The Literati Quarterly | Spring 2015 | Issue No. 4 by The Literati Quarterly

THE LITERATI QUARTERLY POETRY, FICTION, ART & MUSIC ISSUE NO. 4 | SPRING 2015

FOUNDER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Joschua Beres ASSISTANT EDITOR / POETRY EDITOR Jonathan Hobratsch CHIEF FICTION EDITOR Erin Pringle-Toungate ASSISTANT FICTION EDITOR Laura Cowan DIRECTOR OF ART ACQUISITIONS Ethan Ayce Ramirez

TABLE OF CONTENTS ETHOS by Cyrus Cassells 9 WORDS FOR A NEWBORN by Kathleen Ossip 10 THE TWINS by Susan Phillips 12 A BORED GIRL SPITS INTO THE ABYSS by Laura Kasischke 13 INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM LOGAN 16 ARCHAEOPTERYX by Rosanne Wasserman 21 THE WIND IS THE WANDERING MOON by Amy King 22 FAREWELL (AGAIN) by Joe Weil 24 FISH SWIM IN POOLS by Alan Semrow 28 TELEPHONE by Simone Kearney 30 IN ROBERT GRAVES’ MALLORCAN GARDEN by Cyrus Cassells 33 5

CONTENTS CONT. MY HEART IS AN ENDURING THEATER by Kathleen Ossip 34 AFFORDABLE SELF-STORAGE by Rosanne Wasserman 35 WHOSOEVER SEZ THEY’RE NOT WEIRD IS NOT SO NORMAL by Amy King 37 DEATH SONG 2 (FOR WILLIAM) by Joe Weil 39 DEATH SONG 3 (FOR EMILY) by Joe Weil 39 GUERNICA’S OLD CIVILIANS by Cyrus Cassells 40 SUNDOWNING by Rosanne Wasserman43 DROUGHT by Robin Blackburn 44 WINTER VIEW by Changming Yuan 45 ICARUS MODIFIED by Nathan White 46 EULOGY by John Sibley Williams 48 6

THE LITERATI QUARTERLY POETRY, FICTION, ART & MUSIC ISSUE NO. 4 | SPRING 2015

ETHOS

a poem by Cyrus Cassells Like the wolf-subduing saint, here’s a seeker in much-mended sackcloth— burly, storm-haired, rising from his discomfiting, make-do bed, his marble bench in the dove-white basilica’s galleon shadow— There’s an atavistic blaze, an unbarricaded beauty to his broken-toothed “buona sera” and, when I hail him back, a tightrope empathy, as integral as a meticulous clockmaker’s oils— our twilight exchange as unfussy as the ethos of tonsured, fostering Francis, with his soul of a lighthouse rook, yet, as I pass the Poor Clares closing a heavy convent door, as I wander Assisi’s sinuous salmon pink alleyways, up to the hilltop majesty of its longstanding fortress, the many-headed field, rife with clover flowers, masterless daisies, I can’t shake the clarifying force of the disheveled pilgrim’s shoeless humility— migratory presence who makes meant-to-crush-us poverty and dreamt-of bounty seem— with the first arriving stars’ subtle orchestra— suddenly fraternal, like twin pepper and salt shakers placed on a trestle table, where a rapturous, a timeless and appeasing feast is slated to begin . . .

by Kathleen Ossip, from her book The Do-Over

WORDS FOR A NEWBORN

Little craftier than you are, every day in every part of the world people set out to teach

something to others or to study something themselves. This increases the likelihood that desired actions will occur, but only if the performance is a possible performance. You know already that participation doesn’t always equalize power. There is much disagreement about the importance of you, whether the ritual attraction we feel for you is a sexual bureaucracy or a function of good light, oh yellow indeterminate sprout. We don’t know how to grasp your extreme flexibility, nor your ultimate time-stamp. You’ll learn many procedures for mastering everyday life. You’ll learn to think like a computer and like a plant, finding a choice unnecessary. You’ll learn not to reduce people to things. We resist giving advice, we ourselves have messed up so often. We resist too the platitude that all is possible. Listen: at times you may have a demon that forces its way up. Will you grow tentative of future connection? Or trust the likeness between yourself and daylilies trim and brash in the field? Power situations are not creative; flowers no freer than we are; you’ll give yourself to every fresh chaos until you sort the array into mind-sized bites. This performance will fill eighty years or more. We wish you innocence, strength, promise, and surrender, a gradual and natural growth.

THE TWINS by Susan Phillips

We’re identical twins. We look exactly alike—down to the number of freckles on our noses and the exact widths of our hips. We think alike and walk alike. Our voices are identical.We don’t just finish each other’s sentences; we start the other’s thoughts. Sometimes we can’t tell the difference between ourselves. We never argue—after all, we tell ourselves, we’re twins, we can’t argue. No, I lie. We’re mirror image twins, and I’m prettier though my sister is smarter. When I wink with my right eye, she winks with her left. I’m right-handed; she’s left-handed. When I smile I have a single dimple on the left side of my mouth. Hers is on the right. But I like my sister to speak first. She’s smarter, so I can echo what she’s said and appear to be smart, too. When we’re together few people can tell us apart, despite our differences. When we’re apart, no one knows who’s who. I’ve said I’m prettier, but really, how could I be prettier than my identical twin? We look exactly the same. It’s true my sister is smarter than I am, but not enough that anyone can notice the difference. When we were younger our teachers used to confuse us and give us the other’s grades. We live in identical houses, side by side, and often our husbands confuse one house for the other. How could they? you ask. If nothing else, each house has its own number. True, but sometimes we take the numbers off onehouse and put them on the other. We laugh when our husbands get confused, but we do it deliberately. Each piece of identical furniture is placed in exactly the same place in each identically painted room in our house—houses, we should say, houses. No, I lie again. Our houses are mirror images of each other’s. My sister’s living room is on the left, mine is on the right; her kitchen is on the left, mine on the right. When I cook dinner I look into her kitchen window to see what she’s cooking. Wednesday is pasta night. The week she makes red sauce, I make white. When she cooks white, I cook red. Our mutual friends get turned around in our houses. They’ll end up in the living room when they try to get a drink from the kitchen or enter the den instead of the bathroom. We’re only really different when we drink the red wine we both enjoy. I get sad and cry. Tears run down my face. She gets giddy and laughs at whatever anyone says—even when I tell her all my troubles. But of course we have the exact same troubles, so maybe she’s laughing at her own problems. We’re careful not to drink too much. She drinks red wine, I drink white. Once we drank too much and ended up in each other’s house. At first I was confused. Once I realized that the house was a mirror image of my own, I laughed and walked out, meeting my sister halfway between our houses. One night we drank much more than usual—she had red, I had white. Or did I have white that night, and she red? I don’t remember. I don’t remember much about that night and there’s no one I can ask anymore. We had argued with our husbands. They wanted to move to different cities and we refused to discuss it. So we headed out to wine bar we liked on the other side of town. It rained all night, I remember that. The streets were slick and seemed darker than usual. I was driving when another car crashed into us. My sister died on the way to the hospital. Or maybe she was driving when we crashed. Either way she died in the ambulance. At least, I think she died. It’s possible that I died and she’s still alive, but there’s no one I can ask. 12

There were plenty of decades during which I worried a lot about what love was. But it was never a what that I wondered. Or a know I believed I could get.

some summer nights when I was a child it seemed that the air, darkening, grew so excited it turned to fireflies. But, of

of rain in a flood: All wrong about what and where I was. And love— It was, as it turns out, that bored teenage girl who’d leaned too far over the railing to spit into the abyss. “For God’s sake!” I screamed at her, and she gave me the finger when she turned around, and said, “Fuck you! You almost made me fall, you bitch!” (stanza break)

by Laura Kasischke

course, that wasn’t it. These were separate events. The confusion of a kid. So maybe that was it, I thought. And I thought about it a lot. Swimming along like a drop

BORED GIRL SPITS INTO AN ABYSS

No. It was more like the wall they’d leave behind after they knocked the cathedral down. I supposed. Something symbolic. Or an illusion. The way

Yes. That was it. It was that, which was also our toddler, happily howling when we used to swing him in the space between us by his fat little hands. Appearing to surrender him while holding on. Like— 13

Well, like that popular song. Or like nothing. Like nothing else becoming more of itself, which was a thrill and a vow at once, and how obvious, when she turned around, all pissed off, I realized it had been all along.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) by Salvador Dali

conducted by Jonathan Hobratsch

INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM LOGAN 16

I have strong interest in the history of Boston and Massachusetts. The state has provided scores of American poets such as Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Martin Espada, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jones Very and Elizabeth Bishop. Do you take any particular pride in having been born in Boston? Does this connection influence you? My mother’s ancestors were Pilgrims, mostly smalltown types, along Massachusetts Bay: Scituate, Cohasset, Marshfield Hills. One great greatgrandfather was a packet captain on the North River, another a livery-stable owner in Marshfield. My great grandfather, an estate gardener, had an eighteenth-century house in Marshfield Hills. As a young man, he ran a general store that failed because he gave credit to anyone who came through the door. It’s now the town library. I inherit such mild ironies. I feel more affinity to the fishing village where I first went to school, Westport Point. My father, who honored in engineering at Yale (after failing out freshman year and joining the navy), started as a salesman for Alcoa but in the midfifties became a low-level executive working out of Providence. I grew up knowing the river and the sea, always the sea. I don’t take pride in the Boston roots—after sixteen generations of cross-breeding, and not a little inbreeding, you’re left with no more than a homeopathic dose in the blood. That’s probably a disappointment to the DAR. I went to a two-room schoolhouse a few doors down the road from my parents’ house in Westport. I’m grateful for that backwater upbringing. My mother let us loose to roam the cowpath roads, the skunk-cabbage swamp, the rocky outcrops. The bachelor who lived behind us, down a woodsy hill, was happy for us to visit (our sledding slope ended in his yard). A rough sort who showed off his brass knuckles, he helped me with my modest stamp collection. Later he was charged with murder, but my father flew back eight hundred miles to be a character witness at the trial. I grew up making friends with our older neighbors. The bachelor’s brother and his wife lived across the street. They were retired, swanning off to Hawaii or other places during the winter, sending back postcards and bringing back little treasures for us—a piece of lava, a quartz crystal. Next door, though we didn’t know her beyond picking the dandelions in her yard at a penny a dozen, was a lesbian sculptor who had been

highly praised by Lachaise. Her uncle, I found out weeks ago, was the philosopher Charles Peirce. I had school friends, of course. One’s now a lawyer in Sacramento and another a surgeon in Seattle. Another works for the state, another married a preacher, and another owns a bargain warehouse in Elmira. When I think of my childhood towns, I think about people rather than history. Later my parents moved to Pittsburgh, then Long Island. You went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, which has helped produce at least eleven Pulitzer Prize-winning poets, not including faculty. Considering this, and the on-going debate on the merits of MFA programs, did you find your MFA experience useful? I knew nothing about MFA programs until I was casting about for whatever came after college. I was music director and then program director of the student radio station at Yale—we were longhaired types with a pathological addiction to rock ’n’ roll. I’d been hacking at poetry in a hapless way, despite the best efforts of a string of poetry workshops (variously by a Yale Younger Poet who smoked cigarillos and wore a beret, an Old English professor, and a member of the O’Hara circle). I was smart off the page but hopeless on it until two workshops my final semester, one by Richard Howard, who took the train up from New York each week and had taught his first workshop only the previous spring. He gave us quirky assignments, in equal parts demanding and infuriating. After the first, I knew how to approach a poem. I’d been trying to write by listening to the muse, but my muse was deaf and dumb. The assignment offered a set of problems, and I was good at problem solving (calculus and chemistry had been almost my sole delights in high school). Howard almost never allowed us to speak in class. He was a superb monologist, reading poems by Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, poets foreign and domestic. Three striplings from that seminar went on to publish books. The other workshop was nominally in fiction, taught by an extraordinary young novelist—he was only twenty-six— who a few years before had been the favorite student of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. He’d gone to Iowa, after a year giving it up for Hollywood, where he wrote for Peyton Place. (He finished the Iowa degree by mail.) He returned to Yale for law school, a decision that ended abruptly after an unfortunate incident involving alcohol, a shotgun, and street lights. He would bully into the seminar room, sit down, and talk brilliantly without notes about the book of the week: The Great Gatsby; The Sun Also Rises; Light in August. The seminar was supposed to last two hours, but he rarely made it past fifty minutes—the psychological hour. Students almost never spoke. It was an extraordinary set of performances. Later he went on to create N.Y.P.D Blue and Deadwood. That was David Milch. From Howard I learned how form and manner draw inspiration from the imagination, from Milch how the depths of language and character create feeling.This may sound mechanistic; but these are ways of tapping the cask or drawing off water from the dam, at least for a certain kind of imagination. David Milch may have told me about Iowa. Later that term, in his office, he asked if I’d heard from them. I shook my head. “Let’s call!” he said brightly, terrifyingly. He picked up the receiver of the heavy desk-phone and dialed the number—which, on a rotary phone, took forever. Finally it rang. It rang. Someone picked up. “This is David Milch,” he said. Yeah. I’m sitting here with my student William Logan, who applied. Yeah. Yeah. O.K.” He slammed down the phone. “Well,” he said. “You didn’t get in.” He then offered to make me his assistant the next year, splitting the small fee he received for the seminars. The workshops were in the college seminar program, taught by freelancers, guns for hire, for $2000 each. It was a remarkable act of generosity, and I almost took him up on it. To my regret, I didn’t. I was admitted to Iowa the following year. The reasons for my previous rejection were plain. That class had been overstuffed with talent: Tess Gallagher, David St. John, Denis Johnson, Larry Levis, Laura Jensen, and of course Debora Greger. I had Donald Justice for my first workshop. He was a teacher of finesse, of small choices rather than large ones, nudges rather than broad strokes—a perfect graduate-school teacher, in other words. Iowa was competitive, but that didn’t trouble me. I thrived in competition. The poets my year weren’t up to much, but the next year another strong class arrived—Mark Jarman, Elizabeth Spires, Chase Twichell, Brenda Hillman, James

Galvin, Sherod Santos. People have been arguing about writing workshops for half a century, and they’ll be arguing about them half a century from now. Those fixed on the idea that writers must be self-made, must rise from below to live in garrets, starving for their sestinas—that’s a cheerfully safe romantic fantasy. Chatterton might have lived had he been given a little more money. Byron, Keats, and Shelley never had regular jobs—they had enough to get by. What is your general impression of MFA programs and the poets they produce? In a world where we don’t inherit wealth (my parents lived an upper-middle-class life on credit), the arts can’t exist without patronage, and the minor patronage of writing workshops partly recreates the atmosphere in the little Bohemias of a century ago or in the courts of Renaissance princes. I spent my years at Iowa filling the gaps in my college education (I took courses in Old English, Beowulf, and Dante), trying to write poems that pleased me. Certainly, Iowa was a hotbed of fashion. Most students were trying to write like Hugo, Bly, Merwin, Kinnell, or James Wright (sometimes all at once); but they were late running to catch that bandwagon. I wish there had been more interest in form and meter—even Justice wasn’t interested then; though a decade later, when we both had come to the University of Florida, his interest revived. At Iowa I had a few teachers charming but lazy, at least one who couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag, and one who was smart but more than a little evil. I don’t regret a day I spent there. Justice and I became good friends, and I’ve been with Debora Greger ever since. We live in a world on fast-forward, compared to the early seventies. Students know about dozens of writing programs, who’s headlining at the AWP Conference, who’s up and who’s down in the stock market of fashion. That first year I applied to two writing programs; I was offered a place at Columbia, which I couldn’t afford. I know students now who apply to eighteen. There are perhaps a dozen strong MFA programs, another dozen with one good poet and some mediocrities. The rest are mostly local affairs, with weakish poets and not much reason for existing. Even in the best programs, probably sixty percent of the poets stop writing seriously once they graduate. They learn during the program that they don’t have the stamina, or the curiosity, or the anger to be writers (or perhaps what Eliot called the writer’s “necessary laziness,” which is very different from normal laziness). MFAs have the same dropout rate as Hell Week in SEAL training. No MFA program can make a poet out of someone who can’t persevere, can’t stand to fail. The only early sign of later success is the willingness to submit poetry to magazines. A student who can do that, and possesses some native gifts, can go somewhere. What advice do you have for younger poets entering or exiting MFA program? Coming or going, a student should not be afraid of reading, not afraid of being influenced by the dead. Most students haven’t read nearly enough; and too many have been badly taught in college, with books briefly in vogue or courses like “Chaucer and Animals.” Such students have had one or perhaps two inspiring teachers and gained from them— but contemporary English departments want to fill students’ heads with theory and ignore what young writers need: great books, not great theories, and some understanding of why great books are great. I was not an English major—I drifted from American history to political science (sophomore year I was taking cross-listed graduate courses in probability and game theory), later American history and literature. I had to catch up, but I was a reader. Try to ignore fashion. Read. Read more. Read better. You teach in Florida and live part-time in Cambridge, England. Would you consider yourself a transatlantic poet? Would you say your poetry is received differently in the UK than in the US? My sweetheart and I went to English on Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarships in 1981 and stayed two years (I had the fellowship first, then Debora). After I was hired at Florida, we returned every few years, finally buying a

house in Cambridge. We’ve had seven stays of a year or so and gone every summer for the past two decades. Two of my books were published there, the most recent a selected poems. I wouldn’t call myself transatlantic—that would suggest too fancy a self-opinion—but I write a fair amount about England and the rest of Europe. I like having a desk drawer with a few pounds and euros and dollars in it. I like clearing my desk in the States and starting afresh in England. I knew more poets in England thirty years ago—I’ve lost track of some, and many have moved on, a few to America. The first year we lived in Cambridge, I met Michael Hofmann, for a long while now my colleague at Florida. Debora and I mostly hunker down and write. Twice a week I walk across town to play chess with George Steiner, and afterward we join Debora and his wife Zara for tea. The reviewers have been kind to me in both countries. A few brickbats have been thrown, but what fun would writing be if every review were a shout of joy? You have written six books of criticism and have received awards for them. What living poet today do you think is highly undervalued? Also, who do you think is the most valuable literary critic for American poets today? Robert Lowell. By most undervalued, I mean in relation to his poems. That may seem an odd choice, since before his death he was considered the best of his generation. A lot of readers have been turned off by the high-flown manner, which remained empyrean even when more colloquial. They prefer Elizabeth Bishop, whose poems are comfy but never dowdy. Fashion is a strange beast, and perhaps Lowell will never be loved as he was; but, when the fashion of being out of fashion stops, we may realize what an extraordinary artist he was, one who changed the course of American poetry twice, and who was even more influential in his day than Pound and Eliot in theirs. If you mean a poet still living, I’ll let my reviews answer that. As for critics, a young poet could do worse than read R. P. Blackmur, the best poetry critic we’ve ever had, or Eliot, who possessed extraordinary, almost unnatural gifts as a critic. I learned much from Randall Jarrell, whose reviews and essays are a model for high standards, wicked humor, and a working poet’s sensibility. Among contemporary critics, I’ve learned far too much from Christopher Ricks, George Steiner, and Geoffrey Hill. Billy Collins is a former U. S. poet laureate. I’ve heard that he makes more money from his books of poetry than most other poets. I have read that you do not value his work with the same esteem that many of his readers do. Why do you think he is so popular? What are his faults as a poet? Billy is popular because his poems take no effort to read, offer the pleasures of highcaloric junk-food, and require no thinking at all. There’s nothing wrong with that. Readers buy the easy, the polemical, and the sentimental—and why shouldn’t they. Few readers, even among poets, have the taste for verse that makes them work. If it weren’t Billy, who has written some very funny poems about writing poetry (oddly, his only interesting subject), it would be someone worse, another Rod McKuen or Anne Morrow Lindbergh. I forgot, we already have another Rod McKuen—it’s Mary Oliver. You were once called “The Most Hated Man in American Poetry” by the Hudson Review. Youseem likable enough. How do you handle such criticism? On hearing that, my mother said,“It’s good to be the most of something.” I’ve never been bothered by the antagonism my criticism arouses. Indeed, I’m not sure criticism would be worth doing if it didn’t make a few poets tear out their hair. Critics aren’t in business to be publicity agents, though many seem to think that there’s no higher calling than shilling for bad poetry. I don’t think it’s the critic’s job to lay down laws. Shelley said wittily that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Poets don’t really want to be legislators—all those tedious committee meetings!—and neither do critics. Thecritic’s job is saying something about a poet that isn’t utterly stupid. That so many critics fail suggests that it’s not rocket science. It’s harder. ---FIN

It was Super T-Rex whom I in the deep alone night beheld, whom I hailed, saying: Super T! Old darling! Where you been off to? Whence wandereth? â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Sup? And the childâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s old hero answered,

that these were our coverings when we were moving through air by our own accords, that these were our aspects to our own kind, to our prey and our predators, to our own proprioception when we traveled, that these were our souls, now encoded forever in avian DNA. We were present in death, where a monochrome motionless terror became our name; but in life, our beauty

by Rosanne Wasserman

and it held out a cape made of hummingbird pelts: a garment of kingfishers, green as an endless Everglade; wings of enormous pinions; wide, high crests that rippled like egret plumage; and it told us

ARCHAEOPTERYX

There was this paleothingy, he said, there calling all of us, calling to order, us visions of chicken bones, embryos, eggshell-head lizards in fetal curl icarus-breakback crash, bald as pierogis,

was still alive, it told us; it could fly.

THE WIND IS THE WANDERING MOON by Amy King So much smoke surrounding my feet at this forever party, I can’t see my toes move in the flip-flops full of fatted calves going to market and then some. I am too hairy with excess useless flesh. But. The film begins. It’s a dark alley, it’s the look of five guys driving another to a desert to smoke hash & drink beer & the eyes between them that know life to the viewer is about to end as we know it. “Predator” was aptly named since it only spoke the reality of people in alien terms, the remove of human so it doesn’t hurt to watch. You know how people stick things in each other sans permission and then call it love of a special design? Killers of great talents? Even men who wear diapers believe there can be a thin line of care that negates the need to be fully present when dissecting power relations of more than one person in relation to another as they remove the sense of existence from the flesh. Whether pounding, ripping, or excising some part, that usually does not remove the entire soul from the vessel, if we’re speaking in alien terms, of course. But back to the party where the film is background noise through beer chugs and girls in halter tops and wet white tees; the buzz as background is awareness of the white lie only meant as a loyal betrayal. Participants at the party are not subliminally subject; they are the keepers of faith in casual-not-realness as suggested by the aliens that make us think we are otherwise not students. Not people. Predator dances with a half naked Schwarzenegger in a life and death eroticism – their weapons enact desire’s demands on the flesh and steel in ways impenetrable and intimate. The familiarity is akin to the white lie in eroticism that lays its unspoken sheen out in a bro-compliment: Cool ink, dude – where’d you get it? Love is not some far off planet, but is, as they suggest, all around us, if you know how to see. Love warped is as easy as love perverted for the use of anyone in the immediate who is not ready to get why they can work on something less shrouded by alien discourse and feelings of foreign antimatter in the form of bodies in motion. As if that were not factual enough, that they are motored by the human condition called feelings and drives, that they are only machines meant to be dealt with on the surviving life cycle. That is, we think is enough; therefore, we don’t think about the other. But if you don’t think about the other, you can’t dance well, unless you believe mathematics exist only on paper for someone to read it into a bomb. Millions die later. But the person who can dance, who can anticipate, right or wrong, 22

the way the hips of the other in front of you will shake because they are thinking of you deeply back and want to be someone worthy of her hip shake -- that is the way math comes to life. And then you go to class the next day, recalling not the trajectory of coming in six point ten minutes late, but how she looked at you thick with feeling unnamed, as yet, in your tiny life. How she looked right into the rounder saucer of universe you hold within your awareness but was unaware of it until she saw you there in its presence. You are in it and are it and there was nothing you knew before she knew how to see you in the middle of absence. You knew math’s life the infinity you saw her in it. And that is how the moon snaps you into its self.

I’ve given up poetry and I’ve written a poem to tell you that.

FAREWELL (again) by Joe Weil

See? It’s in tercets! Oh I forgot. Tercets were popular ten years ago. I’ve given up poetry because I am so ten years ago, and ten years ago, I was so-- well-you get my drift. I’m Nixon. I’m letting you know you won’t have me to kick around anymore. I’ve already failed. Success and death are the two things I’ve never experienced and something tells me death is more likely. If I die, ten poets will remember me for an evening while a cappuccino maker whirs too loudly. And that will be my success. In America, poverty is shot, processed and performed as a cautionary tale. I wanted to be a good writer. I didn’t have the money needed to go to grad school and get told how to write, how to snub, how to schmooze. I have very little talent, but I can feel it in my bones when I hold my children. How can so much love go into a man so mediocre that he’d actually tell the truth about his hurts and refuse to keep silent? I am intelligent enough to know this will damage my career; such as it is, but, if

you are dying in tercets, you may as well damage something. I never wanted a career. I wanted to say: look the skyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been handcuffed to a rose! I was a lousy tool grinder. Even worse than a poet. Frauds should have no children. My greatest sin was wanting. It is hard not to want. You have to be a very great poet not to want. I know that. You have to have the strength to bite off your own leg, to escape the steel jaws of your ego. I am trying to do that. I am trying to embarrass myself so as to die in the only good way-to be clean somehow, to wash this shit from my mouth. To stop feeling evil. I hate the poetry scene. It is not why I came into the world. It is not why God showed me how bees circle the holes of sugar dispensers or how the detritus on beaches, the word detritus, the very word itself, is lovely and sane and supports the twin pillars of heaven. I am sick. It is hard to want and be sick. Yeats already mentioned that. I came into the world to be-to be slaughtered, but I forgot to be childless, to be expendable. I write this poem so that my children will understand. I loved them. It is nothing incredible It is a bowl of sugar encircled by bees in a diner where the food may not have been very good, and the service 25

stank. I spent my life in such places. I put my eye to the hole and looked for a world full of hives--the soft sound near the sweetness I knew. I could be stung and maybe it was worth it. Who knows? I want my children to believe it was worth the whole bloody world to understand how even a word could rise Detritus, which is what I will leave: Detritus, road paved with goodÂ intentions (and little life insurance), shells, drift wood, condoms needles, dead crabs, weed sop, the cry of hungry birds. What else can you leave them? Sans good poems, a lot of bad ones: my palm on the back of their skulls, gentle the way I never was.

fin. 26

Sleeping Woman by (2013) Mikhail Zahranichny

FISH SWIM IN POOLS by Alan Semrow

She says her name is Claire and she’s wearing a skimpy floral sundress with splotches of bright red, orange, yellow, and a few dabs of a violent purple. She asks my name. And I tell her, “Todd.” She’s stunning, beautiful, with long legs, a tight frame, confidence. Real Old Hollywood glamour. “Well, Todd. It’s very nice to meet you.” I invite her into my Cadillac and, as she gets in, hand over a roll of hundred dollars. She counts each bill, a blaze filling her brown eyes. As Claire plops the roll into her robin’s egg blue clutch, I turn the ignition on. “Todd,” she says. “Tell me what you do.” I turn right on Main, toward the motel. “Sales. Liquor sales.” “How ironic.” I stop the car for a group crossing the street. “I suppose, but it’s liquor sales, so...” She doesn’t seem to understand. “How long you been in town?” I twirl the dial of the car fan to high and tell Claire it’s been two weeks. “You’re from the North, hey? From… uh… Ohio. Cleveland.” “Smart guess, hey?” “You’re voice. It’s all in the sound of your voice.” I look over at her, she’s grinning almost devilishly, staring forward at the street. “Well, I can’t tell where you’re from.” “Guess!” “Oklahoma.” She purses her lips and looks over the rim of her circular sunglasses, which have fallen down the groove of her pert nose. “Nope. Not a good guess either, Todd.” I turn the car into the motel lot and park in front of the chain link fence that guards the in-ground pool. I gaze down at her crossed legs—at

her, sitting here in the passenger seat. “New Orleans.” She starts to laugh. “Haven’t moved hardly a mile.” “Don’t you run into a lot of people you used to know? That can’t be too fun.” “Oh, Todd. I still know them.” I push the car door open and run over to the passenger side to assist her. She puts a hand out for me. I grab and lift. She thanks me and then we walk to the complex. “So if you still know them,” I say. “I mean, what does that mean exactly?” “Oh, Todd. I still know them.” She winks and we start our climb up the stairs to the second floor. At the door, I stop and look out at the hot sun—the unforgiving sky. It’s 90 degrees and I’m in New Orleans. I stick the key into the door and we enter. “Finally!” Claire says, throwing her thin arms in the air. “Cool. Cold!” She looks around the shady room with its shag carpet, stained walls, and questionable lampshades and appears to think nothing of it. She sets her clutch down on the desk right next to my work bag. I run to the bathroom. As I stand over the toilet, pissing, I think about how long it’s been. Upon reentering the room, I’m welcomed by Claire lying on the bed, her yellow heels since kicked off. She says, “Winter must be hard.” I shrug my shoulders. “Could be worse. I could be from Wisconsin. I’ll take the heat any day, though. Would not complain about this.” I slowly lower myself onto the bed next to her, retaining some sort of a distance. “I’d love to live a winter some time.” “Well, you’re free to come visit.” She chuckles, digs her long fingernails into her blonde hair, and looks at me with stern, yet understanding eyes. The eye contact we make, it’s sad, but, at the same time, so very open in a way that’s almost hopeful. “Okay, Todd.” She coughs into her right hand and says, “So, for three hundred dollars you can get pretty much whatever you want.” “What do you want?” Claire rolls her eyes, as if to suggest I’m just a child or something. “It shouldn’t matter, silly Todd.” “Well, it’s hotter for me if you’re happy.” Claire bats her eyes. “No one’s ever said anything like that to me before.” “Yeah,” I tell her. “I’m not sure I’ve ever really heard it either.” She doesn’t seem to get it. Claire puts her hand out, stroking a few circles around my Rolex watch. She looks up at me. “Aw. Are you a sad man, Todd?” “Oh, Claire. That’s a conversation I don’t really want to have right now.” “You are, aren’t you?” Claire gazes into my eyes, a piece of blond hair falling from her loose bun. She says, “You should be happy. Life is good, you know? It’s a good thing.” She puts her pointer finger out to touch my lips. I move in closer and we kiss. When it’s over, we lay panting, drenched in sweat. I ask Claire why she never left town and she says, “Didn’t see the point in it, really. I had created a life. What’s the point in ruining it on chance?” “But are you really okay here?” “It used to not be so good. I’ve known some pretty dirty men. But I learned. You always learn. I learned about being selective. About not letting my guard down any more than I needed.” I put both arms around her warm, naked body and kiss her behind the ear. We fall to sleep. I wake to Claire putting her floral dress on and stepping back into her yellow heels. “You leaving?” “Yes,” she says. “I have other business to tend to this evening. I thank you for your time though, Todd.” I sit up against my pillow, my eyes narrowed and mouth slightly ajar. “You have to leave? I have more money. You should just stay. You should really just stay.” Claire shakes her head and looks down at her heels. “I really have to go, Todd. Thank you, though.” Feeling hopeless, I say to Claire, “Can I have one more kiss? Just one more.” Her face remains unmoved. She walks across the room, bends over, and offers one last kiss. And I whisper, “I love you.” She turns from me and walks to the door. She opens it, stops, glances at me and says, “It was nice knowing you, Charles Moore from Seattle. I’ll see you around.” As she slams the door behind her, I leap from the bed and run to my leather work bag—hoping, wishing, praying that it isn’t true. Claire took a large tip. I jump over to the door, throw it open and stand on the balcony, the Louisiana sun so brutally thumping down on my naked body. I look left. I look right. I look forward. Claire is gone.

by Simone Kearney

TELEPHONE 30

Playing telephone, a single random syllable comes out the other end full of stretch marks. Is it Nebraska or sagging nasturtium? In the beginning, I’m entering rooms. Come here, my blowy fleece. Wincing seams not clear, but definitely you’re night, definitely Floridian. Your distance is dressedup sound, complete with horizon elasticity. Tomorrow you’ll be perky blue in single file, fanny pack, grout in wall fanning out of a mistake like I’m yours.

Yes, far from aim and shell-shock, dear Robert, deep in the safehouse beauty of mist-shawled Deya, there is no no-man’s-land under the orange leaves.

IN ROBERT GRAVES’ MALLORCAN GARDEN

And the lavish miracle is how the upwelling seasons ushered the injured poet and fusilier from the Great War’s maiming to the Valhalla of this island garden’s deep green parliament of laden branches—

by Cyrus Cassells

Here the guileless breeze in the elating orange boughs is buoyant as a subway bootblack’s whistle, and I suddenly recall: floral scents became unbearable to Graves in the first years following the November armistice: After break-spirit trenches, red rows near the arbor weren’t allaying blooms at all but mustard gas and morass—

by Kathleen Ossip

MY HEART IS AN ENDURING THEATER 34

The enduring theater is empty but it is a theater. I lived there today and that made me happy too. Can’t you see I’m made of language? Can’t you see I cringe at the formulas? Can’t you see I don’t want to go to the block party! I have smiled enough. My heart is tender and open. Smile at me and I’ll love you, it’s a simple fact. 6/9/14: My daughter calls me a fucking asshole for the first time. So proud! Like trying to be super-smart and super-nice or super-efficient and super-open-minded – can’t be done! –: In the enduring theater, there’s a performance, a hidden life where magic can happen. The real is surreal enough for us, the imaginary true enough for us: The performance emblazons itself nowhere except in the heart of the empty theater (red velvet!) which endures.

Are you going away with no word of farewell Will there be not a trace left behind Well, I could have loved you better, didn’t mean to be unkind You know that was the last thing on my mind —Tom Paxton

I have a young orchard behind the house & summer sun adorns it. There will be apples, pears, & plums someday for one who owns it, or for deer, once its light fence is torn.

Books aren’t dehydrated people, though that horror-comic hand squeezed kids it captured until they were chewing-gum wrappers. Glass, though, well—that silicon still wants to be the sea. It remembers waves, remembers motion. The huge old beveled green glass dresser top I thought immortal, keeping my mother’s cherrywood from harm? —cracked yesterday, beneath a dragon’s hoard: fifty big beadboxes: gods, those things are heavy: grand piano on a floor of break-up ice floe on the Mississippi. Beads are not enchanted human beings, though that dream . . . & her grandmother clock that fell from shaky drywall next to stairs: coincidence?—our anniversary. Things break, they mutate, evaporate, tarnish like silver-film silents dissolved in light, half-told by tattered shadows. And never, & never the less, this numinous over-the-top of being won’t be encoded in a chip or shut inside a locker. But neither will it craze & crack. It won’t fall from the wall to spend the next half-decade under the bed in a Rubbermaid box — because, in part, there will be

neither fixing, nor use for it again. It won’t be retired:

by Rosanne Wasserman

AFFORDABLE SELF-STORAGE

There was that: no box of colors needed, the whole art easy to transport, its transports quick recorded— now here am I, with fifty years of journaling & books, & here’s our dear lost landscapist who knew the Hudson River, gone beyond utilities himself, although his work is still of use to his beloved: what use will we be? You can’t even hang this stuff on walls.

it will be gone without a trace. It will be flown. The vibe from the journals; the ton of hard collectible desire; the words on chosen, colored spines all neat aligned in order: if sentiment adorns them, then, it will not be from me. Prove that I lie. 35

WHOSOEVER SEZ THEY’RE NOT WEIRD IS NOT NORMAL

by Amy King

It’s nice to see you wear repeat clothing, That you are as fresh as the rest of us with less money and fortitude for the artificial limbs of humanity. When I drink tea, I can smell wine. When you smoke weed, I can smell New Jersey. As I told you in the afterlife, we will marry and have the CIA’s babies. Because the world has a vision and I police the fuck out of that vision as much as the world allows for prostitution and my shotgun to sit deft and dusty, cradled in half-broken arms, pining out. Without apology, I can tell you This is not a throw away poem, The kind you can dump In vomit and forget for seconds at a time. This is the kind that sews its way into a nunchucked corner Of your liver, Huddles in with the stew of ugly sins To make mischief whenever you drink Too much or get the flu a little too long. You tell grannies how their panties move you, how the tiny penis of your dog makes you understand what exactly altruism is, how the pink belly of the planet is a source of a fragile exorcising of the spirit you think belongs solely in a shoebox beneath the tree of your youth. What the future held there Has not been permitted Entry to date And this denial resonates with your own finger-sized joy, the déjà vous variety Which you culled as a sophomore in high school, The You, having lived that crystal clean life, know from all of us is the one hollowed-out truth we can live without. You go about yourself and know this much and line it with fur and live there in moments. I too know right now that if I can’t see you, I can’t hear your thoughts, so I close my eyes to feel your breath inside my spine which is like nothing else, including the hairs within that stand up on their own spines, tingling their tired workouts. I like feeling the same as thinking, and I’m sure that that normal is as weird as this if we could only get up close to each other, skin to skin, the same way I’ve looked at you and known others who aren’t here tonight.

It is no longer a matter of caring. Last night, my chest keened and I had no strength to lift my children. Let the wind lift them. Let all the advisers leave the scene of this accident. I see my kids being blown in the maelstrom, striving and being driven. Whatever is driven, tossed, untethered, flung---

by Joe Weil

And not even that.

DEATH SONG 2 (FOR WILLIAM)

What would be more like hell than to go on caring about you-your cities and your laundry detergents your applause and your jeers, the silence of your ungodly indifference? I care about the bend in that river-the scraggly mess of staghorn sumac snow bearded along its shore-- the way it turns and twists in memory passed factories and graveyards.

by Joe Weil

DEATH SONG 3 (FOR EMILY)

good. It is as it should be. Justice is just another word for sleep. Sleeping, a man is worth the whole world.

To be discounted--like road kill and yet the wind so powerfully in your fur, and the sun light, too, to be something the child wished the father would have stopped to stare at: What animal? Not a deer or a possum, but something stranger--so strange that the car should haveÂ had to stop, should have ceased its traveling, and the father and son piled out to know, to know against all lanesÂ the animal that it was. This self grown outward-- like a prayer.

GUERNICA’S OLD CIVILIANS

by Cyrus Cassells 40

Listen, when Santa Maria’s bells tolled and the punishing planes descended, it was bustling market day, sullying wartime, yet dulcet birds still warbled in their wicker cages set in the April sun . . . Beside the once-crushed town’s long-trusted treaty oak, won’t-be-hushed women and men, survivors with resolute canes, still craving an enduring serenity, mightier than staunch columns of Solomon’s temple, will press upon you, pilgrim, if you’re able to listen: it’s a cloistered nun at prayer, two Basque-talking local boys building a cardboard Noah’s ark, unmonitored elk in the uplands past the still-standing town, whenever you dare to ask: What is peace? 41

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SUNDOWNING by Rosanne Wasserman

On a windy stone, the third, Giddy with his hundredth year, Sang unnoticed like a bird. --W. B. Yeats I imagine that “I” will be gone by then, the mylar-skinned weatherballoon of who? a pinpricked Lunar watchstander done with the dogshift, going down in occasional flashes from Earth itself, of amber light so brilliant it seems that dirt has turned to gold—but no: those shallow pools are only curbs at curves where rain from morning, window glass, or silver frames of doors are catching fire from what already set behind our suburb’s trees and houses, under hills cut into by the public works of time. In private, though, backhoes move as well as much as far as nowhere known: at at least, as you remember, something changed. Beneath the neocortex, deeper than cerebrum, somewhere from medulla oblongata to Saxon-syllabled spine-stem—regions Latin-recognized, not capable of words— cells know day is ending, signal: gather, gather, fly watch darkness move across, unfocusing what daylight freed. Safe in height and numbers, whistle: let us know you’re here.

DROUGHT by Robin Blackburn

The clouds left no evidence of their passing -They must be using some algebra Long forgotten by meteorologists and farmers To determine where, when and whether To dissolve into rain. Â Their calculations Do not include variables Like the brittle trees The ground baking and breaking apart The egg sizzling on asphalt Or the children running through sprinklers While their last memories of the sound of thunder Evaporate under the merciless sun. 44

WINTER VIEW by Changming Yuan

Like billions of dark butterflies Beating their wings Against nightmares, rather Like myriads of Spirited coal-flakes Spread from the sky Of another world A heavy black snow Falls, falling, fallen Down towards the horizon Of my mind, where a little crow White as a lost patch Of autumn fog Is trying to fly, flapping From bough to bough 45

by Nathan E. White

ICARUS MODIFIED 46

Done my part, I’d likely insist… Hardly the poor plowman who’s at fault, forced to focus, in tune with the ponderous blade upturning the crisp soil, aiming for consistent lines— nor the merchant ship boasting windswept sail passing swiftly through a perilous channel, steering straightaway, set on clear, unambiguous demand— Free pass for the pastoral, the shepherd busy musing, too tired to trust his eyes, who may have spotted something clumsily, approximately angelic—or rather steadily reflecting

on last night’s revelry, revisiting some maiden’s blouse (loosely organized) while turning his back to the sea and on his flock idly grazing… and for the fisherman standing waist deep along the shore, so close to those kicking legs, his bag profitably aglitter or half empty… (Can’t he swim?) …neither one cited between William and Wystan. Who knows what myth unfolding in our routine gambles, in the common face encountered this morning— cashier, uniformed driver, anonymous handyman? What’s the rule denoting labyrinth and flight? Get on reading full-scale. We have to eat.

τέλος 47

by John Sibley William

EULOGY 48

Strange knowing you will never breathe this air. Though the ashes I release, unburdened by your name, swirl out and circle back without purpose, I would like to believe the dead can also yearn for wild trajectory, be as liberated by a mountain at dawn. I would like to believe we can share this abandon, that ash can remember. Nearby, birds are defining themselves by their song and I can feel the river far below cleansing these hands that look too much like yours. Even the distant motorboats echo into proximity. I am still no closer to knowing how much of you is here. I sit in this open cathedral bequeathing what youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve given me. To this free living air, the black powder of your lungs. To the mountain, where your bones end and rock begins. To what is missing, what remains. What remains? And must there be a name for it?

CONTRIBUTORS

ROBIN BLACKBURN is a graduate of the St. Edward’s University Honors Program. She has worked with words for most of the past 20 years, earning a living as a journalist before becoming an editor at Stratfor.com. Her poetry has appeared in x magazine, the 2005 and 2006 issues of the Austin International Poetry Festival’s Anthology, Nefarious Ballerina, Falling Star Magazine and Come and Take It, and at the website http://asininepoetry.com. She is a former regular competitor in the Austin Poetry Slam and continues performing at various events in her home town of San Marcos, Texas. Blackburn currently is working on her first novel and building her repertoire as a musician and a belly dancer. She maintains a blog at http://livingasalchemy.blogspot.com/ and can be found on Twitter as @arobingoestweet. CYRUS CASSELLS is the author of five acclaimed books of poetry: The Mud Actor, Soul Make a Path through Shouting, Beautiful Signor, More Than Peace and Cypresses, and The Crossed-Out Swastika. His sixth book, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo: New & Selected Poems, is forthcoming. Among his honors are a Lannan Literary Award, a William Carlos Williams Award, a Pushcart Prize, two NEA grants, and a Lambda Literary Award. He is a Professor of English at Texas State University. LAURA KASISCHKE (pronounced Ka-ZISS-kee) was raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, 2012. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as several Pushcart Prizes and numerous poetry awards and her writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Harper’s and The New Republic. She has a son and step-daughter and lives with her family and husband in Chelsea, Michigan. She is Allan Seager Colleagiate Professor of English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan. SIMONE KEARNEY is a poet and visual artist. Her work has appeared in Boston Review, PEN Poetry series, Stonecutter, Beladonna Chaplet Series, Bridge Jour52

nal, Post Road Magazine, Maggy, and Supermachine, among others. Her chapbook, “Days,” is forthcoming with Monk Books Press, and a limited artist edition of her chapbook, “In Threes,” was published by Minute BOOKS Press in 2012. She received a full scholarship to attend Byrdcliffe Artist Colony this summer; she was artist-in-residence at Josef Albers Foundation and Ragdale in 2013. From 2010-2014, she taught composition at Rutgers University, Pace University and Ramapo College, respectively. In 2010 she received an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College. The same year, she was a recipient of an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Currently, she is completing an MFA in Visual Arts at LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland College Institute of Art. Born in Dublin, she now lives in Baltimore, Maryland. AMY KING is the most recent winner of the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) Award. John Ashbery has described her poems as bringing “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living.” King’s book Safe was one of the Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2011, and it was reviewed, among others, by the Poetry Foundation and the Colorado Review. She teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. WILLIAM LOGAN is the author of ten books of poems. He is a regular critic of poetry for the New York Times Book Review and writes a biannual verse chronicle for the New Criterion. He has won the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle, the Peter I.B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the John Masefield and Celia B. Wagner Awards from the Poetry Society of America, and the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry. In 2004 he received the Corrington Award for Literary Excellence and in 2005 the inaugural Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism. He has also won the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and received grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Florida Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2012 he received the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry from the Sewanee Review.

Logan graduated from Yale (BA, 1972) and the University of Iowa (MFA, 1975). He directed the creative-writing program from 1983 to 2000. He teaches poetry workshops and an occasional seminar on contemporary poetry. KATHLEEN OSSIP is the author of The Do-Over; The Cold War, which was one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of 2011; The Search Engine, which was selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry,Best American Magazine Writing, the Washington Post, Paris Review, Poetry, The Believer, A Public Space, and Poetry Review(London). She teaches at The New School and online for The Poetry School of London. She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. SUSAN PHILLIPS is a Chicago native who is now a Boston area writer, photographer and teacher, whose work has been published in many newspapers and magazines. Her short stories have been printed in twelve magazines, including Lacuna, Poetica Magazine, Literary Brushstrokes, Rose Red Review, Lissette’s Tales of the Imagination and in the anthology All the Women Followed Her. She is currently working on an historical novel about King Agrippa I and three collections of short stories: one about women in the Hebrew Bible, another about Talmudic figures and a collection of fairy tales. ALAN SEMROW’S work has been featured in over 25 publications. He has an English degree from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Semrow spends the majority of his free time with his boyfriend, friends, family, and Shih Tzu, Remy. His blog can be found at http://alansemrowriter.wordpress.com.

Groundwater Press in Hudson and Port Washington, New York. She teaches at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, Kings Point, New York. JOE WEIL was formerly homeless, but eventually found work in a factory. He has since published the poetry books Painting the Christmas Trees, What Remains and The Plumber’s Apprentice. He now teaches undergraduate and graduate creative writing classes at Binghamton University. NATHAN E. WHITE is the author of Apparent Magnitude. He lives in Camarillo, California where he writes poetry and music. JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS is the author of eight collections, most recently Controlled Hallucinations (FutureCycle Press, 2013). Four-time Pushcart nominee, he is the winner of the HEART Poetry Award and has been a finalist for the Rumi, Best of the Net, and The Pinch Poetry Prizes. John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and Board Member of the Friends of William Stafford. A few previous publishing credits include: American Literary Review, Third Coast, Nimrod International Journal, Rio Grande Review, Inkwell, Cider Press Review, Bryant Literary Review, Cream City Review, RHINO, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon. YUAN CHANGMING, an 8-time Pushcart nominee, is probably the world’s most widely published poetry author who speaks Mandarin but writes English. Tutoring and co-editing Poetry Pacific (with Allen Qing Yuan) in Vancouver, Yuan has poetry appearing in 969 literary publications across 31 countries, including Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Cincinnati Review and Threepenny Review.

ROSANNE WASSERMAN’S poems have appeared widely in anthologies and journals; both John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons have chosen her work for the Best American Poetry annual series. Her articles on Pierre Martory, James Schuyler, and Ruth Stone have appeared in American Poetry Review. Recently, with Eugene Richie, she has co-edited John Ashbery’s Collected French Translations (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2014). Her poetry books include The Lacemakers, No Archive on Earth, Other Selves, and Place du Carousel, a collaboration with Richie, with whom she runs the 53

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