Issue 39

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.

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.

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.