Poetry Winter 2023 fiction all issues
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Cover
Susan Wilkinson
Selena Spier
Red From The West
& other poems
Pamela Wax
Talk Therapy
& other poems
Ana Reisens
Honey Water
& other poems
Mark Yakich
Necessary Hope
& other poems
Bridget Kriner
A Few Lies & a Truth
& other poems
Keegan Shepherd
Silver Queen
& other poems
Alaina Goodrich
Sacred Conflagration
& other poems
George Longenecker
Those Who Hunger
& other poems
Hailey Young
Ball Room
& other poems
Sébastien Luc Butler
Aubade
& other poems
Savannah Grant
Ever Since (v.2)
& other poems
grace (logan)
Dynamic
& other poems
Samantha Imperi
A Poem for the Ghosted
& other poems
Corinne Walsh
Limerence
& other poems
Kayla Heinze
Stop checking the score
& other poems
Richard Baldo
Chasing Through to Dawn
& other poems
Alex Eve
A moment
& other poems
Robert Michael Oliver
Prison Hounds
& other poems
Selena Spier
Raspberry
Nothing comes to life until you name it.
Just as it took saying light to make it.
What’s left over drifts
through the mind’s sieve
and sinks to the bottom.
Coats the tongue like an afterthought,
but can’t survive on its own outside the body.
Bright world, there you are—
thumbing through magazines, waiting for me
in the lobby. The bone-white pills
I cradled in my palm. The drive home silent.
In the new snow, fingertips shining
with sugar and grease, the heating pad
pressed to my abdomen. Bright,
bright world. How the knot of fear unraveled
at the sight of what had left me: blood.
Just blood.
And a pale clump of cells,
no bigger than a raspberry.
Playing Dice with the Universe
You won’t find me in your matrices.
You should know that—haven’t you searched
for a woman in her body, and found
neither woman nor body? I will not yield,
I will not take the shape of your container.
There are two variations of knowledge:
you cling to the one that is stored in the body,
is prone to the body’s distortions.
I sing the body dialectic.
I am kinetic, I am chemical—
I am the die and the hand that casts it,
the faces, the dots and the sum
of the numbers they signify.
I am your black luck and resurrection,
god-headed chance,
the act of measurement.
Red from the West
A halo circumscribed the place
where the little beast
sank its teeth in. We waited days,
a week. No symptoms, no fever.
None of our terrors bore fruit
in the end. Flickering shapes
on the brain scan turned out to be
tricks of the light. Candles left untended
guttered out. We left the oven on all morning once,
came home at noon to a hot house.
And the years began to repeat themselves.
And everything reminded us of something else.
So summer shrinks from the surface
of the skin—the air goes brittle—
the wide fields overtaken by milkweed
and goldenrod.
Still Life
The doorway to that bedroom coincided
with the outer edge of time. It was always
as you’d left it: crowded shelves
and books with broken spines
prostrated on the desk, motes of sunlight
drifting back and forth,
back and forth across the unswept floors.
And in the summer, when the heat
began to stay the night, the ladybugs returned,
forewings clicking like metronomes as they settled
on the windowsill, the sheets, congregating on your arms
and legs as you slept. And nothing changed
except the distance from your feet
to the foot of the bed. And the room became
a mirror
in whose smooth impassive face
the passing of your life became apparent.
Step back, and the image resolves. Clear
and clearer. Until one day you step backwards
over the edge of your life
and fall.
Waiting for a Letter
How colorless the world became,
every sensation known only as pain
or its absence.
Dirty plates stacked on the radiator
and the blinds drawn.
No hero’s journey after all.
No dream of perfect order
to console me. Only grief,
the new milk souring
overnight, grief that hung
in the folds of unworn clothes
and came apart in my hands
when I tried to hold it.
I can hold it now.
It visits me sometimes. It likes the mornings.
Like a cat it is, always coming and going.
I’ll go to the sink to rinse my mug
and when I turn it’s gone again,
and my mind begins to populate
with other things—windows and pollen,
small talk and how to avoid it,
laundry receipts, international stamps,
the bathtub drain that wants unclogging,
bagels from Zabar’s, the rent check,
the subway, my romantic prospects,
strangers running to make their trains
with jackets draped over their arms,
clutching greasy paper bags,
clutching paper cups of coffee.
A white spot appears at the base of my nail.
Drifts closer to the edge each day.
My mother used to say
that when the white spot
reached the edge,
I’d get a letter.
Selena Spier
is a graduate student at Columbia University currently living in New York City. She has daylighted as a waitress, a bartender, a nude model, a farmhand, a baker, a line cook, a newspaper columnist, a tutor, a rock climbing instructor, a suicide hotline counselor, a carpenter, and a painter.