and home baked treats.
And I would be lying if I didn’t say I don’t think about the future and you
as guest at my wedding, all four of us grown old and grizzled together.
How you and I had once pictured the front porch, the rocking chairs.
How the view has changed since you lived here.
R.B. Simon is a queer artist and writer of African and European-American descent. She has been published inmultiple literary journals, and her chapbook,The Good Truth, was released by Finishing Line Press in July 2021. She currently lives in Madison, WI with her spouse, daughter, and four little dogs.
Guest Editor 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 Critical Flame and a chamber opera libretto. Born in Seoul, Korea, she now lives in Kansas with her husband and their two children. Learn more at her website.
Confession
Bless me father for I have
skinned the cat. It was alive
and now it has been
reborn anew in the kingdom
of dirt. Like a white lamb,
it’s stilled and pupaic
as they feed on his body
his congealed blood. Oh father,
you should see his transformation
his perpetual giving. The world
has changed into winged life.
The trees, now shine verdant
as if it received a fresh coat
of paint and has set to dry
in the open air. The ones below
spin in their sated ecstasy
as they grey and acknowledge
the thin skin dries to a dazzling
carapace like hundreds of bright
slick black eyes rolling in the dark.
Father, the beetles are real and they
know such things as mercy.
When galactic verve enters me, I can fold myself neatly into the chair at my bedside. It scrubs the bits that require pipe cleaners, Draino, thick-bottomed plungers. I see these dying stars inside me where the red turns black. The light fades and the tiny sparkles parade over the discus courts in my stomach’s veranda. Nothing can part the spill of all the moonshine welling over. How interesting to know about the limitless meanderings of the inside. The myriad courtyards of dunnock song. This forever night so brilliant and concealed.
Dan Lau is a Chinese American poet. A Kundiman fellow, he is the recipient of scholarships and grants from The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Queer Cultural Center, and San Francisco Arts Commission. His poems have been published in Colorado Review, Bellingham Review, The Margins, Poem-a-Day, The Baffler and others. He resides on the unceded territory of the Ramaytush Ohlone, also known as San Francisco.
Guest Editor 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 Critical Flame and a chamber opera libretto. Born in Seoul, Korea, she now lives in Kansas with her husband and their two children. Learn more at her website.
For Malachai
after Lucille Clifton
Yes, we named you
even though we couldn’t
agree to bring you
into the world. Move
to California with me,
he said. Ride my dick,
he said. This is the worst
thing I’m gonna do in
my whole life, he said,
but no part of me
wants to take this
journey with you.
How do you think
you’re gonna do it,
he said, pinning
me up against a wall,
huh, how. Ask what
help you can get,
my friend said.
We find the question
inappropriate, they said.
We don’t know what
strabismus is the
Kaiser clinic said.
They might not
make you start
right away, he said
in his sleep, What?
I asked, awake and
worrying alone.
At the book-signing,
he said. I mean,
at the abortion, he said,
and turned his back as
I got up to write it down.
Malachai, I wanted you
but one day, coming
down the mountain,
when I realized
it was too late for
the chemical way,
I felt you growing
like witchgrass, like
something wild
and unwanted, like
the shadow of me
inside of me. I could
not say the words:
I want an abortion,
so the Berkeley
women’s health
clinic practitioners
didn’t know what
to do with me, are
you sure you’ve
considered all
your options, they
said in the small
room made by
old tapestries, yes,
I said. I can’t say
it but I think you
should do it anyway.
Can you hold me
down, I asked, in
case my body
struggles. Yes, they
said, working that day
for free for me,
their young tan arms
in soft cotton across
my thighs, holding hands.
You’re not pregnant
anymore, the doctor said,
who was famous,
apparently, for giving
abortions back
when it was hard
to get them, like
it is again now,
dark curtain like
a cervix closing,
like a phone’s dial-tone,
like the man whose seed
sprouted in you turning,
like the grey men
in suits, counting bills.
When will I feel better?
I asked the friend,
home and emptied
like a dried rind,
like wildflowers,
like something free.
When you have a baby
she said, which was
true for her, and maybe
true for me. This is how
it happened for me.
Nothing easy.
Everything painful
Everything exactly
as it should be.
Animal Bodies
What now that the small
animals are outside
my belly. Tight chest
with four chairs,
congress around
the heart. Shame
is the black dog
in the crate, daughter
menstruating on
the hotel fold-out couch,
deep in her screens.
Can an aloe plant die?
Because I think I killed
something that thrives
in thirst and desert sun.
Sometimes I wonder
what I have to give.
Thank you, my mom
said, twice, as I was
leaving her in rehab.
Once in my ear as
I kissed her head, the
other over text with
whatever permanence
that holds. I want to
say sorry for something
I said to her the second
day. I’m sorry I didn’t
walk slowly with you
last summer. Caught
between her 81-year-old
pace, my daughter’s at
12, and the small black
dog of indeterminate age
who leaps like a raw
nerve at other beings
and then retreats, as
if to say, love me quick
before you might kill
me. As if to say love
is terrifying. As if to say
here is the only thing
I know how to do.
All the animals
emptied, there is just
a body, occipital ridge
tight from sudden impact,
years of carrying healthy
humans. I picture my
skeleton, frayed and
yellowed but still
surrounded by white
light, oceans of purple.
I no longer see the bones
inside those I love. I
strive to stay still with
the wetness of their eyes.
I strive to touch the
animals that live
outside my frame
when they wake in
the night forgetting
how to breathe.
There’s no secret to it,
just the hand
and they begin
to calm. To let the
beasts that reside
inside retreat, to
let the small body
be just a body.
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.
Guest Editor 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 Critical Flame and a chamber opera libretto. Born in Seoul, Korea, she now lives in Kansas with her husband and their two children. Learn more at her website.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 