THE January 2025 30/30 PROJECT PAGE

Welcome to the 30/30 Project, an extraordinary challenge and fundraiser for Tupelo Press, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) literary press. Each month, volunteer poets run the equivalent of a “poetry marathon,” writing 30 poems in 30 days, while the rest of us “sponsor” and encourage them every step of the way.

The volunteer poets for January are Glynis Benbow-Niemier, Kathleen Decker, Laura Gamache, Joanna Lee, Jeffrey Levine, Isaac Randel, Ina Roy Faderman, and Sristi Sengupta.

If you would like to join our alumni group of over 1,000 poets, apply here!

Day 14 /  Poem 14

Memory in Two Parts / Glynis Benbow-Niemier

Memory in Two Parts
figment,
as in formed, imagined
filament, fiber as in paper
or a strand of hair, pine needles in air
or woven cloth, a mat of grass wet with rain? dew? tears?
salt would be the difference, salt pillars formed
by precipitation, evaporation
the drip drip drip drip in a cave
short ribbons of minerals they call bacon
spider-legged crickets, delicate
slow moving attachments to the cave’s low ceiling all figments
of earth’s imagination, a dark space, a caesura you can walk
around, touch its damp walls and you will disrupt
this work, delicate as angel’s hair
gypsum crumbling to sparkling dust
under breath, like images in dreams under
a straight gaze

or, there

was a made place of dark space^[1]
a window in a wall, through to the heft
of lightlessness, if you put your head through it felt
like darkness complete
despite what you saw of rusted Cor-ten steal
the odd shape of held space
it absorbed thinking, gave back
something like peace

^[1] Anish Kapoor’s Memory installed in the Guggenheim 2009-2010

Party Crasher / Kathleen Decker

Endings Befall Even the Most Vivid / Laura Gamache

A friend died – massive stroke after Christmas –
I got an email this afternoon. I remember
she sang show tunes unabashedly
in restaurants, outdoors, at the thrift store.

Her face was round as a full moon, especially
When she grinned. She had curly red hair she
dyed in later years, last year not successfully.
She said she was a good Catholic School girl

with a twinkle in her eye – she taught, she wrote,
she was always in the mood for starting fun.
We lived on opposite coasts, saw each other
at a writer retreat once a year.

She and I drove one May to Plymouth
to protest family separations the last time
the orange man was president. We supported
what the local Indivisibles had to say.

Her energy was never down, even that day.
She told great stories and was openly
curious, funny, and bought the loudest
outfits at the thrift store. For her 80^th

birthday we each bought her something
terrific there – chunky earrings, colorful
scarves. An earlier year she’d bought four
wine glasses, having broken one
with one swooping enthusiastic gesture.

The full moon rises in half an hour.
When it does, I’ll toast Maureen.

Wolf moon  / Joanna Lee

Curtains hang stiff, tied 
back in one window so Karma and I 
can watch the night, 

letting the poem wander where it will.
I cover the moon 
with my thumb, looking for Mars, 

but see only darkness. 
The new humidifier 
you bought to ease

the fused effects of old cancer 
and a lingering cold season 
whispers steam over our pillows, 

gurgles, reminding of nights 
that were darker yet. I nurse 
my can of Coke, a last defense 

against eyes that would kill to close. 
Somewhere a train whistle 
blows, low and lonely. Somewhere 

a father coughs in his sleep. 
Somewhere fires are still burning. 
Somewhere, for others, they have gone 

out. Somewhere lovers stand by a river 
with blankets and a telescope. 
Somewhere someone stands 

on a bridge. Breathe, John, 
the surgeon pressed,
you half drowned already in the propofol. 

Two men held you down on either side, 
your body bent like a bow. 
You weren’t supposed to remember. 

Two men stride with purpose 
down the center of the street, like 
they’ve got something to forget. 

Somewhere in the distance, sirens. 
They call it a wolf moon 
because wolves have no fear of the cold. 

Karma jumps up on the bed and I lift 
the covers for her to crawl under. 
Another wreck of a week; we are all howled out. 

Intuitions of a Native Speaker  / Jeffrey Levine

An elderly man holding a tattered duffel boards a train heading west
              out of Boston. Nearby, waves blown by headwinds, the sound
of them slapping at the tankers in the harbor, water thickening 
              with winter ice the same way we pause at the windows lined with lace . . . 

The face in the mirror is interested in predicaments. 
              It wants to imagine life’s diminishing in mathematical terms.
It is a thing in process, this life, like the train, which is what he likes 
              about trains. How at speed they give back the world as mosaic.

No one ever talks about this, the man thinks early in his travel. 
              Theme and variation, more variation. Narratives in miniature.
Real smoke, real mirrors. He has left behind a house, a space, 
              a room, tranquil, a single fragrant stove. Barely lit 

by that grey Cambridge sun that scuds low. A sky that hardly 
              bothers with evanescence. The late-autumn smell of the ginko 
insisting its acrid fruit through those empty rooms, stirring 
              the slow, nearly dormant honeybees into a single breathless host.

The conductor takes the man’s ticket, mumbles something 
              about how windows give primacy to the transformation of objects, 
rather than a poetics of accurate observation and description. In other
              words, the conductor says, they’re not a metaphor for suffering.

He takes note of the changing guard at Walden Pond, receding
              through its own brand of melancholy, its thoughtless clockwork, 
how it hurts, what the dreaming wants, even between the dreams,
              like Dante asleep as a star-lit night falls on Mount Purgatory.

Out in the receding landscape, what matters comes in dreams,
              like one where you know you are sleeping, doubling
your absence, harvesting fruit from the last blossoms, 
              or like Thoreau, taking inventory of the done trees.

There lies what seems in that late winter dusk a day
              in which you allow no hour to be torn from another,
in which the winds cut, clouds push high, and the birds 
              above the sleeper car fly in circles, dreaming in song.

“Darkness at the Break of Noon” or This Reminds Me, Come to Think of It, Of That Day Five Julys Ago or Homebound, Dylan, Middletown / Isaac Randel

It’s not the hottest day this year but it’s meant to feel like it:
our star’s misanthropic pleasure. A prosecutor’s son
was killed, and his killer dead a county over.
Hypotheses multiply like blisters
—German banks and shell accounts
for tyrants and their private lusts— and today it’s much better
to think of life not as this but as the quieter movements
in the walls and drains. Starch-eating colonies of things
with easier brains. The plain act of hauling meals 
back to a quiet brood, repeated out across biomes,
huddled in secret tunnels or cutting new architectures in the earth.
What child hasn’t imagined such life? 

                                                                   There must be some,

and there are German banks and dead sons to caution them.

Outside some fauns clutter the unclaimed stretch of grass 
between units and the first thought is of surplus:
                                                                                        precious underbrush 

will clear and low-nesting birds die. There must be a better way
to think of this. Some fawns can gather without judgment.

Song for Squirrel Nutkin / Ina Roy Faderman

ear flames! mossy
paws, another day
another run up
another ash tree

acorn rosary
haphazard prayer or
fecal worry beads

dream of whales
and turtled seas
and rhinoceros and tuna too,
think about English red squirrels
tuft and tail away

all nuts are oil
all joints are oiled
chase her across the canopy,
the budded branch

a drey with kittens
blind deaf hairless
grey squirrels red squirrels
hide from foxes, cats, owls

and grow the hair
and grow the tufts and
make the seeds come up

and prime a pump
and write the book
and read the book

connect the acorns
like they’re dots
make them shiver
or grow shoots
and watch the martens and the fox
and the humans, watch them too

Day 13 /  Poem 13

Hands on Instagram / Glynis Benbow-Niemier

she wears silver rings on her thumbs
and her fingers are short but strong
as they push the needle in and out quickly:
she demonstrates visible mending

bright colored yarn merging neatly
over the hole in the original knit—
sock, sweater—doesn’t matter
it’s like watching birds of paradise emerge
from the fuzzy dun of soybean fields

I want to ask her how she chooses her colors—
suspect, even if she could answer, she would know
that isn’t my actual question

Sisters / Kathleen Decker

black with black
white with white
all exploited by menfolk
they struggled, each set of sisters
for basic rights denied them
and they struggled

with each other
one battle at a time
for equality
it took another fifty years
or more…before
black with white
white with black 
they live and love and vote
sisters together
leaders together 
equal to anything 
and everything

Fire, Fire, Fire / Laura Gamache

Helicopters whirtle overhead dipping
lake water, tipping sideways, sloshing
and reentering smoke to thwart
the fire’s spread. Gratitude to firefighters
in hand-painted signs and cookies handed
into trucks. Burning eyes and hillsides,
fear as the fire looms close enough
to see flames and not just smoke.

Every morning’s ritual check the AQI –
is it safe to go outside? Check the indoor
air filter – is it clogged or functioning?
Check the fire’s Facebook page for
the latest maps, notices, shelters.
How many acres? How many personnel?
Communal not just Personal Hell.
Community Meetings called by
the Commander in Charge. We all
answer calls for blankets, calls for
housing, for clothing, for food.
Who is culpable? What caused this?

Local radio gives coordinates to block
boats from helicopter water dipping sites –
everyone who doesn’t have a stake is
curious – on vacation here by the lake,
this another entertainment of which
you can partake. Unless
it’s your house needing water or
orange-pink retardant from the sky.
How dry is it? How hot? Where is the wind
coming from, heading towards?
Red Evacuation Level 3 notice
stuck in the doorframe. When
you are forced to go, how will
you know if this place you love
survives? It might not. Climate change
is in charge here as today in LA.

But the scale of these fires,
these losses, smoking house bones
and deer standing awkwardly
with no homes. So many people
with no homes. So many square miles
devastated and gone, just plain gone.

Postscript: The health inspector’s daughter contemplates alternative scenarios  / Joanna Lee

(Erasure from The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson, Riverhead Books, 2006, pg. 79)

The numbers in front
a hunch that
if

Snow, 
mortality. Perhaps
something in the distribution of deaths would point to
contaminated water supply. Snow
had only begun. 
Whatever numbers would have to be
local. 
so many of
the witnesses were dying.

Snow that
night. those last hours in the company of
water drawn from the Broad Street 
laboratory, vision dimmed by light of
the young, water
mixed with a
thimble of brandy and swallowed.  

Man Standing Next to His Words  / Jeffrey Levine

Screw consequence, am I right? I watch seven afterlives 
start to smolder and smoke, making space for other 
afterlives. Yet, there are those same phantoms again. 
My mother in the kitchen with a glass of sherry, my brother 
with his knuckles chapped raw and bleeding from the weather.
My father, Fra Diavolo, somewhere over the Midwest in an airplane, 
Zane Grey’s six-gun in his lap, last chapter, cleaning up the town. 
Why this now? She’s five years gone, he, ten. My brother’s
hands still chapped and raw, along with his life. It seems 
we somehow failed at being saved, neither was there any
ecstasy in our surrender. 
Look: the carving knives on
the carving board are rusted and dull, the garlic bulb too old,
too cold, the Spanish onion too shy, too withdrawn. 
By now we must have gotten the message. 
In high school, my English teacher suggested we could not 
be writers unless we were sufficiently sad, and in particular 
one could not be Russian poets unless we were sadder still, 
had suffered uncountable indignities, our blood composed 
of that carbonate layer lying beneath a shallow and evaporating sea. 
And rising above, majestic and scolding, the cliff face ignored 
by conventional maps, leaving its extent unrepresented 
except by a mere line between the edges that exist only 
in the liminal space between sea and land.

January Gaels / Isaac Randel

For five days the North bore down 
its Hyperborean breath and funneled 
into our coats and gloves. You couldn’t
make it from train to cab,
from door to foyer, without feeling 
the pewter-gray-blue shock of North. 
The four of us – united after three years – 
muscled through the waterfront’s wind tunnels
and sheltered in a pub reeling 
with the sound 
of fiddles and Uilleann pipes. 
What a place to tell what we wouldn’t
–while the winds were blowing— 
let slip before! And what a place to hear
the overflowing 
of toasts for types
of triumph unknown and unknowable yet! What
a place to toast the health of those not here 
(not yet) – who will arrive 
when these winds – all of them – subside!

Dragon in the library / Ina Roy Faderman

the dragon red and gold
dances past the front desk,
the self-check computers,
the teen room,
followed by people, joyful
tambourines and cymbals
and flat drums,
into the children’s section,
around the little toddler story time
reading the hungry caterpillar
the dragon is red and the caterpillar is green,
both hungry and smiling
absorbing what matters: strawberries and
the smell of old paper,  
the paper bag princess and one green leaf
and think about becoming more but
what kind of butterfly would a dragon become
maybe a pterodactyl with thunderous femurs
columnar and ready for take off?
but why when there’s bright turquoise cushions
and places to rest your feet
and upstairs desks and people with
laptops back to back like friends,
becoming can happen here on the bright
hardwearing carpet and the sunshine faded
copy of poems that mark the solstice and
welcome the spring.

Why not / Sristi Sengupta

Why not carry me?
Like wet sand, only sweep me
                                                      Off my feet;

Day 12 /  Poem 12

At Menards / Glynis Benbow-Niemier

Since it is the new year: organizational
accessories on sale. Plastic jars
with screw-top lids, cubes clear or in jaunty
colors all shrink-wrapped in packs—you can’t buy
just one. They are sold as posses to help
you round up who-knows-what-stuff and to put
it away for good. Meanwhile, the sparrows
who stayed when the large doors of the garden
department came down for the last time, flit
high in the shelves of hoses, black edging,
dusty boxes with bird baths and other
tools, waiting for spring. They seem to avoid
irritating the fake owl over the automatic
doors, but it screeches as I walk through looking
for twine, instead finding a cold mustiness
not unlike a mausoleum—a sanctified,
temporary storage with feathered guardians.

Hounds / Kathleen Decker

My End is My Beginning / Laura Gamache

             Ma fin est mon commencement
-Guillaume de Machaut

Five or six robins hang around the top
half-dozen steps that lead into our yard
from the alley, one seemingly standing
sentry as the others dip and peck. A
rabbit galumphs past them, to hunker down
in the ivy. A car. They all scatter.

A blue sedan surges past where I stare,
stops, slowly creeps backwards, reverses un-
certainly before lurching forward to
turn around beyond my sight. It careens
past again, can’t wait to leave this dead end.

This alley is what early attracted
me, even before I met the house. Let
me begin again. When my forty-five
year old daughter was four a friend came home
with us after school. As we were bouncing
down our rutted country driveway he screamed,
“Is this a dead end? Is this a dead end?”

Near us is the long-going 520
Bridge Update Project. The walking and bike
trails on the Seattle Side are complete.
We took the trail, looked down over the lake
and sea of fast-moving cars. There used to
be a trail under the highway, I thought.

Beside the UW Fisheries
Building. I recalled fighting blackberry
canes to find it. We continued along
the pristine new trail running parallel
to the freeway as it dipped into a

neither dark nor foreboding tunnel, still
crisply new and weed-free. And then a turn
and return to the weed strewn muddy path,
chicken wire fencing and warning signs to
make me think, turn around, it’s a dead end!
But we didn’t.

In case you were wondering how it ends  / Joanna Lee

We all watch 
as the new mayor pauses, 
tilts the glass of tapwater 

to his lips, swallows, 
smiles, a grin like a schoolboy, 
pleased as punch. In this 

version of the moment, we 
can’t help but grin, too—
in this moment, no one 

thinking of their unwashed 
dishes or how long 
since they’ve shampooed their hair.

In this single second, no one 
points fingers, no one clamors 
for official dismissals, no one 

presses for restitution.
In this moment no one 
questions whether this really is safe. 

We believe. 
But ask the city employees at a hundred-
year-old water plant: nothing 

lasts forever. The snow has come and gone,  
pressure is back, the quality tests
passed, boil injunction finally 

lifted. In another version
of this closing sequence, I can’t tell 
if it’s more like the aftermath 

of a battle or a race, 
cloud-mixed like the shadow
of a summer river in the middle

of winter: all beauty, all 
doubt. Plenty of hours yet 
for questions, for blame.

And be ye lift up  / Jeffrey Levine

Being young and new in Brooklyn and single and for obvious reasons in need of important hi-fi speakers, here’s this  store where having carried my vinyl Vivaldi with me, standing before a pair of $5,000 demos tall as a regular-sized person, one could not only hear but feel the bass notes in Winter, feel the snow falling cold and crystalline and the winter winds gusting, because Vivaldi. The sales crew left me pretty much alone, and I thrilled myself with the music as if listening to music, any music, with my body, and this from a man whose then short lifetime knew music from inside the belly of the orchestra, between the oboes and flutes, before the horns and bassoons, flanked by cellos and bases and violins. But when performing, sounds made are sounds released, projected, donated, given away, but directed out in the way of all music making, toward and through the fourth wall, and I a note or arpeggio or vibrating reed or a complicated fingering, cooking the meal rather than feasting on it. Oh, of course I’d sat through many concerts, the conductor’s back to me, but a shared experience with thousands of others is always first about the thousands of others, and then about the music-makers, and only then about the music. And perhaps it’s just that. Anyway, those high-end bass tones from the high-end speakers in the high-end store! Those notes turned me to pure spirit. Of course, one cannot purchase anything capable of making Elysium on earth, not in this lifetime, because first of all I had no money, and second, it would be too much to ask of the world all at once. The world had already done enough. And because I would have disappeared altogether into those speakers, into the cast aluminum basket, through the paper cones with their layers of beryllium, penetrating the drivers, the coils and magnets, then out through the paddock gate, down the gravel lane and under the Romanesque arch dividing the nave from the chancel, and below the lovely slim round-headed lancet window-light in the east gable, the chancel being a bit narrower than the nave fitted onto the east end of the older building between its antae, the pilasters, with projecting parapets along its eaves bringing it out to the full width of the rest. These ragged crenellations give the speakers a romantic air; one can imagine some aged cleric defying the robbers of the wood from them or preaching to inattentive wood pigeons that go clattering off through the pointed fir tops every time a string is bowed on their level. Somewhere deeper inside the fabric of the cone, the imprints of hooves on the rock, and the marks left by the plates and even the salt and pepper pots, together with the grave of a young cleric, who, the farmer’s wife told me, died of too much joy. Thus is the generation of them that seek thee, that seek thy face, O God of Jacob! I would have merged with the vinyl. I would have doubled a double bass. Someone else would have been left holding Natssja Kinski’s python.

Nairobi Between Dusk and Dawn / Isaac Randel

Two midnight coffees. Past the courtyard,
two gendarmes. On the languid paths
of herbs and frankincense, and profane air,
the seeds of expectation and of fear:
thrillseekers and seekers of last desperate proofs
of concrete glory, and around, the ones
whose earth this is and whose inheritance;
university towers, the cliffs to foil the zebra
far off, visible; Parliament where blood and promise
poured, the children of the children of the children
who staked the highlands where the waters were:
in suspicion and in large-hearted forgetfulness
the roads line and fill along the Southern Bypass;
here the perfume, here the witness of 
the font and source of musics pre-remembered—
the plains declare and declare, and they
whose earth this is and whose inheritance
are proof of what we came to know: they’re there—
and there they are, far off, with names that speak 
of sacred histories— the sable and great—
wildebeest and eland. In our quarters
all— except the gendarmes, whose minds,
like ours, arraign them to a shiver
that reaches deeper than law— sleep.
On the plains the zebra sleep, and genets,
arraigned by nothing but sacred calling, stir.

Punk ferox / Ina Roy Faderman

Herefordshire:
underground
hundreds of thousands of years
depicted by tomographic shadows
like being glimpsed coming out
of DV8 two hours before dawn  
where fog is the only backlight
and I’m a dark shape
music when the door opens 
and then silent again 
little waves and spikes of sound
to be wild with proliferation
variation and plasticity
vines and tendrils
not a straight
line of genesis to snails and cuttlefish
the complexity of making out
with a man in eyeshadow
who followed me into the women’s
bathroom whose boyfriend is still on the floor
dancing to himself happy as, they say, a clam
the true differences underneath
the spicules are a sign a warning
the foot that isn’t flat but
ridged “novel locomotion”
or no foot at all such divergence
and still mystery at the base
somewhere in my underbelly
is still that girl dancing all night

Mary Magdalene in A Potato Field / Sristi Sengupta

worms from the loam have made their way
into her skin – parts of her cherry cloak turned
Alabaster from tillage dust; the secret wish
of never seeing him again – ripening in her heart  

— Only here no one will come
looking for you if you leave behind
the primacy and courtship of god 
will seek someone else’s son, someone else
to show men how to wear shoes without stabbing
another’s thumb with their sole. 
You will always be second here
and I will show you how free everybody was|
in your governance, I will break jar after jar
on my knees so they never bend again
and the gentle river will cross my heart
before a single splinter can pierce you
with the Marionette’s curse. 
The fair across this field every winter –
only there you will find the most fragrant
wood apples in the whole of Galilee
and I can once again hear your tender laughter
at my small hands tearing into its shell;
hide your clemency behind a mask 
of my hair, kiss you in ways that feel
like I am always kissing you back.
Only here you will crawl on your chest
feathering the tiny hills as you drag
yourself across the field and remain 
on your stomach, hiding in between
Yellow bushes punched into the bleeding soil.
Only here you can turn to me with qualm.

Day 11 /  Poem 11

Doing a Crossword While Waiting for the Car / Glynis Benbow-Niemier

Fine snow falls softening the edges of the parking lot curbs—
its apparent quietude eclipsed by the two TVs and their doubled commentator’s
continuous talk and loud piped in music hovering, hammering the high, girded
ceiling. Maybe these distractions merge into white noise if you work here
long enough. In my inattention, the crossword clues stump, then reveal. One word
leading to another and another. And then an idea for a poem appears
as I am thinking about the mechanics working behind this loud showroom scene.
They have their expertise, but we do not see it. Sometimes I feel like poems
happen this way: I have a shiny new image—it’s beautiful but doesn’t run.
I take it to mechanics in grease stained coveralls with name tags on their left
pockets: Larry, Bob, maybe a Jill. They say they will put it up on the rack
to see what’s what and ask me to “wait in the front” where I go back
to a crossword or other distraction. Sometimes, that image appears washed
and ready to go out the side door—sometimes, they just appear, shake
their heads—better to cut my losses. These mechanics are tight-lipped
about what the problem was, what their fix was, what’s unfixable—
they don’t like to talk about it, like to keep their tools and diagnostic machines
mostly hidden. I tell myself, one of these days, I am going to sneak
in and watch—something tells me, they will be ready for me.

Ode to a Quilt / Kathleen Decker

In Seattle’s January Light / Laura Gamache

gibbous moon floats milkily
in soft blue between a neighbor’s
trees – startles me when I look up.

January light feels half-on        
as though dusk has begun even
when it’s barely past dawn.

Tentative sky is grey-white,
ill-defined. Even the blue
striations feel muted.

This is a month to doze
during the day, the daylight
never quite fully arrived.

Should we fly like the geese
to Mexico, Hawaii –
anyplace with abundant light?

Forget Peru, whose altitudes
are plentiful and sky
multiply hued, imbued

with a nearly undetectable
darkness like the white paint
Tony told us he purified

with a pinch of lampblack,
our days this month shot
through with a dash of night.

Sonnet on the eve of the second snowfall  / Joanna Lee

–for Dr. Danny Avula, in lieu of an inauguration poem

I imagine there’s a pajama party
at the water treatment plant tonight, 
the whole who’s who of city hall on guard
to make sure tonight’s snow doesn’t ignite

another bombshell on our dry, naked flank.
Look. It’s already started falling: soft 
white over the cold dark of reservoir tanks. 
A hand at the ready should power sneak off, 

primed to flip the switch, bar the door, 
hold back whatever stands between us and the sky.
The hand—probably not yours, but yours.  
This is the faith we keep, you and i, 

we all of us wanting to believe you 
are up counting hours, that you watch the storm, too.  

Fin de Siécle / Jeffrey Levine

My dearest Io,

From my old traveler’s journal at the turn of the century wedged
into a row of attic books, untouched and unread for half a lifetime.
We were in the Galapagos, remember, and I’m cataloging birds: 
ground finch, cactus finch, tree finch, Galapagos dove, 
Galapagos flycatcher,  Galapagos hawks, lava heron
with the notation, “close-up,” sanderlings, red-billed tropic bird 
(Phaeton aetherus) with note: red-billed tropicbird is a tropicbird.
I had written to myself: “and I refuse to so much as mention
the Galapagos moon, except to say full, large, close, larger than large, 
enormous, at perigree at the solstice,” and the woman, a fellow passenger, 
you, who said, “The tides have swelled enough to diminish the bluff,” 
then offered to sell us your house on the Hudson, too vulnerable 
you said, and that we (us?) should move inland and upland, say 
New England (we have!) (we did!) (though we are now a new we) 
and I was thinking cottage, something 18^th century, and you’re wanting 
a ranch house, because “what they lack in character they make up for 
with light,” and symbolize, as homes go, a letting go of world weariness, 
you said, of fashionable despair, of erudite sophistication, of everything
that we cherished in our hour together, and I say, what we have here 
is a failure to coincide, so instead I say, looking into the future,
that I have decided to become a carpenter, not because I know 
how to hang a door or even hit a nail, but because I can’t, precisely 
that, precisely because, how do I say, love, here’s where the word 
comes in handier than I can—             the bent ten-penny nail, 
the floorboards and floor planks dented from off-center strikes—
yes, but the smell of fresh lumber, the pleasures of fresh lumber sawn 
fresh from trees, from old pines and oaks and maples, making a home
from trees exactly the age I was then, we were then, how I loved then
most the dark, and do now, whorled knots that chew up the blade
and spit it out. 

Wild Hope (redux): Conversion / Isaac Randel

More than imagined or historical tortures, disappointment
is what we curb our thoughts against—
as though it could be possible! But
of course, it’s not
only possible, but the final and only
problem left (excepting all the others). Only
disappointment stands 
between a thinker and—
well, that’s the question, what it is 
(or what to call it) that sits
on the far side of disappointment?— one 
wants to say “everything,” but one,
when one is this close to it, 
knows one can’t work one’s way through it
through one-word charms and collapsible reference;
the whole (there’s another one!) must
be taken in pieces to be seen for what 
it is. So: proceeding (precessing?): what 
and where do you (and I mean the plural,
ridiculously expansive “you”) want (and 
I mean true, Augustinian want) 
to be and go? Where, if disappointment was 
no issue— if it and its blemish and stain
and cowardice were entirely no issue— 
where would you take us next?

YELL / Ina Roy Faderman

The Children Paint Me Hawaiian blue / Sristi Sengupta

     The quaint temple ghats of mid-north
            are not ankle-bound by long chains –
                their red-tiled toes, ever dipped in 
                          the silken rolling waters 

     with little beauty and much waiting,
                           jabby strokes of silt on waste bands
        and  zig-zaggy winnow of elf-fire
       through the spongy bamboo poles

      – lonely legs of a virgin noontide; I am
the mainstay for the children’s portrait lesson.
                          The cerulean polyester of my sweatshirt
                                  stark against the lispy purple of Keora leaves

      behind me, they have already failed
      to capture, in whatever irregular red
they have blotched on the paper directly
           from the paint tube, the chagrin

that hasn’t stopped gnawing at its black bark
              ever since it shot up and bent right mid-way
      after a blow from the trass-born eaves
                                   around the colonnade

      the light on the face of my portrait-self
              seems to be falling out of a sun 
                                                        trapped inside a jar of pickled,
                                                                  off-season jujube

                                                        three of them are peeping hard
at the incompleteness of their dozy subject,
      my blueness, too local, too sunken;
so they flatten the harshness with some water

                then the absent river floods in
and suddenly I am the blue sky of Hawaii.
                                         They are tiny islands drifting away –
                                              desperate for grounding water

      Half of me is a matt black sea,
    my crossed arms: waves of white.

           Outside, a moorhen’s trill 
startles them – their v-shaped birds, shaky
      like the scabs from when the moon
           first crawled under my skin.

Day 10 /  Poem 10

Instructions / Glynis Benbow-Niemier

may be in order
things required
for understanding or
building that IKEA desk
don’t skip step #2
be prepared to undo
return
where you missed the word
don’t
turn this to left
read from the bottom up
skip page 6
an unnecessary review
of all the issues and
questions you may accrue
from the beginning
from the beginning
questions you may accrue
of all the issues and
an unnecessary review
skip page 6
read from the bottom up
turn this left
don’t
where you missed the word
return
be prepared to undo
don’t skip step #2
building that IKEA desk
for understanding or
things required
may be in order

For Francine / Kathleen Decker

Life is a Finite Set of Shapes / Laura Gamache

A NY Times Crossword Puzzle Poem^[i]

An alphabet, like life,
             Is a finite set
of shapes.
              With it, one can produce
              Almost anything.
                             -Kaveh Akbar, from Martyr!

If life is a journey, imagine Marco
Polo, Betty Crocker filling fruit jars
Though lading them to whet
appetite for quince paste trumps arson’s
human and high windborne hula
through LA. Think of the loss of levees,
Louisiana’s buffeted bayous. No TedX
Encapsulates climate chaos. IMAX
Overstates our recent Bomb Cyclone. Get an estimate

to repair your car crushed by a fallen tree. Coo
to your cats or sleep through this stretch of time
we’ve been assigned. If life is the ore
we mine or never mind, we gird
or do not gird our loins for, why leak
tears at our small errors when the SNAFUs
of governments continuously oral
report like brain flares. Delis
are fragrant with opinions and caraway. Isla
Negra still puts Pinochet in a corner. Ono’s
Island sculpture lights Reykjavik. Make
A run for it or lie in a hammock, the ark
Only admits two of us. Rock guitarist?
Good on you, you might as well enter anon,
Watch YouTubes of Johnny or Jack Paar
Or copy our uncle and hand cull
Your own orchard’s hard cots.

^[i] Fill out the New York Times Daily Crossword Puzzle, then, as fast as you can, use the across answers as end words for the poem’s lines. I skipped some words, (OED, Ned,) and accidentally misread one (anon for akon.) I stopped with culls, though neyo, T-nut, ardor, cyst, sass, and nerts came after.

Perspective (Day 4)  / Joanna Lee

            𝜎_x 𝜎_p  ≥  ℏ/2𝞹 (the Uncertainty Principle)

Nothing is certain 
in the muddy winter at the bottom
of the James, just above Williams Dam /

so much fear of what may be buried here
on a January night, what lost 
footsteps found in the cold 

/ think of how far this water has run, the bright Allegheny 
mornings where dew clasped dew 
in a dance that must have felt 

like homecoming / pressing fresh wet lips 
into lands with names of stone–-Lynchburg, 
Bedford, Cumberland—as it winds 

toward the inevitable nostalgia of sunrise, and the sea / 
the rage of a river rushing to its halt 
—incalculable

/ to be diverted, penned & 
pulled, perhaps, to an entirely different fate… / we 
cannot know how the story ends, who 

the statistical probability /
the flow of winter as variable as the dew /
the secrets that might have gotten caught 

in the nets / 
the ones that might not. 
It is after all never the same river.  

Soupe du Jour / Jeffrey Levine

Dearest Io, Cosmic Bard, Noble Nebraskan,

 A thousand apologies, I promise, no more of that abominable French, not another slyly drollish rue this or rue that puckering these lips, not one syllable, nor wisp of cyclopean cédille – never more, jamais, jamais, jamais, I promise, will vulgar unpronounceable pseudo-artistic Francophilistinisms jet west to Lincoln by way of these shamed and flustered fingers. Merde! A pox on it, all of it, the language of chaos, of peur existentielle, and all those choses French – smug, vowel-swallowing wart-covered web-footed sibilant Gaulettes – au revoir to them and to their syrupy language. Fain wouldst I hew to one of the mother tongues as spoken by our true-blooded brethren here at home, bred-in-the-bone Saxons, and maybe the occasional Brit, the odd Rasta (for the lilt), and all right-thinking natives of the Tree Planter State, out there with you on the snow covered prairie, somewhere between the left bank of the Mississippi and Carmel-by-the-Sea, home to Huskermania, to Carhenge, Arbor Day and the candidate-du-jour for Governor Committee. Too bad, though, about the English only thing, because one gets drunk on the sound of French, and because as Malraux said: There is always need for intoxication.  Tell me, as the doomsday clock nears midnight, that life is worth living sans such sweetness. More’s thepity, my heart then lies fallow, a wasted mélange of endearments poised atip my non-native langue: mon petit poisson ,my little cabbage, my kitten, mon ange, my heart.

Ton obéissant serviteur,
Gide

“Is He the Only One They Could Afford?”   / Isaac Randel

for Morris (commissioned by Rachel)

This thing defies all reason.
Just look at what he was:
a lumpen bag of fleas and
a bully (just because)– 

a ball of hair and stitches 
whom stillness never knew–
who hates the slightest twitches 
which he has not approved.

He came up North to stay here
and claimed the North his own.
All toys he found, the way here, 
are his – and his alone.

Your seat? It’s his – no question.
Your ball? His too. No doubt.
Your house, which he’s a guest in?
His property. Go pout. 

You’d sleep for six straight hours?
Consider that the past. 
Your home once smelled like flowers?
Well,– now it smells like gas. 

Exhausted– in submission–
we’ve offered up our claim 
to life’s small, simple wishes–
for peace, tranquil and tame. 

It’s him, and you, and me now:
our patience long withdrawn–
and yet – how bored we’d be now
without this demon’s spawn! 

Pawpaws / Ina Roy Faderman

At 11 weeks: two heartbeats.
Two white ovoids.
Privately, we called them Meep and Peep,
small Peep behind his twin, only a sound.

At 13 weeks, we can see their legs,
unconvincingly tangled like a parody of love.

The doctor shows me placentas 
like white clouds in a black night sky
and says, It’s possible that Peep,
the small, the weak,
will not survive, and struggling to live, he’ll
leach away oxygen, food, and Meep won’t either.
And, he adds, they could
take you with them.
He says that we will need to make 
decisions.

I think about pawpaws, with their too-sweet fruit,
as they clone themselves, into ever growing patches,
taking up light, syphoning water, turning
deer to destruction elsewhere, until
nothing but wild ginger can grow beneath them.

I am decided
and then undecided, and
then decided.

But there is no decision.
19^th week and Meep is gone.
Not floating, dead or
dying, just not there,
Peep rotating in the greater space
like the Pleiades
on a moonless night.

Now 18 years later,
he’s a head taller most men, like a forest of one, and
I wonder if some of him came from somewhere else, 
like bacteria from meteors.
I’d like to know if Meep is still there, 
an echo in his head that makes music or sings songs. 
But I can’t ask, and I won’t send him the test that
could call him chimera. I just call it mother-love,
seeing Meep surrounding him,
like an aura, a friendly ghost that
helps him safely find his way home.¹

¹ [O]ccurs when an embryo detected during an ultrasound can’t be found on a future ultrasound….its tissue gets absorbed by the pregnant person and the surviving embryo(s) [Cleveland Clinic, Vanishing Twin Syndrome]

Madam / Sristi Sengupta

But i cannot read it
right, ever; the missing
n more visible after each try
Until i proceed with plucked clarity at least
less confusing, like shower knobs at home
or hammock webs under eaves as opposed 
to the tight, arched ones impossible to admire 
without a delayed chirrup at their wind-proof-ness:
bare nerves of a dolomite hanging above the gardenias
squeezed under the shadow of my old neighbour’s parapet
only the moisture from my mispronounced stare percolates
and laces the dark pit with enough discomfort so the flowers
still bloom and wither, guarded against the frigid dislodgement
of children who race from the mouth of the bustee to the pond’s
edge shrieking with humour in their unchecked speed quite like
the a lurking out of place to enter and crack open a different meaning:
a callous graze of tires rolling on stick-ends –
who permits children to play beside my house – beside any house
at any hour? Why do children have to play? What is the best way
to dictate the most essential nuisances – spitting of toads, basking
of fuchka shells on the side of the road in heaps, the incessant 
stealing by the supine crows from one heap, squatting
grannies at the timed tap between 4pm and 5 pm, 
the browning of a babbler, yellow of its beak, its
friends’ beaks. So when an email comes crest-
ed with that word, I forget for a moment.
I forget there is no valid hour for a bird-
song or for playing, resting or bathing,
no pants that don’t feel like a skirt
being lifted up slowly and no thighs
that go on forever. Everytime, 
even if only once, it ends. 
I remember: around me
the things that appear with
the snap of my fingers
don’t disappear after
I snap again, or things
that appear at the 
snap of the fingers
don’t care for a snap
anyways. Yesterday,
I found out I had 
stopped check-
ing for birds in
trees. Sorry
for the delay
in my res-
ponse, allow
me three days
before I can
accept this
new life. 

Day 9 /  Poem 9

Weather / Glynis Benbow-Niemier

Quiet Times / Kathleen Decker

he listens
attentively
or pretends
to my poems

I listen
attentively
or pretend
to his equations

his love for numbers
as mine for words
consuming, imperative

we caress
in quiet times
speaking of neither
listen to heartbeats

Séadna: Showdown with Neighbor Crow / Laura Gamache

Crow struts the street like a sergeant
Satisfied glee in her gall
meets with her comrades the magpies
methinks her a mad-eyed moll.

Her brethren have bumped my shoulder
Sent me sprawling for a show.
Will she want to treat me cruelly?
Cantankerous cocky crow.

The Scene, Day 3  / Joanna Lee

Front yards twinkle
in the late afternoon light still 

with snow that just won’t melt. 
The heavy windchimes 

on next door’s porch sound 
like distant church bells, the small 

snowman three houses down 
looks lopsidedly out at the street. 

Though the roads are bare, only a trickle 
of traffic passes, a city holding 

its breath, conserving its energy. 
We worry for each other quietly. 

On little screens all across town, 
the new mayor tells us how it is. 

We nod to ourselves 
from bedrooms and rec rooms, go back 

to our conserving, our January-ness 
already losing its new. Can we start 

this one over, we think? The sun 
falls slowly in its particular devastation, 

clouds almost iridescent in their blue, 
a sky like the broken-open promise 

of an oyster shell. It will be a cold one tonight, 
but not without hope.  

The Worst Upon a Coat-Hanger / Jeffrey Levine

Fifteen apparitions I have seen; / the worst a coat upon a coat hanger
                                                      –W.B Yeats, “The Apparitions”

Not so very long ago we visited the fountain of the four rivers in Rome 
at the Piazza Navona, a marble ode to the Roman Baroque limning 
a divined confluence of the Ganges, the Nile, the Plate, and the Danube, 
and featuring show-stopping sculptural performances by Bernini and Borromini
at the foot of Borromini’s Church of Sant’Agnese in Agone.

We like to imagine that we can bathe in confluences. We like to imagine
that our memory flows like this, out of our lives, out of our youth,
out of our dream worlds, and back again into fantastic fountains of,
if not exactly our present, then—

But no need to hustle life into comprehensibility. I am no closer to solving 
things now than at fifteen or thirty. What we say to each other, 
and even what we think to ourselves feels arbitrary, like life, or like memory.
I watch myself stir in bed, half-awake and half-dreaming, thinking
something odd or private that means nothing except to the receding dream, 
this dreaminess, this outward reaching toward consciousness, tearing slowly 
away from the dream world like Velcro, but without noise or pain, a morning 
ritual both expected and hypnotic, changeless and evocative. 

I’ve admitted to Dr. R that, as a teen, almost daily spring and summer
I shut myself secretly and silently in the garage and banged ceaselessly, 
raging with my balled-up fists against the winter coats hanging 
in a thick rack against the garage wall, away from everyone, even 
my torn and reddened fingers out of the hearing and vision of the gods. 

What did they do to you? She, my analyst, wants to know, me on the couch
morning-after-morning, an hour’s drive from home, past the farms and fields 
of Rte. 7, past the cows and horses at rest, lowering the windows 
to inhale the smoke curling out of the curing sheds smelling like breakfast, 
past Pontoosuc lake and into the morning traffic inching through Pittsfield, 
to the place where she held her practice on the ground floor 
of the unprepossessing Victorian House sandwiched between country club 
and gas station, with that framed illustration of Rudolph Zallinger’s 
The March of Progress, a linear sequence of apes turning into humans
that analysts hang on a wall to give us courage.
I don’t know. Nothing.
I don’t remember.
Nothing.

“Los Angeles Weather is the Weather of Catastrophe, Of Apocalypse”^[1]   / Isaac Randel

for the repose of the dead, and for the perpetual rebuilding of Los Angeles

I.

“I worked up in San Quentin years 
and years ago. I walked the halls
of broken men. Then I taught here,
and in the South, trying all

kinds of ways to get other broken men
to walk— and walk right, understand—
that was after the end 
of the Gulf War, and 
you can imagine what I 
saw, on the bad days—
not physical, but in the eyes:
you can imagine the ways 

a desperate man can hate 
with his eyes. But I never— understand, I
never— saw hate like I did on those two days 
I watched the Santa Anas catching fire.”

II.

one said he had forgotten his passport,[2]
            one woke in the night troubled[3]
but he had the family dog, 
            not only by the peacocks screaming 
and he’d managed to save his child’s 
             in the olive trees
beloved stuffed walrus (named “Walrus”). 
            but by the eerie absence of surf.
They’d rebuild with that, he told me.

^[1] From Joan Didion’s “Los Angeles Notebook,” in reference to dozens of deadly fires that have marred Los Angeles’s history 
^[2] Lines taken from Caroline Mimbs Nyce, “The New Yorker Daily,” January 8, 2025 
^[3] Lines taken from “Los Angeles Notebook”

Kiss and Capture / Ina Roy Faderman

Most planetary collision scenarios are classified as “hit and run” or “graze and merge,” meaning this “kiss and capture” scenario is something entirely new.’ – space.com 1/5/25

Charon kissed Pluto
at the end of each crossing.
He must have.
I can’t imagine it any other way,
than Charon, oaring across
Styx with his unmoving,
unspeaking (honestly, boring) fare
would take the chance to
sneak a quick swipe across
the full reddened lips. The kind
of erotic gesture that we, moderns,
don’t know how to talk about.
A sort of upfront payment for carting
the prize over the impossible river.
A promise for later, maybe transferring a coin one mouth to
another, first taken from the dead mouth in payment,
now  payment of another kind. Thin metal,
cold and thick with drying saliva,
a payment for crossing, a payment
for thanks, torso to back,
hair over muscle, legs pressing legs into the
ash of asphodel, splaying patterns into the grey.
And Persephone
couldn’t mind this arrangement
older than the gods themselves,
a way of making sure that everything has a way
of crossing necessary boundaries.
And it plays out again, and again,
Pluto and Charon, circling
one another, not wrestling,
not colliding, unable to survive together
but wanting, 
unwilling to pull apart.

Where the Eels and Poets Keep / Sristi Sengupta

Eels, whose origins are traced to the mysterious Sargasso Sea, vanish into the depths, their journey still an enigma to science. Like them, poets emerge from unseen places, born of darkness and unspoken truths, creating light from what remains hard to understand. Both are driven by something beyond knowing, yet their presence is deeply ‘electric’.

At the shore, a ripple presses forward,
the salt tide folds in on itself,
and somewhere in the fathoms of the Sargasso Sea,
eels are born.
Not that anyone has seen it happen.
Not that we could.

They vanish,
slipping into rivers as if they belong there,
their skins slick with the abyss,
the dark still clinging to them like birthright.
What pulls them forward,
what keeps them alive—
no one knows.
But we know they must.

Poets are no different.
They come from somewhere too,
though no one has found their spawning ground.
No one traces the moment
they step off the edge of the world
and into the current of words.

Still, they surface:
on a quiet page,
in the thin hum of a voice breaking
beneath a streetlight,
through the sharp edge of a question
that wasn’t meant to be answered.

It is a conundrum:
what makes a person take the unbearable
weight of starlight
and shape it into something
fragile enough to hold?
What drives them to write of love
as though it could bloom again,
even after it has been crushed
under the heel of its own ending?

When you look for answers,
they’ll show you the thing they found instead.
What we cannot paint,
we can shine light on.

Day 8 /  Poem 8

Lucky # / Glynis Benbow-Niemier

Which wrap? 
Merely responsibility or nine pieces  
of cloud?        
Little bird just then.
You find beauty but change
your present line
of thought.

Watch relations
with natural time
other people
simplicity of character—
do not lose
this ability.

Finding uses
for what others ignore
this is your special
nature
fortune
be reserved
be bound but

prove it! Simplify
English student.         
Profound present
or the fun side
unfolds. You need
not worry
about your future.

*Lines drawn from words found in 14 fortune cookie fortunes

Predators / Kathleen Decker

American Sonnet, maybe, maybe not / Laura Gamache

Consider “I Have Slept in Many Places
For Years on Mattresses That Entered” by Diane Seuss.
It sings to me.  I copied it into my notebook.
It is an American Sonnet. What is an American Sonnet?
Terrance Hayes’s have fourteen lines, Wanda Coleman’s.
I get forget dead white guy iambs and end rhymes. I don’t
have keys to this lock box. Seuss lists maybe, maybe not
where she’s slept, spins that straw into an “amber throne
of cockroach casings,” conjures Angela Carter’s fairy tales.
Tells on teen boys who now belong to a megachurch.
Like Seuss I was a “child on wet sheets. I could not contain
myself.” I too spent time in a hospital bed holding

not a lamb but my bear with a marble in its paw. Maybe
maybe not “like an army of lilacs.”

Current status (Day 2)  / Joanna Lee

                  Water, water, every where,
                  And all the boards did shrink…
                        Samuel Taylor Colerige, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

crippled by worry &
doomscrolling by the hour, we 
hear of California burning, while here cold
-weather shelters are shouted out across Facebook
like the call and response of prayer.
Water distro sites pop up like mushrooms, a
governmental rubatosis¹, maybe,
for which we look up from our snow-melt 
dishwashing in gratitude, even 
as temperatures rise across Reddit threads
and the first real symptoms
of dehydration cross our pocketbooks,  
faith becoming as dry as our faucets—

¹rubatosis, n. the unsettling awareness of one’s own heartbeat. From John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Checkhov’s Teacups / Jeffrey Levine

Shoreline with Dissociative Personality   / Isaac Randel

for J.R. 

Things unglue: the Pacific, which yielded up
foams and airs of sheltered grace, now
yields nothing— or gives what it gave, but
not the chambers to receive it, nor allows
old gooseflesh its old place— the salt bluffs
pass unwhiffed, sand fleas unloved,
the Whitmanic sprawl unspoken for, which spoke before—
he says, “I’m watching myself from above.”
He cannot feel his body anymore.
There is a rupture in the sacred space 
which drew him— drew him— to the forge 
of honorable life: he washed his classmates’ feet; he gave rare
permission to be knightly and excellent— he stares 
and cannot bring himself into himself. The tidal roar
does not deliver him— not yet, and not until the rough 
division of inner lives is done with him.
There is a rapture he must wait for.

Crow Boy / Ina Roy Faderman

At 10 pm. my son says, “I am going to read
a book before bed. Or listen to music.
I learned today it’s called sleep hygiene.”

I’m glad. Really. He’s tired all the time,
even for a teen, waking up with the feeling
that his day is already half over.

And if I feel the loss of the things we share
slowly disappearing as he grows:
the little, sharp jaw, the long legs

I won’t tell him that. I won’t remind him
that when he was three, he would wake up at 2 a.m.
and join me in the living room

and I’d put him in my lap and point to the ceiling
and watch the crows land
on the darkened skylight.

“Crow tummies,” I would say,
and he would giggle as they banged snails
on the cloudy plastic. “Crow tummies.”

Meditations / Sristi Sengupta

Day 7 / Poem 7

Flight / Glynis Benbow-Niemier

1.
Pushing their pin
ends through warp
and weft
feathers escape
as if remembering
something
they used to do—they
float in the updraft
over the vacuum
and stick to things
I pluck them
watch them disappear
into the hose
feel queasy
how many geese
poof up this old sofa?

2.
I find the finch
on cement below
the three-story expanse
of glass
lit all night
a passerby tells me
maintenance
will pick it up if I call
she would not
touch this near
weightless body
stopped by an illusion
I put it under a Tamarack
and remember stooping to pick
up a feather
my grandmother warning
put it down, birds are dirty
this, from a woman who
as a girl caught squab
built fires and fried one
in the lid of her mother’s
favorite cookie tin

Conmigo / Kathleen Decker

I named him Conmigo
the friend that was always with me
he was what I could afford
and no more

he was not elegant
except to me
some made fun when we showed
“Paints don’t belong in dressage shows”
the standard is for long, lean, lines
robust necks, bellies longer than backs

no, he was not built for dressage
strong, bulging hindquarters
neck strong enough to
carry himself
but not the thick, warhorse standard

How I treasured his spots!
so like the horse poster
in my childhood bedroom
brown and black and white
eyes blue as a cornflower
under the prairie sky

in my dreams we ride again
win every dressage ribbon
take them and escape
to wide open plains
where we spurn prizes

On the Day / Laura Gamache

On the day my friend went in for her second
knee replacement, Jim and I rode
the Rapid Ride G Line bus downtown.

On the day of my friend’s surgery, we
walked out the Elliott Bay side of the market
onto a broad new patio, with a bounty
of views we thought we’d lost when
the Alaska Way Viaduct was torn down.

On the day my friend’s husband texted she
was out of surgery and did well, we looked
up to see seagulls flying with a bald eagle.

The shape of water  / Joanna Lee

tonight is hollow, emaciated,
a cold city boiling, 
the storms they promised having come, 

gone, come again, and left us,
like the little orange cat
that skits round 

late at night, 
washed out & thirsty. 
The neighbor’s child knocks 

snow from my car with a mittenless hand,  
sucks a cold mouthful as they move on down the still-
slick street, laden with the heaviness of rumor. 

The corner store does a roaring business 
in pallets and pallets of Deer Park. The local kennel 
takes to Instagram, asking for bottled donations 

to clean out their pens. 
A new mayor is splashed on every screen 
before he can even be publicly sworn in. Across the city, 

cafes are closing their doors. Libraries 
remain locked, public drinking fountains silent, 
their quiet like a prayer

to city workers who’ve never known 
what it’s like to be prayed to.
And faith, 

faith is a luxury 
we find ourselves begging for a drop of, 
every one of us. 

Will You Still Feed Me? / Jeffrey Levine

 I watch the odometer tick 177,667 on my 20-year-old sedan and wonder which of us will make it to the next milestone. The tire rims need replacing, the side-view mirrors flap open and closed at will, the driver’s window no longer goes up or down without inserting the tip of a house key into the electric works, white wire for down, red for up. There’s an embarrassing dent along the car’s right flank, having backed into a guard rail at the gas station, and while the heater and A/C still work, the fan makes noises like don’t count on it for long. And when I press down hard on the gas pedal, she takes several moments to consider the problem of her place in the universe and other matters concerning finitude before responding with grudging indifference, and one more tenth of a mile blips over on my way to the dentist’s office to replace one more unfortunate molar, passing also my orthopedist’s office, where last week a torn meniscus for “a man my age,” I learned, is better left to its own devices than surgery. Wielding a five-inch-long cortisone needle, he encouraged me “to live my best life,” just as he had said when making tsk tsk noises over my spinal MRI pics, or when removing half of my right bicep. “It was a mess,” he offered by way of comfort. I still have the recording my father left on my cell phone informing me of his diagnosis. His doctor had given him three to five years: “Men your age are more likely to die of something else,” the doc had told him, but he would prefer 5 years to 3 and, he says, on the whole, would prefer not to die. He had just the three, as it turned out. 

Yesterday I was reading Joseph Epstein’s essay: “Will You Still Feed Me” where he kicks the piece into gear this way: “At sixty it is even too late to undergo that greatest of all masculine psychological clichés, the midlife crisis. If one does so, one is not in a crisis but merely being a damned fool.” See how our very existence is incomprehensible to us, the miracle of our pounding heart stranger than any “mate in two” chess poser, and we would just as soon do the crossword puzzle as play chess, wouldn’t we? As Maslow said somewhere, “It is precisely the god-like in ourselves that we are ambivalent about.” So, Epstein, who I’ve been reading forever, is merely 60, I noted, with age-privileged smugness. I’ve overshot that milestone by a good 15 years, I tell myself, and I’m thinking, really Epstein, wait until you’re my age and things wear out and the body is out of warranty, and nobody makes the replacement parts anymore. Only then did it occur to me that he’d published his essay in 1998. He himself was not only my age after all, but he had catapulted 27 years into the future in the seconds it took to Google him, and this news left both me and my rattle trap of a car 12 years in the dust. Like a fine experiment in relativity, I’d gotten older by a dozen years, then younger by the same amount, so I know, as did my father, that I have another ten/twelve miles in the tank, give-or-take.

Invective Against Heroic Couplets   / Isaac Randel

commissioned by Yair Atlas 

This wretched meter— muted, sullen, gray,
constricting how, and where, and what to say—
who made it? And wherefore? Give me his name—
I’ll blot it from the Book of Life with flame.
“Heroic Couplets”— could’st show me a more
detestable and cank’rous open sore
in any gangrenous infirmary? 
I think not. What colossal misery!
For how can I, illumined by the Muse,
contain my wond’rings with so slight a use
of rhythmic perspicuity? I know 
no other form that strains the conscience so. 
The sonnet has a noble arc. The ode,
a noble purpose. Tell me what this mode
of “coupling” ever did for men of letters?—
naught but test the patience of their betters.  
And why in pairs? Why iambs? Tell me why:
O vainest repetition, thou shouldst die. 
(But wait! I’ve made an error – I am damned! –
no true heroic couplet is enjambed,
and I’ve enjambed most every one of these 
poor couplets! O! My rancorous decrees 
against this form have been exposed – but know,
my loathing for it festers even so.
To imitate the form, even in jest,
is too revolting – too rank – to digest.)  

Shabby Tigers / Ina Roy Faderman

I step outside and it’s cold, for California,
and I hear maybe fifty tiny raucous hinges,
screeing from the branches of the nearby
scrub oak, and a few nights ago, I searched this sound
on the internet: lesser goldfinches,
I see them every summer snacking
in the hedges lining my driveway,
with their brave yellow fronts and cocked heads,
watching me and squeaking like
rusty swing-set chains even when I’m a foot away,
I had assumed they migrated each fall, instead of
living in the near-dead leaves of a couple of tall
trees, matching the fall leaves, but not
camouflaged, instead loud,
unafraid.  Even of my large, shiny black cat,
who chitters each time one swoops near the glass door,
as if they know he can’t get out, and even if he could,
he couldn’t catch them, because he’s clumsy
and a house cat, with the hunting ability
of a mop, despite the appearance of
a melanized leopard cub. And really,
in the end, they’re tougher and smarter than
he is, surviving what is – albeit mild – winter without fleeing,
ignoring the crows that dive bomb them from the tops
of trees, unlike the red-tailed hawks that
quickly swoop back to the wires
above the expressway to wait for roadkill, instead
of roosting in the crows’ trees, even
they pretend that they’re still hunters.
That’s what we all pretend, that we’re hunters
of something, not just waiting for winter to end. Except
the finches, round as billy balls, singing the ends of hedge branches
that bob but hold them, like the weight of expectations
and future springs.

The Funky Rhythm Of Prldoptum / Sristi Sengupta

The funky rhythm of Prldoptum kept the crowd moving, 
while Jen looked on with a knowing smile.

the rest of the world took the bridge 
her Sunship was parked under

They are approaching the last hour
of a fifty-five lightyear-long party.

she’d have to wait for the ignition to take off and pray
for no no parking tickets on the rounded flare-shield –

only the outside beams work; although
the matchboxes keep multiplying in the dark

the hollow cockpit remains unlit because
whichever one she’d strike holds

 a robin’s last breath trapped within.

Day 6 /  Poem 6

New Year: Day 6 / Glynis Benbow-Niemier

Sprouts / Kathleen Decker

daffodils are early this year
sprouts appear in December
verdant among bare limbs

searching for sunlight
after the warmest,  driest
November in history

the warm streak
gives time to prune
to reorganize,  to replant
to blanket with mulch

I find reason to worry
Will buds die with a late freeze?
Will the birds fail
to migrate due to warming?

centuries of science
yet still reliant
on Nature’s whims

Seward Park Observations / Laura Gamache

Hooded mergansers float the bay beside the parking
lot, their black and white the sharpest colors
as rain clouds shroud the mountain, drizzle dots
rain jackets.

Elegant white wingspan whirls in the distance,
as we enter the trail past jabbering crows. They are
badgering a scruffy bald eagle that alights
uncharacteristically low

on a madrona branch leaning over the lake. We
stand below it, remarking on its size. It doesn’t lift
off, and we continue walking. The crows, bored, fly
too, to make mischief elsewhere.

Another bald trills its silly call, settles high in
a Doug fir ahead of us. A second soon swoops
to take the prestige place like a holiday tree
angel.

Low clouds and lake mist make the trail feel
isolated – humans greet each other with soft voices
as though we are resolved to treat one another more
kindly than on ordinary days.

Yesterday, Jim and our grandkids walked from Shilshole
pier to the end of Golden Gardens beach, matching pace
with five seals swimming offshore. Or the seals
paced themselves to the humans.

Haibun for the weather no one really thought would come / Joanna Lee

We watch the first snowfall of the year drift down outside the darkened bedroom windows, everything softly mounded in the beginnings of white erasures. There is no time in such a sky. A kind of forgiveness to it, maybe, but it doesn’t last. I want to say the world grows softer even as my body does. But where’s the grace in that? The silence in the streetlights calls us to the here-and-now, as if to announce Look, someone has blown sea foam from one side of the street to the other; look, as if it might last forever. As if it might not. As if it could soothe the violence of this touchpoint for flame, muffle the sirens, erase the mistakes, disappear the soda bottle someone’s thrown as they walked, even their footsteps—in this very moment, forgiven. As if there were no cold in it, only kisses of a horizon that make you think of mornings by the ocean. There is no truth in such a sky. Someone has eaten all its starlight. Its nests hard at the center. A blankness beneath. The little orange cat knows. His silence among the falling silences as he patters up on the porch, heart beating, the only thing of color as far as the eye can see. 

kitten-prints right up
to the front door, vanishing
into a new dark

Byzantium in a pot / Jeffrey Levine

Christmas (or: The Republic of Vermont)  / Isaac Randel

love’s austere and lonely offices – Robert Hayden

Rutland is asleep. Manchester sleeps.
The shires are or pretend to be asleep, and
their children, though fewer now than they were,
hold the moon and clouds in hard expectation.
These scenes still signify— God bless them. 
But the drifts are deep
and Sunday’s frost has frozen deeper still—
he grabs the windowsill
and steps lightly over the mattress on the floor—
pauses, hears his nephew snore,
and takes his keys. The spaniel cocks her head
and, understanding, stays drooling on the crusted seat.
He drives. The depot plow is there 
where he left it last night and the night before.
The parking lots of Walmart call and he has never,
so far as he remembers, 
refused a call. He is twenty years old.
He scrapes the streets and sprinkles salt 
and turns the radio off. Things sparkle.
The day is hours from breaking— home is years 
from breaking. Bald Mountain breathes. 
From the parking lot he sees, or thinks he sees,
the bears that denned its summit: 
hulking— not alone— unbearably small 
in the blueblack cold. 

In which I am profane / Ina Roy Faderman

i’ve been invaded by the honeylocust tree
that curves over the fence into our yard ,
my flanges rattling in the skins of my hands
seed pods, maybe that’s the easiest way to reproduce
and I’m finally getting it right,
with sweet liquid leaking from pores, and small black squirrels
(that locals swear were made in a nearby university
lab) and the almost tame deer that come down from the hills
when there isn’t enough rain can eat
my discarded fingers and shit the little bone bits out
and carpets of new seedlings will grow,
which isn’t as much fun as sex (at least good sex,
the kind that doesn’t involve yelling but whimpers
because it can’t possibly be as good
as it is, so please the whimper says go slower,
just so I can check that this is real)
but is probably more efficient
and is a way of living forever,
or rather a way of incarnating that smells of honey,
attracts birds and darting hares that live
by the shores of the local bay and sometimes
peer at the humans who make thudding noises
as they run past, which everyone knows
is bad in case predators find you,
but my predators are inside, replacing my tibia
and talus with maracas which I cannot shed (did you know
that rattlesnakes are so much rattle that they don’t shed their rattles
but grow them as they shed their skins?),
and replacing parts until I am a mass of sound and
syrup inside a loose bag, a skin horse
of a different type, not a reincarnation of anything but
a beginning, a pair of amoebae waiting to become
from a single amorphous being, too big
to be contained, not a bag of bones, not a
tumor of hair and teeth,  but a wolf
clothed in a woman and eventually a carcass
in which a seedling will grow
after the poison pie mushrooms have taken care of the muscle
and bones and the rattling ceases and the seed pods take root
and everything stops being an invasion and becomes a needing
and a growing and a bell of leaves and a smell of honey
spreading everywhere. 

Musical Interface Gloves As The Super Kind Loco Pilot Of 30332 HB MJT LOCAL / Sristi Sengupta

electro-pop has left
several muse-tech boundaries
unscrambled for good. I didn’t believe how but listening to Imogen Heap
perform with a meshwork
of optic fibre-looking,

skeletal elizabethan collar
that is paired to her fingerless
gloves, working together with a trained algorithm that can send
or receive any sound beyond time
and space right now; even as

she spoke, she seemed to cast
waves of music at one corner of the studio
this moment, another corner in the next – this way causing an original echo
the birthsound of which, never existed
much like the crop circles in her song

that send an impossible message
instantly without once projecting the hardships
of its process – false art, one-of-its-kind, masters the ways of the universe

by emptying the realness
of vibration or realizing the emptiness of it,
either ways it’s genius because it’s kind for not breaking
the tune, any tune, in the input-output
fashion, point by point

each gesture, a sorcerized plunger
hurtling through air and not crashing until the artist
loosens their fist for a micro-moment of surrender. I think of an afternoon
train I often take to zone out
of the city to the side

where fields stretch and
glow from the gas of rotting paddy roots,
I enter, with my co-passengers, a concert by the loco pilot who has all
the good reasons in the world
to shoot across

the distance, the lessness
of breath diminished by taking it away – false art,
its origins, incoherent, mechanical. But the light, oh, the light when the sun
rams into the window bars
and shatters

into this spectacular
new light that floods the pvc floor
boards quaking with intrusive derailment, the passengers look
at each other’s feet, for warmth
for the fresh spill

that the wind we cut through
would dry out of revenge but
the train slows down gradually, the quaking shrinks into a rhythm and
the light passes us, unharmed,
over and over again

Together, we
cannot help but share
the keen hush of watching the fields run away as if a vast sea
were to come right up any minute
and daze us with its shine

Day 5 /  Poem 5

What is Required / Glynis Benbow-Niemier

In a grad poetry class, I brought up Robert Frost. What did I know,
steeped in the pot of 19^th century literature and Norton’s?
My peers rolled their eyes and that was a kind of learning.

When I was very young, PBS aired something about literature.
What I went to bed with: the idea of metaphor and the need for secrecy.

Bly says something about the power of distance between elements
in metaphor: this is leaping poetry. I can never think of this without
seeing frogs leaping in ponds. Those Japanese masters knew a thing or two.

In a poetry class, one student finally understands the play, the mucking
about—why what she has to say may need to be silent in the backseat.

And, she wasn’t angry about it.

When I read Kathleen Fraser’s “boundayr” it was like a sudden
unmooring—where running my fingers through its silky filaments
language pulled me on, words luminous in their own being.

Students wanted to know what it was about, and maybe, so did I,
but what I really wanted was to laze in it and postpone any knowing.

Becoming Bionic / Kathleen Decker

There are No Straight Lines in Nature / Laura Gamache

              “Because of Mozart, it’s all over after the age of seven.”
                             -Wendy Wasserstein, American playwright

I pen vertical lines slowly
down today’s blank sketchbook
page. They look like a waterfall –
Skogafoss in Iceland descending
directly down in an unbroken
line like the long hair of a high school
classmate who rolled it on juice cans
overnight.

I’ve grouped the vertical lines in fives,
a wider space between – like musical staffs.
I read music at five, before words.
My mother was a violinist.

I keep drawing, see lane lines where I count
laps aloud every few strokes
into the pool water, hear beaded
curtains – unattainable status symbols
of my teens – wooden beads shiver when parted,
click into place when dropped.

Jewel colored strands of embroidery floss,
And pasta – lengths of little tongues
strung between chairs.

The idea is to stop after ten minutes but I
fouled up setting the timer. Abruptly,
it’s over, I write “Lines make…,”
thinking I’ll remember what I meant
when back from a walk. I don’t.

Karma sneezes (A Séadna) / Joanna Lee

Bad cat flu or just bad juju?
Jumpy, my husband, too, coughs.
We look up to see stars mis-align, 
both make the sign of the cross.

Unnerved, we head to bed, Karma 
mashed in my robe, sniffling yet,
settle in like three peas and/or  
tortured Swift lyrics: down(damned) bad.

Tolstoy’s Peacocks / Jeffrey Levine

By midwinter the abandoned shops in the square were overrun with peacocks. 
A muster of Peacocks in their iridescent plumage filling the empty cinema 

eating the un-popped popcorn, an ostentation of peacocks in the empty 
jewelry store pecking at the mirrors. Like a clear gesture from an invisible hand,

they announced themselves prepared to solve the ambiguities of his death
in a train station in Astopovo.
                                                      My Io, he had written the day before: 

I have just returned from a late walk, all stars and heavenly hush on the birch-
lined roads where I live, and this after a two-hour walk through the forest that sits

just up the mountain from my house, the place I live, though lately I feel my orbit 
isn’t quite right and I need to find some way to widen it so that at least once 

a day, even late at night, there would be this woosh across the continent 
and visitations and a new galaxy to memorize, new constellations. 

I’m thinking something else, too, something important and suddenly urgent. 
I want to see Warsaw. You will have to train my mouth to make those sounds, 

or better. I miss your family stories, my love. Your mouth. Those sounds 
you make and that look you give me that comes from another universe. 

Forgive me my romanticism. It must be the walk. Or the Chopin.
I imagine ancient sages subtle beyond serpents, the way someone 

managed to subvert the Cossacks — as part of our literature classes 
in high school we studied Antigone. And the teacher, on whom I had 

a teenage crush, but beautiful, beautiful – she read Kafka’s Penal Colony 
to us (Kafka was forbidden, Nietzsche was forbidden, alarming beauty 

was forbidden), together with a lovely classmate I defected from the May Day 
parade when we were passing the most wonderful park in Warsaw – 

lilacs in subversive bloom). You need to know only this my Io:  The threat 
of being changed into a peacock. Not quite a marriage proposal, but close. 

I would have resisted in any case, but the timing! How strange life can be. 
Your name, your existence, never mentioned; never will be. But in me 

like a light: that which is most important in my life.
But I must not say words forbidden to us in the mortal state.

“Catching Bullets” / Canarsie  / Isaac Randel

for C., T., P.S., and T.J.

 I was young and splayed across possibilities
and sheltered under three heavens 
and prone and given like every boy I shared

ife with was prone and given without contradiction to
spectacular ranges of violence.
I aged and acquired and learned loss.
The three heavens which were mine were
mine no more and did not shield me. Shechakim,
whose millstones grind manna behind the stars,
left: I could not smell its honey-dough.
Rakia, where sit the stars and lesser lights,
left: I could not write by their lights again.
Vilon, which shrouds the sun each night,
left: I could not be assured of saving dark.
I lived, like every man I shared life with lived,
irradiated and aching for peace.

You have never known the kiss of peace.
You are splayed across fearful possibilities.
You are younger than I ever was.

Take Vilon and Rakim and Shechakim— they are yours—
may they shelter you all your days.
Take the other heavens— they are yours.
May Michael watch you from Zebul
and the ministers of Maon drown 
the sounds of night in song.
May Machon loose its treasuries of snow
and Araboth loose its souls not born
to shelter you. May you never say the words again
you said to me. May you never need to say them.  

Alice’s Right Foot, Esq.: Hearthrug, near the Fender (with Alice’s love) / Ina Roy Faderman

Dear Sir,

I write from my hands
below the oak leaves
while my head weaves in and out of
the branches of the tree,
and a pigeon slaps my face, like
she’s clapping my cheeks with
two hard hands instead of
powder-soft wings,
screaming, get away from my young,
which I would if I could, as you can believe.  

Since my eyes can no longer see below this
green and veiny canopy,
your feelings and telegrams taking far
too long to reach me,
I write to let you know of various pitfalls
I observed when I was last with you:
the sheep path is on your
so please do not kick off your boots,
or the droppings will squeeze between your toes,
unpleasant and worse than raisins dropped during tea;
any quick moves should be avoided,
since I fear the possible hurts to my neck
from branches which are like knitting needles
may in turn harm you;
the actual serpents (which I am not,
pigeon claims non-withstanding) are adders,
and live on the ground, so I will send you a pair
of boots each year, as a present from me,
by courier.

With my respects to
my Left Foot,
Yours &c,
Alice

Reincarnation / Sristi Sengupta

There’s the Crown Jewel Treasure House
then there’s the Soul Prince Select and even
though these are unliberal translations of the actual ones, we have
a whole many more of these here. Name it and they’ve got it.
At least a dozen semi-premium sweet shops down this line if you began
from the mouth of 55 K. C street
and walked all the way down to the paperboat
factory turned lime-licked quag box.
Open kilns of curdling chenna, you’d just have
to be rocking at one of them at five-ish and the mutt would arrive in the next minute or so –
a nightmare paint-by-numbers, each matted strand of calico coat
sticky and raw like shoots of an unsightly god tree.
He adheres to his good boy duties as long as
he is fed little big treats of pure dairy. It might be bad for his gut

or even his overall health but not accepting anything foreign
to his personal standards has helped him survive and probably –
regardless of travestying attempts by our local urchins, he wouldn’t
be sticking around to ward off supernatural evils for so long.
Service is always either on paper plates or little dishes made from
sal leaves because there are no seating arrangements,
you’d have to sweep it right off the counter after paying and stuff
yourself with your back towards the traffic and rubble.
Anything heavy, like metal, would be limited and the queue would remain
undispersed and queues like that remind my people of pandemics,
partitions, parties (and not the fun kind), slavery (yes, actual slavery)
and doomsdays. Light plates do just fine. You just need to watch
out for cars rushing past – they tend to bring in lewd gusts of wind
that lift the side of your thin plate like the hem of an underskirt.
Besides its instincts are already blighting its memory –
muscle by muscle tearing apart the disgusting garment of skin and hair,

it’s as if all the matting is actually years of hopeless rumination.
Its muzzle, all crusty, from malign snot too thick to drip off
you’d mistake the clicking of its old jaws for aggression –
it’s his best bet at breathing.
You still don’t have to throw it to the beast even if you’ve finished,
you’ll not be needed back to human life before 7pm anyways.

There’s tea, there’s ladle neck-deep, in the malai pot, there’s craft
and the fastness of craft. Worldness, its estrus.
When everyone’s grabbing an udder of the twilight,
like a pink mango in their palms, echoes of a conch shell
heave this pipe of a town street – and you never quite see it coming,
one of the oldest social mores to reach the has-beens every night, the gurus,
the ancestors, the setting sun. the neighbourhood awakens, home-by-home,
and the other instinct kicks in. The mutt tucks its tail
between his mangy legs and squirms under some sewer lid.
you finally throw the winky plate – its crunch dead from the syrup
when a rickshaw pulls by, busted wheels creaking
thistoothistoothistoothistoo
Could’ve been nothing

Day 4 / Poem 4

To the Driver on I94 Today/ Glynis Benbow-Niemier

Achievements / Kathleen Decker

I have conquered empires
toppled despots
and righted injustice
all over the globe
my name will live forever

they wonder how I do it
on social media
and antisocial posts
they marvel
and cavil
at my success

it has not been easy
strength required
at every stage
intricate plans
and fierce resolve

bullying is sometimes required
every footstep forward
no backward looks
no failure accepted
no tolerance for the weak

but then I awaken
Oh, the things I could have done!
If only I were…
brave

Losing Another Resident Orca Calf / Laura Gamache

Tahlequah buoys up her dead calf,
keeps its blow hole above water
as much as she can with her flank and fins.
Two years ago she carried another dead
calf over 1000 miles. She is grieving,
she is too thin, she probably didn’t
fully recover from the earlier pregnancy.

Orca males live all their lives with
their mothers. She has two living sons.
Carry that weight around Puget Sound.
I live too far away to hear her keening.

The newspaper article says the rest of
dwindling J Pod swim nearby, take turns
lifting that baby to the possibility of breath.

These orcas rely on Chinook salmon,
fattiest, most efficient calorie source.
Chinook runs are a tenth what they were.
The Snake River dams block them.
Chum Salmon, not as rich, are abundant.

Tahlequah and her pod have learned
to eat them, barely survive in warming,
acidifying, polluted waters. Dodge ships
that interfere with echo location, other

boats that disrupt their hunting, family
traditions, and private sadnesses
as human voyeurs attempt communion
with our cetacean kin.

A daughter contemplates the impending snowfall / Joanna Lee

How the white will erase everything, maybe 
cushion the loneliness that has settled in as just 
another ache: shoulders, knee, forearms. It is so hard 
to rise, these days. Harder still, wield a shovel. 
Crutches slick over wet-feathered porch, 
making a question of each step: arms, 
foot, hold. Arms, foot, hold. Hours 
measured by inches, softening 
all the angles planed cruel by years, 
the skeleton roses fleshed in soft ivories,
birdbath mounded to a lesser empty. 
The slowness of the falling almost
something to be heard amid the cracks
of branches, the shift of small lives
burrowing for warmth. These woods 
wergild¹ for so much that has been lost
(so much never given, so much taken away).
A solace even in storms, even in the weary
way you watch the flakes tumble 
from a sky that never seemed to have answers, 
your cigar sucked down almost
to nothing, the rising smoke a defiance. 

¹wergild, (Old English: “man payment”), in ancient Germanic law, the amount of compensation paid by a person committing an offense to the injured party or, in case of death, to his family.

Swann’s Way, Brooklyn / Jeffrey Levine

Chiesa (or: Church of the Assumption, 1910) / Isaac Randel

“A large number of the Irish had reached middle-class status and saw no advantage in being identified with impoverished, illiterate Italians… On that very same day, the Vicar General of the Diocese of New York arrived to officiate at the cornerstone laying and the start of construction of the Assumption Church, an Italian-speaking Roman Catholic church on Breckinridge Street…The church was built out of Tuckahoe marble and stone. The men worked the quarry by day, and after work and on weekends, they built the church. The women mixed the mortar.” – Richard Forliano, Town Historian

Vincenzo D’Agostino married once before.
But that was in the Old Country and
he doesn’t use her name anymore.
He has Maria. Maria has lime mortar, sand,
and a dingy trowel stored near the stove.
When he leaves (and he always leaves just when
she remembers what she would ask) then
she heaves and considers her love
and stirs. He will be gone and back at light
and this is better than what it was 
in the spring and summer and fall and winter nights
they do not mention anymore. The buzz
and stink of river life condenses time: there is 
no mark but one between the days 
of work and rest— today, like the days 
before, the men bleed at the quarries; his 
hands, split and flaky at the touch, will
close on hers, and swing her close to him—
he will sway and sing an old hymn—
today he takes her mortar from the sill 
and walks in silence to the bottom of the hill.
The cornerstones are there. They’re scrounged the marble from
underneath the foreman’s eyes. He will
not break our hands for spazzatura stones. Some
men are there; the women who mixed the mortar are
there, or they are not. All work; all build
their tabernacle in staid tones, a sweating, bleeding guild,
to mark the Virgin’s flight to her world from ours. 

Capillaries / Ina Roy Faderman

Red-winged black birds
Squeeze through my capillaries,
Single file, some closed-beaked and serious,
Others tweaking the tail in front of them.

But it’s a serious business,
Despite the comic tendencies
Of tiny scratchy claws
Marching to tumble into the open
pulmonary trunk, where magpies
Show off their white heads or wings or faces
before running off with shining
silver bubbles, decorating their nests
in the crooks of branching arteries
like Christmas wreathes.

From there, circulation is corvid life,
Humming and playing,
Mocking the rattites
Which lump through life
Without the dignity of elephants,
or the strength of giant squid,
Or the brains to create the wish
to twist through tunnels of
Stretchy endothelium,

Chattering in my head,
Raven-talk, sledding down
the slopes of my hippocampus,
laughing with my own voice,
which maybe was always there,
winging out my left ear, the right
left for hearing the echoes of thunderbirds
that left so many centuries before
and the yet to come pelicans
whiteness in arterioles,
pouching an unknown future. 

It looks like there aren’t any great matches for your search / Sristi Sengupta

Best alternative is rising every
dawn – it’s the only time when last night’s
             vegetable peel-rotting stench is 

most acrid, unerring 

she’s afraid you’ll try to pummel  the scent
of her breasts (or what’s underneath
what’s underneath) so she insists –
or doesn’t – on your getting up and leaving.
But it is unnatural for you
to listen beyond words, afterall, 
There is the birthplace of Thrill and Adventure.

Besides, when was the last time you stopped
                to find her stunning? Now isn’t the time
that your repose could finally begin
to scald her bones. It is something else entirely

On different days of the week, 
the skillet butts the stove at different times,
and not once does she find the opportunity to fold
a rag fat and press
it on her back where it aches forever.
Such lethargy: the rattling of the hungry
walls of her skull over the shrivelling
raisin of her mind

However, the veins it once grew on
              become more active than ever
out of disorienting confusion
repeating, relentlessly, over and over again –
wake up at 5, toss out wheat for the birds,
                   dust pillows in the sun, wake up
at 5, toss out wheat for the birds, dust pillows
in the sun, wheat wake up at 5, birds dust
the pillows, the sun

a time comes until when
mantras don’t involve memory
and routine turns into prayer, that’s why
it’s not easy to find an answer for
How to live with a menopausal wife?
Instead, here’s what you might discover:
combing through her hair just so,
               sleep descends upon the eyes of a man-
eating tiger in the quiet corner of her navel, or
gently rotating her stiff toes counterclockwise
might unfurl

her shoulders – even if not as they once did,
bloom like her favourite purple petunias.
Perhaps a different question could do
the unhanging; what’s easier than learning to live
with a menopausal wife?

That’d put a pause to all the digressive information
on the internet like how to live with in the first place,
like it’s a condition or a commitment or the meaning of
                                                                     Commitment
because all those years ago, 

just days after she married you,
                        at the foot of the stairs
the dim kitchen filled with her muffled tears
over a tiny brown-green pea that had slipped
from her grasp, 

you’d told her that something so small,
          once lost, 
can never be found again 

Day 3 /  Poem 3

Something / Glynis Benbow-Niemier

What do you call the space left
by a tree after
it’s gone? In our yard,
the linden still holds
the shape of a long-gone and
giant ash it grew near to
clearly there
in its branches leaning
away—a presence
of negative space

When I learned about the big bang
in grade school, I lay awake
trying to imagine nothingness
the before of the universe
a room in blackness?
a blinding white light?
no walls, just space?
but space is something

Any
thing
I could name was something
Nothingness may be
like getting to an event horizon
you can’t go
further and still come back
but, there are tree-shaped
absences, silence after the last cicada
stops its summer song,
moraines mapping the southern toes
of an ice sheet whose retreat
we still feel, and a salt-clay plaque
small hands imprinted

Axis Tilt / Kathleen Decker

mother in mourning
daughter lost at sea
drowned in swamping waves
of rebellion and anger

mother in morning
poring over pictures
happy times past
smiles, hugs, adoring eyes

mother at night
tears, prayers, guilt
were the wrongs real
were the slights not slight

mother at light
dawns another day
hope rises with the sun
loss recedes like darkness

Drawing the Spiral / Laura Gamache

“The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos.”
                             -Louise Bourgeois

Drawing spirals today before writing.
From inside out, move the pen slowly around
The previous ring. Don’t think how
You read that Saturn’s rings will be gone,
Ice crystals that make them visible
Melting from the dust and landing
Splat on the planet.
Make spirals without spiraling.

Give all your attention to the curved line
You are making. Let your breathing
Slow and deepen. Don’t remember to –
Anything, continue to produce the line
With the pen you write everything with –
poem, card for a friend, this widening

spiral. You have the time to attend.
You have the control to continue moving
Your pen. You can stop and readjust
Your grip. It doesn’t matter if you do
Or do not fill the page to the edge.
This worry will stop or quiet
If you spiral more slowly. You think
Of Louise Bourgeois’s spider couple
At the Louisiana Art Museum
North of Copenhagen. Her mother
Was a weaver. Louise had a rough
Childhood. The spiders are spindly,
Their legs taking up more space
On the floor than six people.
Ten feet tall. Standing close beneath
Their intertwined limbs you felt
Trapped. Walked upstairs
To view them more calmly
At a safe remove.

Drawing spirals from inside out
Feels spacious. Drawing them
From outside in you already know
How much space your spiral
Will take. If your line curves on top of
On top of on top of the next as you
Draw densely inward this is a black hole.

Another poem about whalesong (but not) / Joanna Lee

–after S. Minnich

In which the taste of whalesong is almost nothing, but not. Like the ghost of a spark on salty lips, or a faint smell of saltpeter close to hand under a wide summer sky. Something profound and smoky and lingering. Small flames over dark oceans where you were drowning, drowning. The stars pricked into inky peach-skin universes, and the small waves laughing. What did you discover when you reached their depths? Did they rock you close until the future came, all bright lights and fingers wagging? Were you sad to go? What echoes do you still hold on your tongue, secret enormities the cells remember, multiplying in their fashion so that on cold nights near the start of a new season you can almost—but not quite—hear your heart stop?  

The Words Seeking Place Among the Words / Jeffrey Levine

Bourbon Street, 2017 / Isaac Randel

for the repose of the 14 dead, Jan. 1, 202

Oh, God. What I remember is the heat. 
The sickly soured cigarette-smoked heat. 
The heat that stuck our sideburns to our ears
and pulled us by the ears to Bourbon Street. 
What I remember is the sound. The brass 
that ragged on brass that built a sound that I
still – to this day – can’t imitate. My glass 
that at each trumpet’s squeak scattered its ice. 
What I remember is my Dad and me 
out late and looking for a joyful noise:
too young for beer, I sat there with a tea 
and felt the room’s outrageous equipoise. 
I know the song they played, but not its name.
It comes to me – the melody – in waves.
It plays the mornings in. And, rightly played,
it sings the saints to glory, from their graves. 

Meanwhile, my mother rides a camel / Ina Roy Faderman

i.

the sign says, Park Closed at Dusk
but the air is awake with cold,
the gate is open.
A late walk with the corgi—
under the yellowed street lamp,
a branching coral perched on a picnic table

ii.

my mother emails a photo.
it is ten in the morning in Oman
and she is riding a camel,
her hair as white as
the bleached dishdasha of the man
who rides with her

iii

“Acropora,” my son says,
But when we get closer,
the pink yarn-y fringing limply from
each bent metal branch,
broken from the top of a fake tree,
leopard print star listing from the top point.
I think, a child nearby likes pink, and Christmas is over

iv.

I reply:
We went for a walk
We found half a pink Christmas tree.
The dog is fine, the boy is fine.
We hope the camel is polite to
older ladies. 

Sun burns / Sristi Sengupta

Duh. No matter the softness 
of your customary attempts
at speaking of it most fondly, I refuse
to believe that the sun moves
the bigger picture all day everyday.
Especially, the way you described its popularity among the shorebirds 
from the time you snuck up to the top
of the abandoned lighthouse last Feb –
mid-afternoon too, the culvert
between arctic winds and your superb front, the hiss-less plumping of each
pore around your mouth, the embarrassing
green of whiskers, glib with titillation: 
just your lips, slightly warm.
I say it is stupid, stupid to catch fire
right before a kiss. 

Day 2 /  Poem 2

Migrations / Glynis Benbow-Niemier

1.
State roads here run in grids: north-south and east-west—an order interrupted by the winding 
Kankakee: dredged, channeled, a shadow of its former self but still wild. I drive south, the sun 
not yet risen but bleeding into the sky, backlighting far trees and silos, fences and lone houses.

2.
La Porte, Kingsbury, Walkerton. Hannah, Pinola, Wanatah. Driving back into Indiana 
makes me ache a little for family long buried under its wide-open sky. No one left—only stories 
attached to places, so I come to hear the 12,000 cranes counted this week.

3.
The sun tips over the trees as I walk to the viewing platform where others watch through 
binoculars and camera lens. I am here to listen in the cold, to be enveloped in trills
and burbles. I close my eyes to focus on sound, to feel the wetlands hum.

4.
When I open my eyes, cranes appear in the distance like winter branches lifting from the tree 
line—cluster after cluster they fly, land, fly in their gracious ungainliness. Deep cold pushes me 
back into the car—away from the song I want to hold in my ears like a secret blessing. 

Creation / Kathleen Decker

in the studio
scraps and morsels
of past and present
mingle in piles and boxes
antique prints and modern designs

she assembles bits into patches
reminders of leisure, family, and vocation
music patterns lie with science fabrics
Star Wars with wedding remnants

occasionally, she stops to gaze
reveling in her store of cloth
the former pool room
turned into a salon
of creative bliss

Was this how God felt
when she looked at Earth
those first few days?
satisfied, stimulated, invigorated

sacrilege, surely to compare
but this power to please
to amuse, to inspire
is perhaps a morsel
of the Almighty’s gift

Grevillea victoriae “Marshall Olbrich” / Laura Gamache

S.E. Australia (cultivar)

Northwest natives’ deciduous leafless branches
display moss muffs at their wrists and elbows
among the evergreens – western red cedars
with elephant trunk limbs and redwood trees
with perfect posture, Douglas firs with tongued
cones in various stages of decay at their feet.

Grey day, no rain, colors muted as tasteful homes
in the tony neighborhood outside the Arboretum.

In the Pacific Connections Garden, this could be
an orange-pink honeysuckle if it were a local,
and May, or a cross between honeysuckle
and witch hazel, though dusty grey leaves belong
on olive trees or eucalyptus. The attraction is color.

Bright flower clusters are not uniform.
New Year’s Eve blower curlicues sport one or two
open ended tubes that jut past them towards
possible hummingbirds. Immature hot pink tubes
end in orange bulbs like matchsticks.

Messy looking slender grey twigs dangle
higgity piggity among the colorful clusters.
The bush itself has spread to close the distance
between it and its neighbor, no use for form.

In a name / Joanna Lee

Poppy: Latin name, papaveraceae. (happy-red paper-thin petal cups waving from the runways when i touched down in Rome at age 16.) Demeter was said to have created the flower to bring dreams,  and who wouldn’t want to forget her grief after the abduction of a daughter? A mother’s solace in the breeze-swayed reds, gentle Morpheus against the black of rape. Others cite Hypnos (sleep) and Thanatos (death) as wearing crowns of the bright blossom, the red on funeral wreaths ages ahead of Flanders Fields, ancient polītēs fully aware of its numbing siren call, long before dens of opium eaters gave the crimson its mystique. 

None of this to the point of the baby pygmy hippo born at the Richmond Metro Zoo December ninth^1. Spark of joy in the dying ashes of a year, capturing the heart of a public that searches for the next ember to fan, the next high to numb the headlines. Anonymity, from the Greek, “nameless,” without a password to her soul, as she swims and hops to the delight of the camera; the choice left to the people, narrowed down to two: after a flower, like her mother², Persephone come again? (fields of em in the sunshine between tarmacs) Or Hammie Mae, a play on southern Virginia ham, heavy and sweet but without the grace of a daughter born to face the world. 

I voted; have you? 

¹https://www.npr.org/2022/12/29/1145969469/baby-pygmy-hippo-richmond-metro-zoo

²https://metrorichmondzoo.com/newsroom/pygmy-hippo-naming-poll/

Stand of Crab Apple/ Jeffrey Levine

Saltines and Soup on New Year’s Day  / Isaac Randel

We spent the day looking for a place to put
last week’s baubles and memories where they wouldn’t 
catch this week’s flu. Our tree and menorah
signal triumphs that we couldn’t,

sneezing and feverish, think too much about.
Herod and Antiochus – the New Year – 
the circumnavigation of the sun – our thoughts
constrict to what is here:

we butter white toast and crackers,
make ziggurats of tissues. The world outside 
will wait – it has to – the year will wait
and so will Hope, its annual, deciduous bride.

playlist over my shoulder / Ina Roy Faderman

          -acrostic on Dead Man’s Party, Danny Elfman

 i hope they’ll dance to it,
get drunk and high
on my name and champagne—
best i can do, because the MRI says don’t bet on it, so

uit the name to the deed, please, to be a wake, all night long while
my body is simple in flame. ashes can’t
tie the ground to the pacific ocean
with an untethered ride on
a shiny wave that leaves the blocky rocks tinted
silver by the last of the light, ashes not worth a
dollar, but still feed filtering mussels, black and mossy,
on the kelp beds later caught by otters,
either that or they drift so I’m everywhere, in
eye and gill and tentacle and syphon to live while
i don’t, but I bet i’ll still
hear
the music and feel the bump and grind i had once before the last
chauffeur came and said
comin’ or not, as if I had the choice
to stay and sway my hips to
my each, my song, instead of the one-way
door, i’ll make him take this beat with me

Mama and Jan, Four Decades Apart / Sristi Sengupta

Day 1 / Poem 1

December 30th / Glynis Benbow-Niemier

Midwinter finds me walking the arboretum trails—snowless,
March-like except for the quiet—only a lone woodpecker, a jay,
a nuthatch, winter birds in these woods.

Ahead of me, as I round a curve, is a coyote steadily
going my direction. Its coat thick and mottled
like the winter forest, the gray skies. I follow

as it turns from one path to another, until it heads
out into the marsh where it disappears except
for the alarms raised by a jay further out

where marsh and woods merge. I wait, expecting it
somehow to come back. I wait for whatever is next.
The marsh reeds slump over themselves, turtles sleep

in the mud. The air does not stir, feels a weighted
imminence. Earlier in the year, a large brown
nymph hung by its feet, its color waned, its head split

for another head to emerge, large compound eyes,
a long abdomen and sheer wings—an utter transformation.
I wondered if dragonfly-matter remembers anything of its

former shape–its watery life. Does it recognize
the husk of its last home as it waits for exquisite
wings to harden, so it can fly?

Irises / Kathleen Decker

for Vincent

What did he see when he looked at irises?
near the end of his tortured life
the blue blooms on sturdy stalks
may have cheered himfor hours, days

before his final descent
into the caverns of pain,
of soul-sucking hormonal rage
the craving for surcease
that left only one solution

Oh! The cold feel of trigger
and muzzle that presages
interment into even colder ground
I have shared that moment

if I could have spoken with him
explained mood swings
tried newer methods
to tame the wildness
that drove him to the end

new science could help
more empathy could help
I’d share my pain and others’…
and the way it can end
without a bullet

Serviceberry in Winter / Laura Gamache

Mt. Rainier is unobscured by clouds
at the corner of 34^th and Valley Streets.
Vertical green straws of crocus and daffodil
poke from sodden soil beside the sidewalk.
Atmospheric rivers and bomb cyclones
have left our neighborhood entirely intact.

Outside our neighborhood, teens whiz
past me on rental scooters, the potential
for fiasco trailing them like invasive ivy
as I search the arboretum for serviceberry.
I find one, its bare boughs blurred by moss tufts
penned in by a vertical circle of suckers.

A Stellar’s Jay alights in my corner neighbor’s
magnolia, the one that will be throwing
its leathery sepals at the sidewalk in a few months.
The jay’s feathers are so vividly blue
against the sweatshirt grey of the sky, the mole-
brown of winter branches, that I gasp.

Gratitude and the Second Law of Thermodynamics on New Year’s Eve / Joanna Lee

                        –for R.; better late than never

Not a damn thing he says
when asked about resolutions 
It’s enough just to get by in this

universe its state so unsteady never 
knowing what to expect an overturn 
in politics a world war a new species

dying out before it even hits wiki
Bad business all of it you gotta
keep your head down and plug

watching your feet where they step
so’s not to miss the crack
when it opens up before you But

on my way to work there’s 
men on every cold streetcorner 
doing just that kids some of em,

faces through windshields faceless
to how many passing by eyes just
on the pavement the next dollar

the next night’s sleep and so i think no,
how lucky we are to skip some cracks
or how lucky we are to have someone 

bandaid our scrapes when we fall 
and besides i remember from chemistry 
that a steady state is another way 

of saying game over so, yes 
i think this year will be the year 
i finish Ulysses once and for all run

my first 100k in the wild write poetry 
every day for the first thirty of whatever
bad business the next 365 throw at me and

he laughs saying why on earth 
would you want to do all that and
i say because i can. 

What’s New/ Jeffrey Levine

Bronx River Valley on The Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord (January 1) / Isaac Randel

I.

Winter was warm and waterlogged
and now nearly over. Our false spring’s ministers 
(the squirrels) scrap unbidden in leaf-litter 
in these thin occluding woods, gathering
warm midwinter’s easy fruits. If you tilt 
your head from the Parkway and lean
close enough to the water, you can imagine yourself
somewhere (and something) wild; obscure. 
The squirrels betray this but this, to the squirrels,
is nothing new. It’s the herons here 
that change you: that in their sudden being there 
—here— open what the urban world is. 
Everything – as everything always is on this day – is new:

II.

These are the indeterminate 
privations of the sense –
of Reason— none could clarify
a mystery this dense: 

The God behind Totality—
Which brokered Nature’s laws—
lies mewling on a table— 
a subordinated clause—

Which crafted this blood-covenant 
is blooded by the same.
And here, the first – of many – bloods –
The Naming of the Name. 

Captive / Ina Roy Faderman

balloon, a tethered
goat clearing grass and
spiky weeds

until the ground
is uncovered

hallowed ground?
what counts

the shade
round as zero under noon,
then long as a giant
egg, a dusk robin blue

i could live under the shadow
but would rather climb into
the basket
be the spike of dark in the light

unknot and unmoor
and watch the ground shift
away

List Of Things That Catch A Whiff Of Paint And Don’t Let Go / Sristi Sengupta

Guava slices, sweaty from sitting in the red bowl for too long

Scattered change

Glasses behind the mist of hot tea

Dust, gathered on the two faux mink blankets folded neatly, now spinning webs of light in the sun – escaped after being leant upon for so long

Taut plastic cover on a set of cheap paint brushes

Pages, flipped through hurriedly by the endless tips of fingers that defy the looseness of waiting

A spider’s web behind the mirror

The names nestled deep within the chest resound in terrifying silence

The tears of those names, when wiped away, leave hands drained of strength