The Best American Poetry

Lynne Dreyer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Down monkey. Monkey down

Go girl and get, he ices and is rowdy. The lamp still hangs dirty and massive. Eat this ox, now eat
this meat all in a jovial mess. The bee dovetails its only trail, a trial with the dog it meets. You’d
think they’d see the score implicitly but no per se. Piggy she see, she small. An ABC jumping in
head over the books the connection is made through motion, rhyme, and tongue. In that place
between yours and theirs each letter hangs free in form.

The voice was a structure of the guidelines which were changing in Biggy and memory.
Between memory and the future was desire and before desire was rest. Art is pain and light. It
is distinguished by the portable sky that touches various hues. It is small and within and has
something in it that is almost clear. Art is jealous and human, it asks for hope. The good house,
the writer’s context, the poet’s mind.

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Lynne Dreyer is the author of The White Museum (Roof Books), Step Work (Tuumba Press), and The Under Arc (Primary Writing Books). Her writing is also Included in various anthologies--- e.g. None of the Above (ed. Michael Lally), Moving Borders (ed. Mary Margaret Sloan), and Leaving Lines of Gender (ed. Ann Vikery). She is forever grateful and lucky to have been surrounded by the Washington DC poets through the years.  [This poem is from The Under Arc, Primary Writing Books, 2025.]

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Doug Lang, language collage, ca. 1980  [courtesy of Diane Ward]. Pictured in the piece are unknown, Doug Lang, P. Inman, and Michael Sappol.

Daniel Borzutzky: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Or (For Isaac)

And he took his father to the flame and his father said

I am not a goat

And the boy said   no    you are not a goat

And the father said     where are the goats

And the boy said    you are a goat today or you will be a goat

The father thought about hybrid beasts and said nothing

He looked with love at the strange child he created

He thought about how hard it had been to keep the boy alive

And when the boy led him down the death path he kept thinking

I should be in charge   

But I am tired and I can’t do anything to gain control

I am crinkled, worn out, sick of seeing

Things get destroyed in my name

Do I mind that I might be turned into someone else’s burden?

Also, I admire my son’s determination

Someone, the voice of X, told him to take me to the flame

Someone serious, a credible character,

Told him to take me to the flame

It would have been perfectly reasonable to resist

To say look, son, this is not the kind of thing you should do to your father

But I was tired and the child was persistent and I wondered

How long will this thing go on?

It’s true, I am old now

I don’t actually want to live that much longer

But there are a few more things I have to do

Is it presumptuous to say there is a future that depends on me?

The earth has its own ideas

The sea has other ideas

And the sky has ideas

There are just a few bodies falling from the sky today

I think I recognize some of them

They are my children and one of them whispers to me

This is not the right way to live

And to live in the wrong way is to die in the wrong way

Who said that and what did they mean?

Before he takes me to the flame I tell my son

There is nothing left to do here on earth

I welcome the pain and I welcome my son’s audacity

I admire his fingers as they grip my shirt sleeve

In those fingers I feel sadness, tenacity, anger, hope

I feel the violence of the centuries filling up in his blood

I know how lonely it is in his body

The expectations of our people are extraordinary

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Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024) and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024); and Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita and Jaime Luis Huenún. [This poem originally appeared in The Atlantic, Feb. 2025.]

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                        Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1562, oil-on-panel (46 inches by 64 inches).

A.E. Stallings: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Empathy

My love, I’m grateful tonight

Our listing bed isn’t a raft

Precariously adrift

As we dodge the coast guard light,

And clasp hold of a girl and a boy.

I’m glad we didn’t wake

Our kids in the thin hours, to take

Not a thing, not a favorite toy,

And didn’t hand over our cash

To one of the smuggling rackets,

That we didn’t buy cheap life jackets

No better than bright orange trash

And less buoyant. I’m glad that the dark

Above us is not deeply twinned

Beneath us, and moiled with wind,

And we don’t scan the sky for a mark,

Any mark, that demarcates a shore

As the dinghy starts taking on water.

I’m glad that our six-year-old daughter,

Who can’t swim, is a foot off the floor

In the bottom bunk, and our son

With his broken arm’s high and dry,

That the ceiling is not seeping sky,

With our journey but hardly begun.

Empathy isn’t generous,

It’s selfish. It’s not being nice

To say I would pay any price

Not to be those who’d die to be us.

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A.E. Stallings is an American poet in Greece. She has published four volumes of verse and a selected poems (This Afterlife), the last with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the U.S. and Carcanet in the U.K. She has also published three volumes of verse translation, most recently an illustrated The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice with Paul Dry Books. A prose book, Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters, and their Friends Framed the Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon, is just out with Paul Dry Books. Stallings is currently the Oxford Professor of Poetry. [Author photo by Kostas Mantziaris.]
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                       Théodore Géricault, The Raft of Medusa (1818–19), oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris

Edward Salem: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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My Aerodynamics

As I fell from the sky, I smelled fish.

The fish was in my mouth.

My eyes were fish eyes, bulging, bugged out.

I fell like this for years,

in the fishy air. I stopped panicking.

I could think as I fell.

I missed spaghetti.

I was a model, hair blown back

in the wind. I was thirty-five.

I was fifty-three. The sun

winked at me like bar light

through a shot of whisky.

Nights were easier. I actually

fell, harhar, asleep. Five minutes

here, ten minutes there.

Open sky, open darkness.

I drank. I pissed myself.

I stripped my clothes off in the sky.

I was very cold. I hugged myself

and it changed my aerodynamics.

I began spinning out of control.

I vomited clear rain.

I refused water.

Refused breath.

I missed my daughter.

I missed my wife. I missed our home.

I missed smoking. I accepted

I’d never leave this blue prison.

How quickly my mind adjusted,

but I was dangerously bored.

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Edward Salem is the author of Monk Fruit (2025), the winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and Intifadas (2026), the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Granta, and elsewhere. 

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                                                     Family-owned painting by unknown artist        

Joan Kwon Glass: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

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Exit Plans

 

My ex-mother-in-law hates my guts.

I still have the cooking pot she gave us

as a wedding gift. It has lasted longer

than both of my marriages, & this fact

is definitely not lost on me. I use it

now to make hard-boiled eggs,

until my kitchen smells like death.

I bury grudges in cookie jars

& beneath floorboards the way

my grandmother stashed cash

from her husband, the way some men

stow side chicks. The only thing more

human than wanting to believe in love,

is having a secret exit plan.

At some point, don’t all of us hope

for a way out of whatever we’ve chosen?

Near the end of my first marriage,

I caught my husband in a lie so elaborate,

so astonishing, that my shock gave way

to reverence. It’s impossible to know

how far we can go until we arrive.

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Joan Kwon Glass is a diasporic Korean poet, author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, winner of the 2024 Perugia Press Poetry Prize, and Night Swim, winner of the 2021 Diode Book Prize. Her poems have been featured in Poetry, The Slowdown, Passages North, Poetry Daily, Terrain, Poetry Northwest, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Joan has been a finalist for the Tupelo Press Helena Whitehill Book Award, the Poetry Northwest Possession Sound Series, and the University of Akron Poetry Prize. She is a 2025 Writer in Residence for SWWIM, a visiting writer at Amherst College, Smith College, and Wesleyan University, and serves as a teacher for several writing centers throughout the country. 

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                                              Casey Niccoli, Last Exit to the Strawberry Stars, mixed media collage, ca. 2024

D. Nurkse: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Dominant Harmony

 

In that dream I pinched myself

and my father said No! You cannot wake by suffering.

 

So how will I wake? How will I know I‘m alive?                                            

And how will you know me?

My father showed me:

bulky furniture covered with a tarp

he whisked away: a rented Bechstein.

 

I said: what shall I practice?

The scales, the voicings, the remote minor?

My father said: practice the dream and perform it.

 

All night I watched my hands trying to escape.                    

Breathless summer. Pollen hung in the no-breeze,

a dry pang high in the nostrils.

 

Outside the crickets were building an empire

itchy as the night sky.

 

The universe was a mumble of prompts:

Maestoso. Accelerando. Apartando.  

 

Venus waited with pursed lips.

 

And my father listened critically,

legs crossed, two fingers against his cheek,

a tall man determined to take up no space,

his knees up to his chin—at last

a light came to the window. Dawn.

I had played it.

            I had coaxed my little finger

to forget Narva, my cherished griefs,

my father fading in his frayed blue robe.

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D. Nurkse's twelfth poetry collection A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems was published by Knopf in 2022. 

[note: Narva---competition in Estonia dedicated to the works of Polish composer Frederick Chopin.]

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                    Margaret Isabel Dicksee, The Child Handel Discovered by His Parents, 1893. Oil on canvas. H 91.5 x W 122 cm. 

Zoltan Farkas: The Baltimore Poems [Terence Winch]

 

ONCE LOST, BUT FOUND AGAIN

On February 22, 2018, I got an email from the poet Zoltan Farkas, someone I hadn’t heard from in more than 40 years. Here’s what he wrote:

        Dear Terry...

                              I've been remembering the wild days in DC in the 70's. 

        Thought I would try to re-establish contact.  Let me know if you get this email? 

        Now in my 80s, I've begun writing again... miraculous, when you think of it.

 

        Zoltan Farkas  (once lost, but found again)

        80 Mt. Desert Street, apt. 54

        Bar Harbor, Maine 04609

 

A few minutes later, I replied:

        Zoltan!  Welcome back. I often wondered what became of you.

        I also wonder what became of my copy of The Baltimore Poems, which I really dug.

        I'm glad you've started writing again. I still write, play music, etc. I have a 28-yr-old son

        named Michael who is a far better musician than I could ever be. And so forth.

        yrs,

        Terence

I never heard another word from him, and I’m sorry to say that I never followed up beyond my initial response to his email.

 

THE BALTIMORE POEMS

A few weeks ago, my friend and fellow poet David Beaudouin paid me a visit, and I asked him if he had ever heard of Zoltan and his chapbook, David being a Baltimore native and an authority on his beloved city. He said, no, he hadn’t. I immediately went to my computer and searched for Zoltan’s book, while David did the same thing on his phone. I got there first, ordering what seems to have been the last available copy of The Baltimore Poems, $10 from an Amazon seller. 

It arrived in the mail a week or so later. It’s a beautiful little work, published in 1967 by Goliard Press in the U.K.  Anselm Hollo (1934--2013) brought the book to the attention of the press’s founder, my old friend Tom Raworth (1938--2017), the acclaimed avant-garde poet. [below, left: Tom Raworth, photo by Allen Ginsberg; right: Anselm Hollo, 10 June 1965] 

Here’s a sample from the book:

        10. Sonnet

        Making the lonely passages.    Lips

        stitched shut.   A hollow ocean.

        Destroyer.   Stretches past

        meat and bone.    Fire

        in the poem does not consume

        anything but paper.   The shores

        night shores vanish into it

        like something wished for.   Real fire

        burns, water chokes a waning man.

        But I've been thankful for the rain

        to cool my face and help me home.

His work is taut and mysterious, his use of language seeming to anticipate in some ways the work of the Language School, which became a significant force in the literary world in the 1970s and later.

            From no. 8:

        You can imagine a cliff

        somewhere in every poem, opens

        down. Pronouns confuse

        everything.

I made a PDF of the book and asked my friend Charles Bernstein, the great poet/scholar, if he could add it to the EPC Digital Library, which he kindly did. So, after almost 60 years, the BAP blog is making The Baltimore Poems available again—just click right here. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ONCE FOUND, BUT LOST AGAIN

A week or two ago, I went back to the 2018 email exchange and sent Zoltan a message inquiring after his well-being, but he has not replied. I assume that if he was in his 80s in 2018, he is somewhere around 90 now, if he is still alive. 

That’s what I haven’t been able to determine. In fact, after searching extensively online, I have not been able to find either a photo, a short bio, an obituary, or anything about him except for scattered references to the 1967 chapbook and a single mention of him in a poem of mine called “Three Addresses.” Otherwise, he seems to have left no footprint whatsoever over the past 50 years. Using the Maine address he provided in the 2018 email, I stumbled on what looked like a possible phone number for him, but when I called, a voice declared it was disconnected. Online, you will come upon several other Zoltan Farkases, but not the Zoltan I once knew.

With the help of Google Maps I drilled down a bit more. The address in Bar Harbor, Maine, that Zoltan included in his 2018 email turns out to be part of a low-income senior living housing site called the Malvern-Belmont Estates. I tried several phone numbers associated with this place, but with no luck. I found a contact form on one website that seemed connected to the umbrella organization in charge of Malvern-Belmont, and I tried to send an email inquiring about Zoltan, but when I hit "submit," a message in red repeatedly appears announcing "Cannot access Server."

I then called the Mount Desert Islander, the local newspaper, leaving a message on their voicemail and also sending an email requesting any information they might have. A staffer at the paper emailed me back the next day with this: “Thank you for your email and voicemail. After taking a look through our archives, I only come up with one hit, and that is where Zoltan Farkas was listed in the obituary of Sharon Riley in the Mount Desert Islander in the January 23, 2020 edition.”  So it seems Zoltan was still alive in 2020. I tried finding out more about Sharon Riley, thinking that maybe one of her connections might know something, but I struck out there as well.

I then searched for evidence of Zoltan in Tom Raworth’s and Anselm Hollo’s archives, both of which did include something from Zoltan, but this material is not digitized. I will try eventually to contact those institutions to see if they can supply the Farkas material.

 

A SURPRISING LETTER FROM 1976

Then it dawned on me that I should search my own archive at Boston College, and sure enough, there was something from Zoltan in there. I asked BC’s Christian Dupont if they could scan whatever it was I included from Zoltan, which I had no memory or copy of, and they graciously did. 

I was kind of shocked at what I got back from them—a warm, appreciative, neatly typed letter concerning a reading I apparently arranged in early 1976:

My shock derives from how personal and intimate Zoltan’s tone is, to the point of his even signing off with “you have my love.” I don’t remember being close with him at all. We were next-door neighbors in my apartment building in D.C. for a while, but I don’t recall ever hanging out with him. In his 2018 email he mentions “the wild days in DC in the 70’s.”  Yes, indeed: there were many wild days back then but I can’t picture any in my mind with me and him in the same frame. I also didn’t remember the reading he discusses, but I quickly figured that the “Simon” he mentions had to be Simon Schuchat, a very young poet back then, but already impressively accomplished. And the excellent sound had to be the contribution of my brother Jesse, who was the master of our band’s (The Fast Flying Vestibule) audio equipment in that era.   

After roaming the globe for many decades, Simon is back living in D.C.  I emailed him to ask if he remembered this reading from a half century ago. He replied, “I remember the name & I know of a flyer announcing a reading he & I gave at Folio in 1976 or so, but that is the sum total of my recollections.”  The Folio readings, a legendary series invented and run by my late dear friend Doug Lang, took place at the Folio Bookstore in D.C.’s Dupont Circle. In some ways, Doug’s series was inspired by a similar one started earlier by my best friend Michael Lally at the Pyramid Gallery, just down the block from Folio.

Then I wondered if my own journal, like my archive, might yield some clues. I’ve kept a journal very erratically over the course of my life, so it’s always an uncertain source of information. I wasn’t optimistic. 

My 1976 journal contains only contains only 10 or so pages of writing, but right there at the start I found this: “I’m running a reading at the Pyramid Friday night—Zoltan Farkas & Simon Schuchat. It should be good.” And that’s it. No later report on the reading itself.   When Michael Lally left D.C. for New York in 1975, much to my dismay, I dimly remember taking over the Pyramid Gallery reading series, though what else I presented besides the Farkas-Schuchat reading is lost to me at this stage. But at least this brief entry offers another little crumb of information.

AI STRIKES OUT TOO

Finally, I thought maybe AI could do a better job dredging up information from cyberspace. So I plugged the few bits of data I had into Bing’s CoPilot, and this is what came back:

I wasn't able to locate any definitive online bio, photo, or detailed information for a poet named Zoltan Farkas born in the mid‑1930s who was still alive as of 2018. The search results returned several individuals with that name—from an academic profile at Georgia Southern University (which clearly refers to someone born much earlier and who passed away in 2002) to a musician associated with the Hungarian metal band Ektomorf 2. None of these profiles match the description of a poet fitting your criteria. It’s quite possible that if a poet by that name exists, his work hasn’t received a broad digital footprint in mainstream English‑language sources.

…MIRACULOUS, WHEN YOU THINK OF IT

One of my special interests in writing for the BAP blog has been to bring back to public attention the work and lives of poets I have known or am familiar with but who have slipped from view, among them Lee Lally, Diane Burns, and Jamie MacInnis. These poets published very little in their lifetimes, but their work is unique and valuable.  Zoltan Farkas is the most elusive of them all. I am very glad to have re-discovered his sole chapbook and the letter he wrote me in 1976. My hope is that this post will help bring forth more information on him and his writing. That would be a small miracle.

Joanna Sit: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Other Than Longing

 

Every traveler knows a kind of despair other than longing
And waits by the gate of departure where other than longing

She thinks of a place she once knew–another country
Floating in a rose-scented air other than longing

Where the wild sparrow feeds on the sunflower’s heart
Then turns its eyes upward with a stare other than longing

Even the tourist can taste the bitterness of someone else’s salt
The desolation (climbing someone else’s stairs) other than longing

We are all orphaned islands the mountain left behind
Drifting across ruined seas broken spheres other than longing

Every exile knows the irreversible currents of the tailwind
That push the flight beyond a nightmare other than longing

Everything we can’t carry must be abandoned must be lost
And there is nothing to fear other than longing

At the end of the line we turn back for a final look
Take inventory of all that disappear other than longing

What in this world are we waiting for?
What else is there other than longing?

Every passenger at the gate answers the same:
I have nothing to declare other than longing

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Joanna Sit was born in China and grew up in New York City, where she lives with her family. She studied poetry with Allen Ginsberg and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer at Brooklyn College and now teaches Creative Writing at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York. She is the author of My Last Century (2012), In Thailand with the Apostles (2014), and most recently, Track Works. Her poem “Timescape: The Age of Oz” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2016. She is working on an ethnographic narrative called The Reincarnation of Red and another book of poems called Fantastic Voyage.  ["Other Than Longing" appears in LiveMag! 21.]

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                        Hung Liu (1948-2021), Refugee--Strange Fruit: Comfort Women, Oil on canvas, 2001.

D.A. Powell: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Project Apollo

 

I was the poolboy but it was billiards

I got up on the table with a feather duster 

and did a little dance like the honeybee

to get the green felt felt green again 

I felt it in my stinger. I felt it in my pockets 

the god of light shined his light on me

and all around. and later it was his scope 

because also the god of medicine also

the god who killed every boy he loved

which may have only been one. one good one.

then I appeared in ads for pools or ads 

for poolboys. I appeared in a theater

near you like The Hustler, a movie about

a fast boy who plays pool. Paul Newman 

played Fast Eddie Felson and appeared 

in a theater near me and also wet

daydreams. I used to splash myself 

with his dressing. undressing on the billiard 

table and later by the pool of a poodle 

groomer who tried to coif me he

never came up for air, he also scratched 

also the god of archery of games of hawks

of the discus and of the stray. the ricochet

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D. A. Powell's most recent collections are Atlas T (Rescue Press, 2020) and Low Hanging Fruit (Foundlings Press, 2022). He teaches at the University of San Francisco.

[Photo of D.A. Powell by Ben Decastro. “Project Apollo” appears in The Paris Review #251. See https://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/8379/project-apollo-d-a-powell]

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Apollo Dancing with the Nine Muses. After Baldassare Peruzzi (1481-1536), gilt and tempera on board. Italian, second half of 19th century. 

Rae Armantrout: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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The Craft Talk

 

So that the best thing you could do, it seemed, was climb inside the machine that was language

and feel what it wanted or was capable of doing at any point, steering only occasionally.

 

The best thing was to let language speak its piece while standing inside it—not like a knight in

armor exactly, not like a mascot in a chicken suit.

 

The best thing was to create in the reader or listener an uncertainty as to where the voice she

heard was coming from so as to frighten her a little.

 

Why should I want to frighten her?

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Describing the poems in Rae Armantrout’s latest book, Go Figure, Library Journal says, ‘”she has honed enduring art on the ephemera that constitute a consciousness in motion through the present.” Charles Bernstein says, “Her sheer, often hilarious, ingenuity is an aesthetic triumph.” Armantrout’s 2018 book, Wobble, was a finalist for the National Book Award that year. In 2010 Versed won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals including Poetry, Conjunctions, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Harpers, The Paris Review, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology and several editions of The Best American Poetry.

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                                                                                    Man in chicken suit, 1900                                                 

 

Donald Platt: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

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Poem Written in Winter after Midnight at a Gas Station in Poe, Ohio

 

                        Death has always

been here in the blind spot of my driver’s side wing mirror

                        as I travel west

 

on I-90, cruise control set at eighty. Death is the pair of headlights

                        that follows me

these five hundred miles between Albany and Cleveland. One hour ago

 

                        I passed a semi

on the left in thick traffic but didn’t see the sign that said LEFT LANE

                        ENDS. The truck couldn’t

 

change lanes to let me through. I had to floor it, hit

                        110 miles per hour

as I squeezed between a concrete barrier and the braking truck

 

                        with inches to spare.

Life is the adrenalin rush when you have passed so close to death

                        that all you smell

 

is its diesel exhaust. Life is the bright crescent moon that waxes,

                        hangs above

the horizon, rises. Life is the long litany of towns on my night journey

 

                        west—Schenectady,

Amsterdam, Herkimer, Utica, Rome, Verona, Cicero, Canastota,

                        Cazenovia, Chittenango,

 

Memphis, Montezuma, Waterloo, Canandaigua, Avon, Albion,

                        Angola, Dunkirk,

Chautauqua, Ashtabula. Names so freighted with history or euphony

 

                        or dissonance that they are

larger than life, larger than any small town could ever hope to be.

                        Let death be no more

 

than the Dead Man’s Curve near downtown Cleveland, that not quite

                        ninety-degree turn

marked with transverse rumble strips and yellow caution signs that tell me

 

                        to slow down

to 35 miles per hour. One hundred thousand vehicles take that curve

                        every day.

 

Death is a daily event that we will live through or not. I stop

                        for gas with only

fourteen miles left in my tank and see a cube van filling up

 

                        at the pumps. Across

its thin, orange, aluminum hide is printed in an arc of blue letters

                        POE EMS,

 

which I misread for a split second as POEMS. How wonderful

                        to think

that there is a vehicle whose only cargo is poems. That it will deliver

 

                        poems

to the loading docks of box stores. But then I realize that it’s

                        an ambulance

 

offering Emergency Medical Service. It carries all of us

                        who are hurt

and in pain. Those with broken arms, legs, or collarbones.

 

                        Those suffering

heart attacks or strokes. Those inhaling slowly through oxygen

                        masks their last

 

breaths. Poems, too, should be vehicles that carry all our suffering,

                        our exhalations, exaltations,

our living, our dying. They, too, should heal us. I get back on the interstate

 

                        in the early hours

of the morning. When I nod off, I wake to rumble strip, that raucous

                        rock music I keep driving to.

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Donald Platt’s ninth book of poetry, Tender Voyeur, will be published by Grid Books in the fall of 2025.His eight previous collections include Swansdown, winner of the 2022 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, One Illuminated Letter of Being (Red Mountain Press, 2020), Man Praying (Free Verse Editions / Parlor Press, 2017), and Tornadoesque (Cavankerry Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The Nation, Poetry, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Tin House, Iowa Review, Southern Review, New Criterion, and Paris Review, as well as in Best American Poetry 2000,2006, 2015 and 2025. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and three Pushcart Prizes. He teaches in Purdue University’s English Department.  

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                                                      Edward Hopper, Gas, 1940. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, NYC.

Kary Wayson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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More of the Same

 

Even with my mouth on your thigh

I want my mouth on your thigh.

At the center bite of bread I want the whole loaf,

toasted. An orange. On a sunny day

I want more sun, more skin for the weather.

I'm in Seattle wishing for Seattle,

for this walk along the water, for her hand while I hold it:

I want to tie my wrist to a red balloon.

I'm counting my tips.

I'm counting the tips I could have made.

I want the television on, the television off.

In the ocean, I want to float an inch above it.

And when my father finally held me

like a stripe of seaweed over his wet arm,

I was kicking to get away, wishing he'd hold me

like he held me while I was kicking away. Listen to me.

I want to leave when I'm walking out the door.

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Kary Wayson is the author of The Slip (Burnside Review), winner of the Burnside Review Prize; American Husband (The Ohio State University Press), winner of the Charles B. Wheeler prize; and Dog & Me (LitRag Press), a chapbook. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Image, The Rumpus, Bennington Review, The Yale Review, and the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She lives in Port Orchard, WA, across the water from Seattle, where she's a reviews editor at Poetry Northwest.

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                                                        Peter Paul Rubens, Abundance (Abundantia), ca. 1630, oil on panel

Amy Dougher-Solórzano: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

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Still Life with Taylor Ham Sandwich

 

Anything can be an altar.

I skip Easter mass

to sit by the window

in my old bedroom.

(The walls are still pink

but the hospital bed

is new.)

April sun pools

on my father’s chest

& the tray of offerings

beside him:

a mug of coffee,

now cold;

quartered strawberries,

their red juices

seeping lazily

across the plate

toward the English muffin

with Taylor ham

& congealed eggs.

My father snores

& to me it is birdsong.

It reminds me

of an old photo

on my mother’s fridge:

him asleep in a beach chair

in Wildwood Crest:

mouth open,

one earbud dangling loose

like a new species of jellyfish.

Now he sleeps curled

in the nautilus shell

of his own spine,

coral pink bath towel

rolled & tucked

under his bad knee.

I like to imagine

he is being cradled

in the hand of a giant

I can’t see—

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Amy Dougher-Solórzano is a poet originally from Harrison, New Jersey. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Newark, and a BS in chemical biology from Saint Joseph’s University. She was selected by the Fine Arts Work Center as a 24PearlStreet Scholar for Fall 2024. Her poems have appeared in New England Review and Rattle. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband Aleck. [“Still Life with Taylor Ham Sandwich” first appeared in New England Review, Volume 46.1 in March 2025.]

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                                    A Sick Man in Bed, a Woman Praying to the Virgin and Child. Oil painting by Du Moulin, 1750.

Jim Daniels: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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Obedience School

 

Near the end, the experts on loss

sold us a robot dog that barked

and leaned into the touch

 

to give comfort to my blind dying

mother. She wasn’t fooled enough

to name it—or gone enough,

 

though she was pretty gone

then. We put it in her hands

and she stroked it

 

then hurled it across the room.

Nothing to lose is never true.

Always something more to lose.

 

I turned the dog off.

Bad dog, I said.

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Jim Daniels’ most recent collection of poems is Gun/Shy, Wayne State University Press. He has published many collections of fiction; written four produced screenplays; and his collection of essays, An Ignorance of Trees, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2025. He has edited or co-edited six anthologies, most recently RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and currently teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA Program.

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                                                      Paul Strand, Blind Woman, photogravure, 1912, The J. Paul Getty Museum

Clare Banks: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Playing in the Pastoral Dream

 

My neighbor spent the summer destroying

his yard. Lopping the tops of his trees,

and razing the ground until it was no more

than dirt, the roots of vines ascending

 

like wire. I was on the sidewalk

watching my kids ride bikes when his wife

came onto their porch in a bathrobe.

Her head behind the screen was pale and bald

 

from what could only be chemo.

My body seized at the sight of her,

and I thought of my sister last winter

in her wig. It’s no use, I wanted

 

to tell him. There’s no construction,

no revision that will stop this.

In the street it was dusk: I knew about death

and I didn’t. It hardly mattered.

 

The red brush of a cardinal darted

across my yard in the evening’s odd coolness,

moving to her nest in the hedgerow.

Sycamores lining the street shed bark

 

like snakes in wide strokes, leaving their trunks

a pale green. Inside my pastoral dream,

the white noise of cicadas rises

around my son playing in the grass.

 

The street lies awash in golden light

like that of endless spring. And my daughter,

at the end of the block, she’s a deer

wandering the trees, she’s in and out of sight.

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Clare Banks is the author of Notes on Endings, forthcoming from Terrapin Books, and associate editor for Smartish Pace. A recipient of two Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards, her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Iron Horse, Boulevard, Poet Lore, and Mississippi Review, among others. She was nominated for the Best New Poets 2023 anthology by Mississippi Review, was a 2023 finalist in Radar Poetry's Coniston Prize and a 2024 finalist in Iron Horse Literary Review's National Poetry Month Prize. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland and lives in Baltimore City where she co-hosts The HOT L Poets Series.

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                                                                                          Vincent van Gogh, The Road Menders, 1889.       
                                                             

 

Ryan Eckes: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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form

 

filing for unemployment again at the end of teacher appreciation week

along w/ 50 million other people

i almost put an air conditioner in the window backwards, on-switch facing outside

i almost cooled off the whole city

what are you doing, my friend said gently, flying down delaware ave, into the night

i appreciate you, i said, waving goodbye, on my way

back to the form:

were you absent from work when work was available:

no, never

i would never try to love my friends

every single day, skipping stones across the water

for pleasure, one dream after another

why would i ever want life to just get better

and better and better

did you or will you receive vacation pay

the car is parked, the door is locked

the room is empty, the fridge is closed

the day is long, the pain is old

when will you learn

said the carcass of an ATM

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Ryan Eckes is a poet from Philadelphia. He is the author of Wrong Heaven Again, General Motors, Valu-Plus, and Old News. Recent poems have appeared in Prolit, Wax Nine Journal, and Windfall Room. Eckes has worked as an adjunct professor at numerous institutions and as a labor organizer in education.

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                                                       Depression Bread Line by George Segal, 1991, bronze, 108 x 148 x 36

Eneida P. Alcalde: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

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Poetic Justice

 

The poem that needs to be written

            is not white.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            does not speak English.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            does not walk the halls of academia.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            does not seek publication.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            does not need the moon or a prompt.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            bites its hungry tongue in the land of state media.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            throbs in locked boxes hidden from clerics.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            fingers a gun in the rubble of war.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            swallows itself over and over.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            will be killed by the time this is read.

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A Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, Eneida P. Alcalde is the author of The Wealth We Surrendered, forthcoming from Ethel. [“Poetic Justice” first appeared in Poet Lore (Summer/Fall 2024).]

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An ouroboros in a 1478 drawing, from 15th-century Greek scribe Theodoros Pelecanos's manuscript of an alchemical tract attributed to Synesius, a 5th-century Greek bishop.

Michael Earl Craig: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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Chunk of Sea Glass

 

Becky I’m typing this in your study.

It’s a rainy fall day and for some reason

I want to type “you’re in Japan” and

don’t know where your man and kid are.

Man and kid feels a little crass but

it’s okay because I’ve let myself into

your house and I’m weak, and drunk, and

a little hungry, looking at a sizable chunk

of blue-green sea glass here on your desk,

considering the weight it exerts upon the desk

and the desk’s equal (inverse) force upon its base.

 

A thunderstorm’s just passed through,

I type that. And one of your windows

is cracked slightly—the study sips the balmy

air. The room smells like old books.

There’s a red wig on a wig rack,

a heavy black stapler that feels like a pistol,

a water glass with an inch of water in it.

 

Soon Becky I will recline in your recliner,

your cat sprawled on my abdomen,

making it difficult to nap. But I’ll nap.

And when I wake I’ll still have the house

to myself I am sure. And all the browns

and beiges and burnt mustards of your study

will resume again their quiet work on me,

coaxing me along on my journey without you

(who may or may not be in Japan), your man

or your kid.

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Michael Earl Craig’s most recent (of six) books of poems are Woods and Clouds Interchangeable and Iggy Horse. He has published poems in various magazines, journals, and anthologies—Poetry, The Believer, The New Yorker, and Best American Poetry (2014, 2022) among them. He was Poet Laureate for the State of Montana (2015–17) and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellow (2021). He lives near Livingston, Montana, where he shoes horses for a living.    [Author photo by Susan Thomas.]

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                                                  Heinrich Campendonk, Sitzender Mann mit Katze, 1919 .       

 

francine j. harris: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

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Portrait of My Father Mocking Sammy Davis Jr.

 

He widens an eye and gets down on one knee.

He accepts a sliver of silver from my mother and kisses

her behind. He calls her Frank Sinatra. He calls our house

 

the Rat Pack. He steps away from his piano into the kitchen with a carrot

and now he is Nat King Cole. He is singing “Mona Lisa” on a tap

while he holds my mother’s hand. She is the head

 

of Capitol Records. He could do this every day

for 15 minutes. He forever sings to the stalk over jungle plants

buzzing along the windowsill. They go hand over hand

 

in a photo album. His pompadour is tight. He leans out the window crooning.

He hollers at all the little snakes, get back. Now he is bundling up in sweaters.

Now we all eat chocolate pudding. He hates the way we curse.

My father is silvering up his tap shoes. He overdoses on

 

a living room couch. Now, he has a Duke Maestro on a poster.

He’s super funny with a self-demure. In his nod he is Richard Pryor,

bluing in an afro flame. He jokes about his body

on fire. Now, if only he could remember his mother. He crumbles into

 

Sunday morning on stage. Suddenly scatting over oatmeal, now he is

Al Jarreau. We, she, and he take five. We are strumming into stutter

on guitar. But now he is turning over the dark into Miles. He turns his back

 

to my mother’s fading hue. He is blowing holes into living

room walls. His popped lapels are flattening. Flattering

his jacket is leather and Shaft. He sports the Private Eye Duke

 

slumped over. He takes up a shotgun to the neighborhood

in blue. Here he is, the mirage of a sober pimp.

He sends my mother off to the mailbox. One last honey

go get my money. The snow is full of snow and maroon.

 

He is Bryant Gumbel up at sunrise. Keeping his news

tuned to the network. He is high and he can’t stop

smiling. None of his teeth go missing. He is painting his mouth

 

blue and dressing in dresses. My father flips Flip Wilson. No

one will see his second act. The weather is full of beautiful

muppets. My father is Ben Vereen.

 

He tips his bowler, and he lifts the sky.

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francine j. harris is the author of three collections, including Here is the Sweet Hand, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Originally from Detroit, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is Professor of English at the University of Houston and serves as Consulting Faculty Editor at Gulf Coast.

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                                                                       Valentina Bautista, The Rat Pack

 

Spencer Reece: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ephphatha   

        for Dorothy Moran

 

            When the pandemic hit, the priest

died first. Refrigerator trucks chilled the dead. 

The parish stacked the hymnals in tubs

and St. Mark’s/ San Marcos closed in Queens,

the mocked Simon and Garfunkel borough

where coins in dryers clickety-clicked like clocks

in European town squares.

 

            Seven months later, Roosevelt Avenue

jounces with mango slices in Zip-locks. 

The vestry interviews me.  Last day of August,

no AC, we sweat and fidget with our N95 masks. 

The wardens, Henry and Jorge, jigger

the broken tumbler to unlock the safe. 

“Cut the parish hall in half, don’t fundraise,

leverage the lot. Less people in church,”

says a new bishop from his Zoom-perch.  

 

            A woman stands in the garden.

Forever a woman stands in the garden. 

She rides the 7 to work, is over ninety,

first woman to work on Wall Street. 

Much she won’t tell or only tell me.

My invisible incomprehensible work.

I go where I am sent.

 

            A bloated deacon gossips and picks

at the many pimples on his forehead.

O, buckling blue esotery falling all apart!

My anonymity increases with each entrance.

Will our hope be transfigured by this dust?

My black uniform sticks to my pocked back

like a sealed envelope.

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Spencer Reece is the canon and rector of historic St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Wickford, Rhode Island.  He has published  three books of poetry:  The Clerk's Tale, The Road to Emmaus, and Acts.  In addition, he published The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir and All The Beauty Still Left: A Poet’s Painted Book of Hours, watercolors.  He edited Counting Time Like People Count Stars: Poems By The Girls of Our Little Roses. He founded an author series connected to his church called the 14 Gold Street Author Series, in which writers read at the public library and are hosted for a meal at the rectory.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________                           Art Garfunkel, left, and Paul Simon in front of the latter’s childhood home at 137-62 70 Road in Kew Gardens Hills, spring 1975.