Author: Post Road

WHEN I ASK MYSELF, WILTINGLY, “TO WHAT HAS MY LIFE BEEN REDUCED?” THIS IS THE ANSWER + AFTER I WAS RAPED THE SECOND TIME, I LOST 40 POUNDS,

Katie Berta

WHEN I ASK MYSELF, WILTINGLY, “TO WHAT HAS MY LIFE BEEN REDUCED?” THIS IS THE ANSWER

Checking the tracking for the package that has still only just departed Edison New Jersey, checking the tracking for the package that has still only departed Columbus Ohio, checking the tracking for the package that is lingering in Romeoville Illinois, checking the polls, checking the other polls, the approval ratings, the COVID numbers, checking the submissions—has one ticked over to In Progress? No.—, checking the submissions of others on the submission tracker, on the women’s poetry forum, by searching “copper canyon” and “manuscript” on Twitter, checking your estranged sister’s Facebook page—she has posted your favorite podcast, which airs whole sessions of couple’s therapy; coincidence?—, checking your husband’s Facebook page—still nothing—, checking the Facebook page of a long-reviled ex, checking the Facebook page of a long-feared ex, checking the puny academic job wiki, checking the AAUP job board, checking interfolio to see if that last rec has come in, checking the polls, checking the other polls, checking the COVID numbers, checking the package lingering, checking the Edison New Jersey, checking the “copper” “manuscript,” the reviled Facebook page, the progress, forum, podcast, ex.

AFTER I WAS RAPED THE SECOND TIME, I LOST 40 POUNDS,

and everyone began congratulating me. Men, previously ambivalent
unless coercive, became lascivious. I watched reruns
of The Biggest Loser every day. I saw the lines of my face deepen
and became convinced that though I used to believe I had a pretty face
and an ugly body, the opposite was true. I had sex with the man
I would marry and cried afterward, told him I believed this
was a function of my breath, and I believed that. I couldn’t remember
anything. I ran until I destroyed my knees and couldn’t run any more.
I ate a whole microwave-in-the-bag bag of broccoli for dinner,
with a little grated cheese sprinkled. I believed I was descending
into nothingness. I descended into nothingness. I used my iPhone
to disassociate, and to take selfies. My jaw line was impeccable,
my cheekbones, razor sharp. Everyone compared how I was then
to how I was before then. The other day, I saw a picture of what
was my arm. Like the tiny bones you excavate from the pellet
of an owl, the bones of a mouse.

---

Katie Berta is the Managing Editor of The Iowa Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, and Massachusetts Review, among other magazines. You can find her criticism in American Poetry Review, West Branch, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She has received a residency from Millay Arts, fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and an Iowa Review Award. She has her PhD in poetry from Ohio University.

Getaway Driver

Matthew Olzmann

In the movies, the getaway driver wears
sunglasses. He’s patient while waiting,
staring through the windshield as if bored
by all this tension. Never a bead of sweat.
Never a nervous glance in the rearview mirror.

Here come his conspirators, scampering
from the crime scene, diving into the car’s
open windows. Here’s the cash ripped
from the vault, or the briefcase
of black opals. Watch how he shoots

the car through oncoming traffic, careens
down every narrow alley. See how skillfully
he leaps a guardrail, crashes through
any well-placed roadblock, and never
flinches in the flare of some cinematic gunfire.

When I’m behind the wheel—I’m not
nearly so confident. I’m afraid of dying and,
basically, everything else. I’m always
ready to step away from the vehicle
with my hands raised. But not this time.

I’ve learned to appreciate how quickly
the smoke can clear. When I wake up, you are
dancing or laughing in the next room. Look
at the books on our shelves. Bread on the table,
sangria over ice. Your hand resting in mine.

On every “Greatest Heists of All Time” list,
you can always find Munch’s The Scream,
the fire from Mount Olympus, and all those
shimmery Antwerp diamonds. But I’ll hold
this life up there against any of them.

To keep what’s been stolen, I’m ready
to outrace every law that looks for me.
The sirens could be closing in. The credits
might be about to roll. But the tank is
forever full. The engine, always running.

---

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines (selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize) and Contradictions in the Design. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prizes, and elsewhere. He teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. 

Elegy for the CD

Philip Metres

To extract, surgically,
                                                   the impossible
shrink wrap lock, like some postmodern bra,

(having searched through bin
                                                                after cut-
                                                                out
bin for something cut-
                                                   rate that might cut out

your heart), and slip
                                      in the glinting mirror
                                                                of a disc,
let the laser caress
                                                   its digital hieroglyphs.

To fling yourself on the treelawn
                                                                   futon
now your couch and spread out
                                                                the centerfold

of lyrics.
                                      To lie like an analysand,
eyes closed, and let someone
                                                   else’s sound

come out of your mouth
                                                   to now reveal
yourself
            to yourself. As if they knew so well

what you could not admit
                                                                in words, and yet
nod your head to its irresistible beat.

*

Repeat. Shuffle
                                                   your feet across the room,
await a last song unlisted, and buried

in minutes of silence
                                                   at the disc’s end…
the album done, you emerge from the tomb

of your rented bedroom,
                                                   a graduate
grabbing on to your twenties
                                                                             and freedom

and wind down Mt. Auburn Street, autumn,
turn though the open
                                                   cemetery gates,

the songs still sound-tracking your every step
as if your life were
                                                   someone else’s
                                                   art

and you did not know where
                                                                             you would end up
but felt
                                                   as if you were already dead,

and these songs the last things
                                                                             buzzing, drunken

stumbling
                                                   down the entrance
                                                                             ramp of your head.

---

Philip Metres has written numerous books, including Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon, 2020). Winner of Guggenheim, Lannan, and NEA fellowships, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and core faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA.

Prodigy

Gaia Rajan

We hated Alice, the ache of it burning
in our throats and coming up white hot

            when she won an audition or booked front page
            on county news, a profile full of people testifying

that yes, we knew her, yes, that girl,
she was really something. She was fleeing

            which I thought meant going places. She played violin,
            alone in that house with the pink floral wallpaper

and framed Bible quotes where God preached Himself
like a sparrow in heat. The miracle here

            is not that she spun her car into a lake that summer,
            or that the cops arrived an hour later to name her

dead, but that all anyone talked about after was her
playing Vivaldi, not smiling. It was almost easier

            to love her like that. Past-tense Alice dancing
            in clothes she stole from her father, stumbling

around the kitchen, some rock number
on the radio like the roar of his beat-up Buick,

            knuckling her down and down
            into the passenger seat, her violin knocking

in the trunk on the way to a concert. Her father
all dime-store reverent when she played solo,

            silent when she finished, the audience rising
            into prayers to make daughters like her.

---

Gaia Rajan’s work has been published in the Kenyon Review, Split Lip Magazine, diode, Muzzle Magazine, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of the WOC Speak Reading Series, the junior journal editor for Half Mystic, and the Web manager for Honey Literary. Her debut chapbook, Moth Funerals, was published in 2020 by Glass Poetry Press, and her second chapbook, Killing It, is forthcoming in 2022 from Black Lawrence Press. She is seventeen years old. You can find her online at gaiarajanwrites.com, or at @gaia_writes on Twitter. 

Thousandlegger

Maurice Manning

Big with wonder and daylight behind it,
my head’s shadow fell on the floor
of the open root cellar door
and the thousandlegger crept inside it
with careful, sideways ticking steps
over the cold dirt, preferring
the round defining darkness made
from the dome I carried on my shoulders
to contain what knowledge I had and fear,
and images I’d conjured to fear
and fathom and trick what I thought were thoughts,
but only fancies, occupations
of a mind so slow in forming itself
from instinct, but also being formed
by the world unerring in a course
the mind learns in time to accept,
to approach, though not agree to, fate,
because the mind holds out for truth,
as dewdrops cling to a spider web
or, even as it falls, a shadow
darkens the dark already there,
and truth becomes the contrast, counter,
exception clenched against a cold,
annihilating sense of fate,
if only to believe we are saved.
Not that the human quandary bloomed
in my mind that day when I opened the door.
Fetch me five potatoes, she’d said,
and don’t forget to pinch their eyes,
and returned from the porch to the hot kitchen.
Even potatoes were alive
and my obligation was to blind them—
fancy, perhaps, but I went down
halfway to the underworld
and saw on the floor my living shadow,
not a reflection, but a mark,
a second presence I didn’t know
but suddenly divined, as the bug
born in the dark to see in the dark,
slipped inside it like a thought,
and I wondered if it stayed how long
it would, and whether I would feel it
twitching its legs or simply know
it’s there to form the other thoughts,
or stand against them in silent proof,
hence the wonder in my head
and the image of its shadow still alive.

---

Maurice Manning‘s most recent book is Railsplitter. He teaches at Transylvania University and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives with his family in Kentucky. 

Soup

Maurice Manning

I had a few potatoes once
that I’d set aside to use for seed,
but I was hungry and I thought
resourceful, so I cut out the eyes
with an old knife, hoping to save
a few for spring. Left on the board,
jagged and lopped, the potatoes looked
like a map of countries, one split-off
from another following some dispute.
I was poor and doing different jobs
back then and dreaming what I might be,
as if what I was were nothing yet,
and I was reading and listening
and going into the woods at night.
The potatoes I cut into smaller chunks
and dropped them into the cook pot
with about a gallon of water, some pepper
and the little bit of salt I had.
I lit the fire and let it cook,
simmering it for hours. I called
it soup, and I wanted it to last.

---

Maurice Manning‘s most recent book is Railsplitter. He teaches at Transylvania University and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives with his family in Kentucky.