Poetry

Because of their format, several poems that appear in the current issue are included as pdfs. To read them, click on their titles below or on the right side of this page.

The Way I Like Best

James Longenbach

Initially the fragments were discovered by Helena,
Mother of the emperor Constantine,
On a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the year 327.

The Potato Plants

Jodie Hollander

She kept the potatoes beneath the kitchen sink
in a dank place I never dared to enter.
But at fall planting time Mother always sent me
down into that moldy smelling cupboard,

Something Forced

Benjamin S. Grossberg

the amaryllis bulb. That’s the verb we use:
forced it, its petals just one shade
more pleasing than blood. Do I mention

“As Are Right Fit”

Benjamin S. Grossberg

Because in her delirium, she raked my beard
with her nails and called me aba, I know
my mother travelled backwards into her death.

The Wedgewood, the Watches

Benjamin S. Grossberg

Wedgewood didn’t matter, my mother says,
speaking to me in a dream. The little vases
and ashtrays, the boxes littering the house,

Rough Plaster

Bernard O’Donoghue

We spend our summers in a house once owned
By a couple who never spoke a word
To each other. And we have wondered if,

Five Goldfinches

Karl Kirchwey

for Bill Patterson

There’s an apple tree in the salt meadow,
its trunk backswept by the years

Three Sarcophagi

Karl Kirchwey

(Palazzo Altemps, Rome)

In this broken trunk of Proconnesian marble,
the queen is in love with her stepson,

Storm Warning

Randy Blasing

Last night my son, celebrating his marriage,
descended with his Turkish bride from a mid-
century Bel Air to U2’s “All
I Want Is You” & danced under the stars