Jessie Lynn McMains
It’s just a flimsy mattress
in a hookup motel, a night
when the moon is a single stud
in a leather sky.
“All sex is a body trying / to tell a story with a hand / over its mouth,” James Allen Hall writes in “Erotic Crime Thriller.” That is the crux of the poem for me, and points to all the questions it poses. Like, what does sex mean, between any two bodies? When it’s illicit? What does sex mean when your body, or the body of the person you’re with, could be the site of, a spreader of disease? What does a body mean when all the sex it has is considered illicit; when its very desire is seen as a disease? And what does a movie mean when it tells us the story of a time just before a tragedy? In watching it after the fact, is it possible to just appreciate the film for what it is, or will we inevitably look for signs of what’s to come? Will we inevitably wish we could go back in time to the world of the film and change it somehow, and therefore save the real world, the one we live in, from what hadn’t yet happened? The body of this poem comes to you, smelling of sweat and leather, and it may have a hand over its mouth but it still asks these questions, tells these stories, and demands the reader listen.
Click here to read James Allen Hall’s “Erotic Crime Thriller”
Dolapo Demuren
There is less and less difference
between your shadowand the shadow inside you
James Richardson’s “Any Evening” is a spiritual lyric for me. In a world congested with promises of new or novel content, Richardson suggests that revelation sits in the mundane– the repetitive. The evening speaks, the bird singing has sung before but closer, and there is a time when things lose their discriminate features and resolve into one whole. Revelation is the prize of the living. The poem marks this: it begins in action and ends in newfound knowledge. As a teacher, I walk through poems with my students, aiming their interests toward revelation. We arrive to the field of the poem open. What they gather, they take back into our world. And we know there is still so much unknown—waiting in any other evening.
Click here to read James Richardson’s “Any Evening”
Michael Young
I am that truce
in which forgiveness
stirs the wheat.
Over the past year or so, I was most deeply struck by Salgado Maranhão’s “The Rain That Sweetens the Name of Things” translated by Alexis Levitin. This was sent August 21, 2024. It stirred many thoughts and feelings. Our bodies are about 60% water. The earth is about 71% water. We are, in many respects, tidal, washed and refreshed or roughed up and tumbled by waves, waves of time, waves of emotion, waves of erosion. This poem of Maranhão’s stunned with how thoroughly he inhabited this voice, speaking as one with the currents of life in us ebbing and flowing. From its opening where “the tide / has lingered in me” to the end where “What I have now / is what the sea has left me; // growling beside the rocks.” Everything in between is the movement of a life struggling, “To live is to bleed” but it is “to bleed / with wings stretched / to the stars,” angels whose feet are firmly on the ground.
Click here to read Salgado Maranhão’s “The Rain That Sweetens the Name of Things“
Thomas Jackson
I was twenty-two and nervous, reading
about the two men on whom I’d hoistedthe balance beam of my thesis on poetry.
This poem exemplifies how bad events often come on like a downpour, and feeling like you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can think of so many times in my life when circumstances were already dire, and then one more thing happens to tip the scales into totally awful. In this poem, Cara muses on the death of her mother after a period of illness and a man who chose to spit on her in public. The alternation between couplets and single lines establishes a rhythm to the poem’s meditation on grief, it convinced me to turn a poem I wrote into the form.
Read Cara Dees’ “Memo to the Man Who Spat on Me”
José A. Alcántara
it was she that lit the world just then
& not that ember of a sun
Almost immediately, I am shot back to Hopkins’s wonderful “God’s Grandeur”, back to that “shook foil” that will stay with me my whole life. The poem takes me on a journey of love, not by replicating Hopkins’s language, but by merely invoking it. It even continues Hopkins’s closing rhymes of things, springs, wings with its own string / zing. The piece seems to be a double love song: love for a person, love for a poem. And it’s not until the last thudding word, ventilator, that the theme completes, that I see why the speaker, and someday maybe I, might need to remember those ah! bright wings.
