Author: Post Road

The Butterfly House + Climate Change

Adam-Scheffler

The Butterfly House

For a full month
once each year,
cops, skin cancer doctors,
and TSA agents
should be made to work
security at the insect
house of the Miami
botanical gardens,
and, positioned in the
airlock security room
between the green house
& egress, should
have to pat people
down impersonally,
extending
flat fingers, careful
not to harm the
secret beauty each
body might hold.

Climate Change

Today, I’m going to
try to impersonate an
alarm clock that others
won’t want to punch,
someone who doesn’t
get hysterical over a
headline about Miami beach
going underwater and the net
sexiness of Florida flocking
inland, or LA cosplaying
as a birthday candle,
but that also doesn’t
gaslight himself like
an old timey-miner,
moving deeper into the
darkness, with his tiny
flickering flame, so
obsessed with
admiring the lovely
berry-scrawled paintings
of bison & deer, that he
stands there doing nothing
until the light goes out.

---

Adam Scheffler grew up in California, received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his PhD in English from Harvard. His first book of poems—A Dog’s Life—was the winner of the 2016 Jacar Press Book Contest. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Common, The American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Plume, Barrow Street, Antioch Review, Sewanee Review, Verse Daily, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and many other venues. He teaches in the Harvard College Writing Program.

This is the Light

Carl Phillips

            This is the deep light you’ve waited for, unfiltered except
now and then by the memory of your first time seeing it,
soon the night-dark after that, filling with sounds that were
strange only from your own mixed perspective as the latest
stranger to have passed through by accident, if there’s such
            a thing. Now you live here, where it’s likeliest you’ll die, too,
you’re finally old enough, not just to say, but – without
sorrow or fear, most of the time – understand the truth of it,
the mind done with signaling, letting its watch-fires, one by one,
go out: the renegade glamour of late fall, owl-ish, fox-ish, how
            brightness is and isn’t a color exactly, the one tree from a
city years ago, its weeping branches of pink-white poisonous
berries, like a vow against winter, against giving in, or as if
            the tree, to cover its nakedness, had chosen a stole of what –
when looked at closely – seem the shrunken heads of goblins
in miniature – from afar, just berries, more proof that victory
wears best when worn quietly, or it never happened, or to
someone else, I’m only trying to help you, let me help you,
            he said, something like that, unbuckling; they sailed for hours;
the water that day was as close to perfect as perfect gets here.

---

Carl Phillips‘s most recent book of poems is Pale Colors in a Tall Field (FSG, 2020). He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

A Habit from Tikrit + Fleeing Never-Pleasure Island

Gordon Kippola

A Habit from Tikrit

My war was softer than the infantry’s,
but patriotic terrorists fired rockets
at our FOB most days. Insurgent assholes
would have blown my limbs off happily,
or sent my now-ex-wife a jigsaw pile.
Within a month I think, fuck the dead
hadjis in all their meaningless numbers.

Two-thousand and four, in northern Iraq,
ten-dozen Big Red One soldiers are killed,
including a few prescient suicides.
I salute the dog-tags, boots and helmets
of new-slain kids, times six. Fifteen years—
I thought by now, for sure, I’d care again
when human beings die. Turns out I can’t.

Fleeing Never-Pleasure Island

No matter where I’m living at the time—Texas
New York, Iraq—when I walk beside the road,
the same boy screams at me from passing cars.

Who and what are you, boy? Why do you shout
from yellow Hyundais, rusting Dodge Chargers,
boxy Audi Foxes: all these identical stealthy cars

your faceless buddies drive? Do you shadow me
because I’m lost? Has a life of criminal intent
put you on my tail? Maybe you’re not my Javert,

a vengeful ghost, or Satan come to claim my soul.
Maybe you’re Peter Pan, reminding me to crow;
or Jiminy Cricket, helping me become

a real boy. Doppler effect shrieks hammer me
into flight or fight. My knees are too creaky
to run from teenagers in cars. I never learned

to fight, but I was large enough an animal
to give attackers pause. Age fragiles my bones,
robs my muscle mass: age has made me prey.

I wrap a paring knife inside a paper towel
and hide it in my pocket while I walk.

---

Following a career as a US Army musician, Gordon Kippola earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Tampa, and calls Bremerton, Washington home. He serves as a reader for The Los Angeles Review. His poetry has appeared in District Lit, The Road Not Taken, The Main Street Rag, Slant: A Journal of Poetry, Southeast Missouri State University Press, and other splendid publications. One of his poems was selected for the World Enough Writers Coffee Poems Anthology, one was a 2020 Rattle Poetry Prize finalist.

Three Poems Translated by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris

The First Aerial Bombardment

Serhiy Zhadan, translated from the Ukrainian by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris

The street. A woman zigzags the street. 
A pause. By the greengrocery
she hesitates.
Must she buy bread? there is not – is there enough? – not enough
bread?
Must she buy bread now, or –
tomorrow? –
she hesitates.
Stares at. Stares at her phone. Her phone. Rings.              
Mother. She speaks to mother: Mother!
without listening
she shouts.
Shouts
by the window of greengrocery; at the window of greengrocery
as if she is shouting at herself
in the window.
Slaps the phone.
Zigzags the street, shouting at
her invisible – i.e impossible –
Mother. 

Tears. Tears at the impossibility
of forgiving 
her mother. Forget 
the bread.
Forget. The bread and each living thing on this green earth. Forgo it. Leave it. Alone.

That morning
it begins. The first aerial bombardment.

The Correct Approach

Regina Derieva, translated from the Russian by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky

The ancients spoke well:
briefly – but well.
Their thoughts had little wings –
like Hermes’s –
the ancients were not concerned
that someone might misunderstand –
everyone understood them.
But if one’s mind were weak,
he will quietly become intimate with
a Muse, one of the nine.
And the Muse,
inclining her head gracefully,
will teach him.
She will teach him to continue to stay
silent and silent and silent.
And if she permits him to speak
he will have to speak in hexameters.

[Night. Street. Lamp. Drugstore.]

Aleksandr Blok, translated from the Russian by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky

Night. Street. Lamp. Drugstore. 
Dull and sleazy light. 
Live twenty-five years more — 
It will be as now. No way out. 

You die — and again you begin. 
All is repeated as before: 
Night. The canal’s icy ripples. 
Drugstore. Lamp. Street. 

---

Katie Farris is the author of BOYSGIRLS (Tupelo). She has translated and edited several books, including Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poets (Tupelo).

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf), Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo) and co- translator of Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Tsvetaeva (Alice James).

Our Friend Karl

Mark DeFoe

“Why should I call your name/when I know you’re to blame/for making me blue”
Wasted Days and Wasted Nights
– Freddy Fender

Truth was, his life was like our own, rich with
cliché and heart-numbing sorrow. He went
too far or often never far enough.

He could not workup enough self-torture
or good old guilt to shame himself,
for every time he’d feel that need for action,
he’d find it all a bit boring. He’d succumb
to this or that, either or neither, side-tracked
by some shiny bauble in the distance, some
whacko semi-scam, some weird science, some
celebrity morsel that would tease his palate.

He supposed his malady was chemical, but
could never dial that well-recommended shrink,
assuming the doc would echo his dad,
who always said, “Straighten up and fly right.”

He went on, delightful dinner guest, we agreed,
but in the end, unable to buy himself
a cemetery plot, unsure if he
had heard above the party’s roar, the last call.

We found him in his last apartment. dead in bed.
Beside him were piles of books, festooned
and feathered with clever book marks, telling
how far he had to read to reach the end.

---

Mark DeFoe is Professor Emeritus at West Virginia Wesleyan College . His work has appeared in chapbooks, anthologies, and journals, including Poetry, Paris Review, Sewanee Review, Denver Quarterly, Reed, South Carolina Review, Santa Fe Review, Smartish Pace, and many more.

The Pond + Origins & Forms: Eight Sijos

Sarah Audsley

The Pond

Because I knew better, but wanted to anyway,
because he hesitated ever so slightly when I asked,
because I felt my skin as naked and taut,
because I wanted to feel, because
he told me a secret about himself,
because I didn’t know what else to do
but jump—

            Did I say we held hands? When I dove,
I dove all the way through the sudden
snap of cold liquid filling the hole my body
made.

            Did I tell you there was no moon? Traces
of bone-colored frost at the pond’s edges.
The invisible sheen of ice my head pierced
—mind reaching back. Gasping,
I dreamed this before, heaving, I swear
            I was here before
                        —body in
shock of water, body cold—water
rushing out, blood re-routing back
to the heart’s small caverns
like fluttering wings of moths trapped
between the screen & windowpane on a farm
where I would wander in the fields, hide
among long winding rows of corn…

            Whose hand was it tugging
my body out?
            No farm, no field to roam
just frozen feet, shock of hot shower;
the steam on skin rushes through.
            The runnels of
blood down our bodies, shards
of ice melting. The stitches,
the proof: I’m not
safe. I am solvent.

Origins & Forms: Eight Sijos

after Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

1
Math is mostly equations: one plus one, two plus two, plus…
also formulas, so many designed variables—
to keep someone alive, calculate, add & subtract the costs.

2
What if hands pull down stars, guide them inside the round belly?
What if this is how a spirit dives, twists into a body?
What is built up from bones? Fingernails. Skin. Flesh animated.

3
Grandmother’s fingers tightened around my bundled form,
(a thing) spitting, begging, for warmth from her hunched over
indecisive back—she knew the math would not compute.

4
This is where I’ll learn how to cast the rod to find the fish,
or skim the water to chase Jesus bugs, walking on the surface
by some trick of tension, & balanced perfection. Keep count.

5
What does this form do that others don’t? I’ll force the issue
of Korean poetic form, composing these sijo. In this way,
I’ll be closer to my genetics, my bloodlines—strands fraying.

6
This is where I’ll learn how to skip stones across how many
lakes? Making circles, again, hearing the sound of stone on water.
Oars cut cleanly through its flat surface—stars, so many stars.

7
In the heat she’ll fan my round face, place a bottle to my lips
flick flies off my head, & try to conjure up my dead mother’s
face, show me a smile I’ll never remember, nor this thick night.

8
Always those hands keep plucking stars from the heavens, make
constellations inside bodies, make more mothers. I see that form
& origins are stories—I’m all those mathematical distances.

---

Sarah Audsley, an adoptee born in South Korea and raised in rural Vermont, has received support for her work from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff Centre. Her manuscript-in-progress received a 2021 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council. She lives in Johnson, Vermont where she works for Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.