Author: Post Road

Plague Psalm 19

Philip Metres

The heavens
                         distract from the gnashing of ants
And from your mouth pour forth
                                                   doom after doom.
The shaking fist proclaims the wound of your brand—
Nightmare upon nightmare
                         sprout from your moon.

You’ve pitched
                         termites into our wooden house,
And cloud upon cloud upon cloud
                                      you build,
Night after night we hear the working jaws
Packing them full
                         of grayness and rainfall.

Your steeples
                         are sharper than kitchen knives,
Your statues entrap us
                                     with perfection.
Bees needle our sin-stung flesh in your hive
Yet some kind of sweetness
                         still touches the tongue.

May my workloads of muck serve to bless, then,
The gleam of the floor of your seventh heaven.

---

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.

A Dream

Mary Meriam

A northwest current cut the heat in half
so cold could bloom and gust in cedar boughs.
I sleep with fleece on head and feet, my cat
curled in my arm’s fleece pit. As midnight bows
to early hours, heat of fleece awakes
a dream. As walls dissolve, her face appears,
as promised once. The trip begins. She shakes
my strength. Where do I wait? How many years?
I only know the fleece has fled, and she,
her body’s heat, her body here, through bad
valleys too foul for visions, blankets me.
Are night and day the sum of dreams I had?
But this is true. I see her face to kiss,
and so I kiss her. Never wake from this.

---

Mary Meriam co-founded Headmistress Press and edits the Lavender Review: Lesbian Poetry and Art. She is the author of My Girl’s Green Jacket (2018) and The Lillian Trilogy (2015), both from Headmistress Press. Her new collection is Pools of June (Exot Books, 2022). Poems appear recently in Poetry, Prelude, Subtropics, and The Poetry Review.

Liberation War + On National TV

Leslie Sainz

Liberation War

Dos Ríos, Cuba, 1895

It began beneath a children’s moon.
The fish in the river stagnant as earlobes,
their bluelessness appearing sudden.

I was sitting on my hands. Daughtering.
At first, I didn’t see the soldier braiding sleep
among the vine, but his horse, white,

a single light taffied across muscle.
You must know that I am honest,
disciplined. I fingered the small cross

around my neck because I know G-d is
activity—I tried. The sky hocked water
the size of tobacco seeds. His black jacket

strewn across fog, I held it, made it
clean, and each time the river hosted
my hands, my eyelids like just-rung bells.

Hours didn’t pass so much as I lost them.
He woke but was beyond waking, my ear
to his chest, I kissed the gold right out of him.

On National TV

The leading man does not know us as we know us.
He does not consider what we could do
for him, for his country.

The small fan blasts its ricket, ricket. The television moves
its Russian hips. I raise an index finger to my mouth
when Miguelito’s crying gets loud,

though it makes my face a steeple.
The government asked him to paint propaganda:
large fists eclipsed by stars, the machine guns

of El Comandante—
and he told them he would rather fuck his boyfriend.

They won’t come for him until he’s sleeping.

I try to raise the volume, and the glow of the television turns
blue. Miguelito presses his forehead against the screen
as if to fuse into it, but America does not enter us.

All along the street, varying degrees of dimming.
Everyone we know ends the day this way, making
lifelines of their eyes.

Before he takes what’ll be his final sleep as a free man,
Miguelito rips the Christ mounted on the wall.

Christ with the slung head, the outstretched arms, watches
blood pool around Miguelito’s fingernails.

If you believe that hope is a tonic, know my country waits in spoonfuls.

---

Leslie Sainz is a first generation Cuban American, born and raised in Miami, Florida. The recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, she received her MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, AGNI, jubilat, Narrative, Black Warrior Review, and others. A two-time National Poetry Series finalist, she’s received scholarships, fellowships, and honors from CantoMundo, The Miami Writers Institute, The Adroit Journal, and The Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University.

Except for the cloud of doom that hangs over everything

Matthew Olzmann

I’m fine. Aside from the way it casts
its wide shadow widely; if not for that—
All good here! Nothing here to see! I hate
to even mention this one little catastrophe
on a list that could have included
Water Elf Disease, the King’s Evil,
or Saint Anthony’s Fire. I’ve eluded each
of these and have only one paltry cloud of doom
to be bothered by. Other than that,
I assure you; I’m swell. I’m sparkling
water in a tall glass. I’m wind through the screen
on an unfussy summer afternoon
while you’re napping on the couch.
There’s nothing I can complain about
except a world-devouring haze of anguish
that threatens to touch every single thing I love
if I don’t acknowledge, constantly, its presence,
as if this cloud were an ancient deity
demanding endless veneration, as if saying,
I’m still alive, at a volume louder than a whisper
would sound the sirens and alert the bosses
to a glitch in the system in need of correction.
Perhaps you think this is a metaphor
for a slow sequence of ruin drifting
from nation to nation, headwaters to tributaries,
one vector to the next available host?
I too thought that. I too stockpiled
the chicken soup and the hand soaps and waited.
I too broke the break-in-case-of-emergency glass.
I too reached for the mask that appeared
when the cabin pressure left me gasping.
But sometimes, I think the consternation is more
internal than external; no longer sequestered to the sky,
it’s a feeling that shudders through me,
quiet as an old farmer stalking his property line,
shotgun in one hand, flashlight in the other,
the hounds only a few paces ahead or behind.
Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe I’m fine
and feel guilty for having survived so long
when others have not. Already, I’ve outlived
so many I have loved. This cloud.
This thunder. These little horsemen galloping
back and forth inside my head. These storms
gathering and gathering, then breaking into rain.

---

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. 

Sweet Cathedral

Philip Metres

It’s true, my Egyptian art museum docent, 
                                                                a baby changes 

one hundred times the first year—
                         the itching of infant skin,

I Ching of small change and key chains
                                                   that draw her infant eyes
like flecks of fire. No changeling she, she
                         devotedly shreds

the cords of her voice when we change her
                                                                             diaper. Diaper,
born between Shakespeare and Milton,
                         ornamental cloth 

we wind and bind to shield the world
                                                   from our execrations.  

When the museum closes 
                         for repairs, it’s to protect 

the thin skin of pigmented oils
                                                   on rough cotton canvas 
a desperate mother could have
                         used in the shadow

of a pyramid,
                         or in a hut near Arles, to wrap her infant’s 
unshuttable bum.  
            From diasporum, “very white,” 

not diaspora—it covers the flesh 
                                                   of this absurd, shitting, sweet 
cathedral unable 
                         even to hold up her holy 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.

Walking into the Distance

Maurice Manning

Midsummer and the path in the woods 
is dark. I cannot see its end
or rather what I know to be
its sudden fading at the fence
before an unkempt lonely field.
I cannot see the other end
when I look back, midway
on the walk I’ve taken, stepping slowly
There must be something on my mind,
but I prefer to notice how
the sugar maples have dispersed
themselves, the buckeyes and the beech,
and soon, though longer for me, the poplars will
tower over the other trees.

The recurring dream I’ve had for years
is to imagine the great trees,
and I’ve imagined there might be
a moral purpose to such a dream.
Sensual, decadent beauty
presenting itself completely with bugs
for music. And a butterfly—
insanely flapping its dun wings
until it snaps back to freedom
from the harmless thread a spider left—
silently recomposes itself,
as if nothing symbolic has happened,
to float farther into this moment
that has forever living in it.

---

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.