Poetry Winter 2021 fiction all issues
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Andrej Lišakov
Laura Apol
I Take a Realtor through the House
& other poems
Rebekah Wolman
How I Want my Body Taken
& other poems
Devon Bohm
The Word
& other poems
Gillian Freebody
The Right Kind of Woman
& other poems
Anne Marie Wells
Gravestone Flowers
& other poems
Laura Turnbull
Restoration
& other poems
Andre F. Peltier
A Fistful of Ennui
& other poems
Peter Kent
Reflections on the Late Nuclear Attack on Boston
& other poems
Carol Barrett
Canal Poem #8: Hides
& other poems
Alix Lowenthal
Abortion Clinic Waiting Room
& other poems
Latrise P. Johnson
From My Women
& other poems
Brenna Robinson
repurposed
& other poems
may panaguiton
MOON KILLER
& other poems
Elizabeth Farwell
The Life That Scattered
& other poems
Bill Cushing
Two Stairways
& other poems
Richard Baldo
A Note to Prepare You
& other poems
Blake Foster
Aubade from the Coast
& other poems
Bernard Horn
Glamour
& other poems
Harald Edwin Pfeffer
Still stiff with morning cold
& other poems
Nia Feren
Neon Orange Tree Trunks
& other poems
Everett Roberts
A Mourning Performance
& other poems
Alaina Goodrich
The Way I Wander
& other poems
Olivia Dorsey Peacock
the iron maiden and other adornments
& other poems
Bernard Horn
Glamour
Don’t look at her walk now,
her tiny, sidling flat steps,
neither crablike nor direct, falling
her permanent companion, between rooms,
on the bottom stair, even from her bed.
Rather remember how she swept into a room,
beautiful and engaging, her lovely
son and daughter, her husband
and Max her Great Dane in tow. Perfect
is how you saw them.
Don’t think about her hand trembling,
her mind as analytic as ever now crippled
by forgetfulness, the passion still there
sullied by despair. Remember how
Boorfield her Basset would come skittering around
on unclipped toenails
as she effortlessly called to mind
decades of actors and performances,
Dusty and Bobby and George Scott,
whom she read scripts for, and weigh each one
with savvy and irony.
Keep her at the center of engaged
conversation, and remember
Pompey her Jack Russell and the “ah”
of recollected pleasure or beauty,
so clear and generous, it was as if
you had been there
or would have felt as she does
if you had. Keep her
in her pleasure in company,
her roast legs of lamb, her grace.
Her glamour.
June 19. Against Transformation
She lay there in her own bedroom in a hospital bed,
diminished, barely responding to word or touch,
lucid for an instant, then lapsing back into silence,
the visiting hospice nurse having recognized
and announced that this is a “new stage,” a “crash,”
and that the son in England should come right away.
Masked, we stand at the foot of the bed,
my wife touching her foot, as the daughter, all patience,
cajoles a sip or two of water. The image is recalcitrant.
It simply will not budge. Frail as she is,
all the forces of remembrance are impotent
to produce and sustain even a translucent superposition
of how she once was, say, lifting a whole leg of lamb
from oven to serving plate on Passover
and hauling it to the kitchen table to be carved,
that image from long ago bursting into flames,
then consumed from the outside in,
like a piece of movie film projected onto a screen,
curling up, melting, dissolving,
revealing beneath it the powerful and frail body,
thin limbs moving listlessly,
the shallowest of breaths.
June 25. Litany
Why you woke at 6:00 am, somehow tuned
to the last breath of our friend, as Ann woke
across the continent at 3:00, I don’t know.
Whether the dying woman heard any of us,
husband, daughter, son, friends of fifty years,
speaking tenderly, inches from her ear,
during what we now know was her last day,
I don’t know. Whether the haphazard motion
of her arms and legs and whispered no’s
the day before that were signs of discomfort,
pain, despair, or something else entirely,
I have no idea. I still have a hankering
for the notion that there is some connection
between how a life is lived and how it ends,
a drop of meaning perhaps, even revelation
or virtue, despite the lesson of Auschwitz,
Hiroshima, or Covid-19, that there is no connection
at all unless it’s to humble us, to teach us the horror and folly
of dragging our most intimate private needs
and passions, Lear-like, into the arenas
of public life, and I remember, six months ago.
We were walking with our friend in a park
by the water, when suddenly her legs were giving way
and it took all the strength the two of us
could muster to keep her from falling
again. That was the moment our bodies
first registered the seriousness of her decline,
which we did know.
August 20. Mattresses
Today is the day of the hauling of the mattresses,
our eldest and youngest daughters and youngest granddaughter
having departed for Brooklyn and Tel-Aviv
after a month’s visit: the futon up one bending flight
onto its slats on the third floor; the pair of lumpy
single mattresses up a different flight
to the ancient stiff-springed sofa bed
in Linda’s office. By the third mattress,
our middle daughter, just in from a year in Austria,
and I have it down, the lifting, the twisting
in the staircases, the care not to knock down
paintings, the sliding, dusting, the lifting again and
and the lowering: There’s something ceremonial
about it all, as the two of us working together, mostly silent,
barely mention the three who are missing,
after the permanent stain of masks and quarantine,
the new rarity and unfamiliar carefulness
of our exchanges, and the echoes of
one hundred seventy thousand of our people
subjected to the cataclysm of dying alone
has unsettled our access to the everyday joy of family
we’ve always tried hard not to take for granted.
Bernard Horn
’s new collection of poems, Love’s Fingerprints, has been praised by Carl Dennis, Major Jackson, and Prageeta Sharma. His first collection, Our Daily Words, was a finalist for the 2011 Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His translations of Yehuda Amichai’s poetry have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines. He is the author of Facing the Fires: Conversations with A. B. Yehoshua, the first book in English about Israel’s pre-eminent novelist.