Issue 40

Farmhouse Room + Say What You Will

Jennifer Barber

Farmhouse Room

A fly buzzes the window
that looks out on a line
of sugar maples in bright leaf.

Goats vocalize in the yard,
plaintive; caesura; insistent;
then the same again.

If my friend were alive,
would he tease me for taking time
in the country, as if my stay
could do the work of an elegy?

Or would he only be thinking of
erasing the years ahead?

The goats stop bleating as if
they too were listening
to his last dark thoughts.

The only sound is no sound.

Say What You Will

The trees are entering
the carmine and old gold of their leaves,

dropping an alphabet of twigs.
I don’t know how to crack the code.

Is it about wholeness? Brokenness?
Is it about my friend

who stepped from a ledge last week
rather than endure his blood disease?

Or does the alphabet spell
the consoling turn in a prophecy,

the worst already past,
the exiles finally traveling home?

I could live another twenty years
with no inkling, though I lean

against the trunk of the giant oak
till the leathery leaves cover my feet.

Jennifer Barber’s newest collection, The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made, came out in 2022 from The Word Works and her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Ibbetson Street, and upstreet. Her previous books are Works on Paper, Given Away, and Rigging the Wind. She is the current poet laureate of Brookline and the co-editor, with Fred Marchant and Jessica Greenbaum, of the anthology Tree Lines: 21^st Century American Poems (Grayson Books, 2022). The founding editor of the literary journal Salamander, she served as its editor-in-chief from 1992 to 2018.

Guest Folio Introduction

Suzanne Matson

Though I did not begin selecting for this folio with a theme in mind, the poems I was drawn to seemed to cluster around a tactic of pairing human longing and loss to the physical presence, and now, precarity, of the natural world. Whether it’s the poet’s self-entanglement with metaphorical nature in Jahangir Hossain, or the way in which C. Dale Young represents the sea as a site of return for two people who are “like children again” as they bathe, these works speak through a natural register, though, as Jennifer Barber writes of her “alphabet of twigs,” we may not always be able to discern whether the speech is about “wholeness” or “brokenness.”

Alexis Pauline Gumbs pairs each of her trio of poems with a photograph her mother took of her in an outdoor setting when she was very young. They all show a child reaching, grasping, and stretching to not only touch, but be one with nature—“my tiny hand/ a tree”—in an intuitive connection to the living world around her. It’s a connection that won’t always hold, as the older “girl inside keeps whispering/ not safe to love in green.”

The poets collected here know we are parented into being by more than our actual human families. There is the “every open sky” rushing to fill maternal absence in Derek Sheffield’s poem, and the disoriented boy “waking one summer night in a meadow” in Christopher Merrill’s fragmented stanzas of trying recuperate the past. The pull of an old belonging becomes a “full-bodied” scent to the shark-hungry speaker in Will Dowd, while for the speaker searching along the shoreline in Wendy Cannella’s poem, recollection dissolves like “muck where the wrack line ends—/or begins.”

Using nature as a backdrop now means previewing or acknowledging loss. With 21^st-century uncertainty, any notion of permanence is illusory, as Nancy Dickeman reminds us through the image of the candled forest where, “Out of nowhere, winds flare, a spark catches.”

These poems all have different shapes, timbres, and aspirations, yet in their very variety they constitute a field, like wildflowers springing from a common ground. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I did.

Suzanne Matson

Catfish Heart

Beth Suter

of course the fish didn’t want to be in the poem
would rather have been left
to wallow in the muddy bottoms

its scaleless skin soft against silt
not gutted, its heart left beating on the cutting board
as some lesson to a child

but we were hungry and the image keeps feeding me
how a thing could be so alive and dead
the sharp beauty of after

like how my father’s heart kept beating
after the crash spilled him
through a shattered windshield into the creek—

no one said drunk driving, the old folks called it:
there, but for the grace of God, go I
gin running the generations like water downhill

whatever he meant to show me
in the twitch and pulse of it
I can’t remember or forget

Beth Suter studied Environmental Science at UC Davis and has worked as a naturalist and teacher. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, New American Writing, Barrow Street, DMQ Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and others. Her forthcoming chapbook Snake and Eggs was a finalist in FLP’s New Women’s Voices Contest. She lives in Davis, California with her husband and son. You can find her at facebook.com/bethfsuter.

Let’s Be Mushrooms + Night Blooming Cereus

Tom Paine

Let’s Be Mushrooms

Let’s be mushrooms, you and I, when we die—
we are not egotist trees, pith and heartwood,
raging, cursing with raw bark and wild sap,
shaking influencer fists at the bemused sky.
We will do the work in the eternal crematory,
roasting coffee and crimes; senators and saints.
Little will be known of our gracious generation.
What they will proclaim as us—our fish-bellied,
gilled-umbrella eyes, peeking like whack-a-mole
from the forest floor, belies the supreme scale
of our secret selves below their hustling feet,
where we will live as one, unseen and unafraid,
in our conspiracy of rebirth, a subterranean veil
of life-giving lace–(neither of us ever needed
earth to spin to know sun is not the only star).

Night Blooming Cereus

There is a light, a light like angels rising from the grave,
sneaking in, blinded with love. Angelic light is bright
on you as you sleep on this morning. Sometimes I feel
a night blooming cereus has stalked our bed into clouds.
Unbidden, insane sensibility; a strange displacement,
but extra-real, there is emptiness except our bedroom.
This disassociated floating arises like this: a lone scarf
of swirling silken chalk slowly pinwheels, permeates.
Love: it is happening again, I whisper, everyone is crazy!
Let those awake to death-making go drive and work.
I bless your moist, flickering eyelids. Everything else,
everything outside this box of love, their time, is a lie.

Tom Paine’s poetry is upcoming or published in The Nation, The Moth (Ireland), The Rialto (UK), New Contrast (South Africa), Volt, Vallum (Canada), Glasgow Review of Books (Scotland), and elsewhere. Stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Awards, and twice in the Pushcart Prize. His first collection Scar Vegas(Harcourt) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a PEN/Hemingway finalist. He is a professor in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire.

Notes from a Field on Fire + Félix González-Torres– “Untitled” (billboard of an empty bed), 1991 + Multiclausal Exercises in Translation

Day Heisinger-Nixon

Notes from a Field on Fire

The grasses the grasses the grasses
are everywhere now,

& none of them
native to the landscape.

Inside of my two bedroom, one bath apartment,
I am recording from the field.

The fieldnotes are as follows:
The subject ruins their hair with coconut oil in the bathtub.

The subject burns their skin in the sun in a polyurethane raft &
blisters down to their fascicles, applies silvadene for a week.

The subject cannot distinguish a boning
knife from a mezzaluna, the poor animal.

O mammal you are my love.
O lovely I am lapsing into tulips for you, into lilies.

Today, the open-air markets are growing sour from disuse.
Today, a storm falls through all of them in concert.

Wednesdays are my Fridays, someone announces,
Saturdays, my Mondays.

Corporate time shifts its weight constantly in the bottomless light,
avocado toast closing in on its imminent extinction.

My future is growing
ripe with endangerment.

The clusters of birds in my window discuss the dissolution
of their most irrelevant factions.

Condors, cranes. Between them,
the wind inserts itself–– an empty discourse.

The ocean, invariably, kisses strangers at new
altitudes, blushes in her rising heat.

The months are falling out of me & I am annually
a woman in June next to a woman in June.

~~I’m sorry I’m sorry~~,
I say matutinally to the wars.

In my dreams, I’m always pointing at the sky.
I’m always highlighting the nitrogen in the syrupy air.

Highlighting the starlings articulating a spot of oil
bleeding through the afternoon’s golden sheet.

The man in the field of my dreams
is a sopping wet man.

The boy in the field plays with the moss beetles,
coleoptera leaving bodies in fits & starts––

wing-cases & shells,
littering the clammy feculence.

Please notify the landlord that the lawn out front is dying.
~~I’m sorry I’m sorry.~~ Here, take my money.

Félix González-Torres– “Untitled” (billboard of an empty bed), 1991

Now I am wondering if it’s appropriate––
the way I’ve made our moment of intimacy so public.
The weight of our two heads forming
two fabric bowls in the pillows,
almost a soup dinner arrangement on the bed.
On the bed in Manhattan, on the bed in San Antonio,
on the bed in Seoul, the divots are cold in your public absence.
The white sheets are almost blue.
If I order some fries, will you eat them here with me,
your moon body waning under the State’s milk-blue eye?
Your moon body a pile of bonbons & saltwater taffy
in their cellophane wrappers, shrinking in the corner.
It’s raining today & it’s hard to believe
that it’s possible to make love in this kind of weather,
but the grasses seem to be getting along just fine.
The world’s various waters seem to be getting along
just fine & the President prays & pays
for their poison as well. My friends are the kind
of people that would drive out to the city just
to see a billboard of an empty bed thirty years
too late, mustering up, even then, enough heartache
to cry into the tulips along the interstate.
It’s been another wild year & more people have died
than necessary, each body swimming in its own queer toxins,
in the ornamental killings of this great police state
& I’m trying to figure out, in the end,
who is going to get up & shake out the sheets.

Multiclausal Exercises in Translation

After Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Traduire les phrases suivantes en français.

I enter a store and forage a jackfruit I won’t buy.

I sit on a bench in the park and regard the sun.

I speak to strangers and they speak back.

I am still afraid of some dogs and some dogs are afraid of me.

I don’t speak to strangers if I can avoid it.

I sit in a plastic chair at my parents’ house and behold a flock of geese.

I count every pill to see if my prescription will outlive my coverage.

I stop and sit to watch the West.

I consider HRT, but can’t imagine my face in the mirror.

I complain and say Fuck you health insurance, I don’t need you.

I get nervous when health insurance says Haha. Same.

I am in debt and watch a flock of city parrots circle the sun.

I am at a company meeting and they discuss the ghosts in the women’s bathroom.

I say Fuck you panic attack and panic attack asks me if I’ve tried yoga.

I identify plants for my friends and they tell me to stop.

I pop my shoulder out of its socket and think of Pangea.

I become a red country and cannot bear to watch myself.

I say This one’s agapanthus and they say No, seriously, stop.

I study German declensions and benefit from white supremacy.

I become a particular wind––turning and turning and in love in the West.

Day Heisinger-Nixon is a poet, essayist, interpreter, and translator. Raised in an ASL-English bilingual home in Fresno, California, Day holds an MA in Deaf Studies from Gallaudet University and is an MFA candidate in creative writing: poetry at New England College. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Apogee, Peach Mag, Boston Review, Foglifter, Gasher, and elsewhere. They are currently based in Valencia, Spain, and can be found online @__day_lily__ and at dayheisingernixon.com.

Blizzard + Dying Words

Chris Forhan

Blizzard

That’s a good word—blizzard—blurred, swift,
the sound fishing up from below

a long ago downdraft, snow, fast flicks
at my bedroom window, I was ten,

fine film of water blearing the glass,
orange slices in a bowl on the bedside table,

beneath the needle the Beatles keening
You don’t get me. Blizzard: is that the word

that floated into my head then? What
does it matter. He’s gone, that boy

is dead, now that I have thought,
so late, to make him speak.

Dying Words

Clod is gone, and nincompoop:
useful names for us once. They vanished
as my sad dying dad did
and one or two childish wild loves—
so slow to erode I took no notice
till a flitter of wind undid them.

Always some mindless spring
is spidering forth out of absence,
upright sticks in sludge
something-or-othering
into fusses of pink and yellow.

Whatever is lost returns, just
in fresh form. What good is that?

O lion, turning your back,
padding grandly away into tall grass,
let me follow for once to where you go.
Of what you show me there,
I’ll say nothing, I promise.

Chris Forhan’s latest book is A Mind Full of Music: Essays on Imagination and Popular Song. He has also published a memoir, My Father Before Me, and three books of poetry and has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at Butler University in Indianapolis.