1 / Poems
LaWanda Walters
​Étude on the White Piano
There are no piano movers left in Ukraine.
They’ve all transformed into soldiers.
But a woman is pulling the dust cover
from her grand piano inside her bombed-out apartment.
The men are transformed to soldiers and Zelenskyy
is walking a reporter through tall trenches dug
right downtown, which seems surreal. On YouTube,
I saw the woman, her piano in a cloud of glittering white dust.
The trenches are tall hallways of mud right downtown.
The woman dusts the keyboard and the piano murmurs back.
She laughs at how real and sad the day is,
and she goes from dusting to playing the white piano.
Suddenly we hear from the keyboard how good it feels
to be used again. To voice Chopin. The ocean, the aeolian.
She is playing the Revolutionary Étude, which expresses
her grief, her anger. These études, technical exercises
for the fingers, useful if you’re going to be a concert pianist.
But outside the broken windows, it is the opposite of Chopin’s
music. There is a cow walking on a sidewalk, as if browsing
the closed shops behind glass. As if she were a woman in high heels
and there was peace over the land, and this other woman, playing piano,
was only practicing for a concert she will give.
The Pink Shoes
​
My sister performs in her hot-pink heels
at the piano—these shoes help make her heal.
Flamingo-pink sets off the black dress she wears
as solo pianist for the New York City Ballet.
The shoes are her favorite shade, a Kandinsky
splash among the dancers costumed as paintings
for the ballet—Balanchine’s arrangement
of Mussorgsky’s music, Pictures at an Exhibition.
Those pink heels remind me of a fairy tale—the girl
in red shoes who cannot stop dancing, which is her art.
One painting in the piece is from another tale—
the witch’s house that turns on four chicken feet.
The girl can’t stop and won’t take off the shoes. So they cut
her feet off to save her soul. They cut my sister’s voice
box out to cure her cancer. “She a smoker?” some people
like to ask, as if her illness were a punishment, not bad luck
or DNA, a complication from the surgery so she cannot swallow
even a teaspoon of water. A frenemy told her of the gossip
going around among the pianists. “Well, she won’t be coming back.”
What a thing to pour into my sister’s ear, while she is still on fire,
enduring the radiation inside her throat, no teaspoon of water, no balm.
She had come home from the diagnosis to find her grown son bawling.
Even in a text, you could hear the sizzle in that person’s voice.
My sister, though, has come back, thin as the dancers calling her
to take a bow with them, the male lead kissing her hand,
escorting her into the group hug—her hot-pink heels, the bind
of their worn toe shoes, bodies committed to a difficult art
that can sometimes heal our terrible, wayward thoughts.
LaWanda Walters is the author of Light Is the Odalisque (Press 53, Silver Concho Series, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, and other literary magazines, as well as in Best American Poetry 2015 and Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-first Century. She received Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in 2020 and 2024. She lives in Cincinnati.
Chase Twitchell
My Illness
No one can explain it,
not the family doctor, neurologist,
psychiatrist, naturopath, cardiologist,
radiologist, endocrinologist, homeopath.
It began six years ago with a virus
Russell brought home from Peru.
It took up residence in my body
and rode the elevator straight
to the penthouse, where it lives on.
It’s a medical mystery.
For three years I rested and researched
and watched Scandinavian crime dramas.
I spent whole days in the Norwegian snow,
somehow soothed by the distant anxieties.
I spent five hundred dollars on supplements.
I practiced accepting that I was ill.
I didn’t sleep, but I woke up in another body.
The one I woke up in is old.
What My Illness Said to Me
The whole time you hoped
I was gone I lay snoozing
inside you in a comfy bed,
feeding and fattening.
You want to call it the illness,
but we’ve aged together,
middle to old age overnight,
so please acknowledge that.
Say my illness.
I know you will always resist me,
but remind you
that in our earlier encounter
you did come close to yielding.
The Still-wild Lakes of Canada
We rode in the back of somebody’s pickup
to a lake I didn’t know, years and years ago,
and swam way out under the heavy stars,
six humans and two black lab-somethings
What survives is a dark, cold,
empty portrait of the Milky Way.
Chase Twichell is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Things as It Is (Copper Canyon, 2018). She lives in upstate New York.
Jordan Smith
After Wei Ying-wu (in Red Pine’s translation)
Your talents are wasted on a clerical office
Your new poems send waves down the Lu
Like a proud procession of scholars, their bright hoods, their crimson and black robes,
Or like an anthology of occasional verse on an occasional table,
Or like the merchandise booth of the reunion tour nobody wanted,
These are your lesser talents dropping by your office for a drink (just one),
Or sending an email to constitute a subcommittee or confirming the link
To your audience with the emperor. Click and he disappears
Against a blue screen of sky and majesty, just before his secretary
Texts the reservation number of your train ticket to the provinces
Or to the capital. My friend, we know it doesn’t matter which.
I wait for your new poems as I wait for that rumored wave
Cresting down the full length of the river towards the poorly-repaired levee,
The one they’ll write the songs about as they watch
The sun stagger up over the beached barges and bordellos.​
Jordan Smith is the author of seven full-length collections of poems, most recently Clare's Empire and Little Black Train, as well as several chapbooks, including Cold Night/Long Dog. He teaches at Union College.
Matthew Lippman
But of Course the Birds Won
To cry is to Beethoven
— Hollis Wright
It’s all so fucking stupid.
It’s all so brilliantly illuminated.
This mortal coil.
Because right now I am sitting in a cottage in the middle of New Hampshire
looking into the light and darkness outside,
a storm on the way,
and listening to Leonard Bernstein conduct the New York Philharmonic’s
interpretation of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.
When you listen to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony
and you don’t cry you are fucking stupid and brilliantly illuminated.
One day in the span of your life you will cry, though, of this, I am sure.
The first time I cried was at Lincoln Center.
The Israeli Symphony Orchestra was in town.
This August I sat on the lawn at Tanglewood
and the BSO rocked it out.
I was with my mother, her partner, my wife, and my kids. It was family and
I wept and there was only weeping.
Tanglewood is bougie. I didn’t care.
The music beat back the birds
but of course, the birds won.
That’s my point.
It’s all so fucking stupid and brilliantly illuminated
because the birds always win
no matter if Bernstein is up there on the podium
or some kid named Butch.
I am thinking of the one that ran over Dugan’s wife’s daises
with his front-end loader.
Because when we drop the bomb
or the glaciers’ melt erases the cities
or some Boogeyman variant of Covid topples towns in invisible fashion
the birds and the dolphins won’t give a shit
about Ludwig and his joy.
I don’t know if I should be sad about this
or ecstatic.
Tonight, I am in the middle of the woods
and my friend Jessica said Soak it up--
the darkness and light
and solitude and Orion’s belt
and me at this wooden desk
where a thousand other people have sat before me
and wrote shit because they thought they had something to say
like I am writing now because I think I have something to say.
I am fucking stupid and brilliantly illuminated
and my joy is the joy of the world
and one day, maybe, me and everyone else
will shut the hell up and the birds and the dolphins
won’t have to listen to Mr. von Beethoven’s 9th Symphony
especially that part called Ode to Joy
because there will be nothing to celebrate, to ode-ify,
there will just be joy
idiotically stupid and wonderfully alive
between us and children and all the living things.
​​
In Their Sadness and Sometimes
People and animals cry.
— Max Werber
At Shake Shack you wept like an animal.
Not sure if it were a rhino or an opossum but the tears, man,
they were burning through the burgers like magnesium on fire.
Remember when Richard Golden set those strips aflame
and we stood there in our 10th grade goggles
because we knew we could burn like that.
All we wanted was to get laid because biology is a drug that never stops
offering up its post buzz DNA.
You wept a fraction of a second perfectly
into the fries
and I reached across the table and touched your arm
but wanted to lick your face
the way dogs do that when we cry
or the lionesses lick the tears from their little lion babies
after the kill.
Sloths cry all the time and so do snakes.
Sometimes we can see them out there in the jungles and swamps
in their sadness and sometimes
there are too many telephones that get in the way.
At Shake Shack, I saw you from across the table
like I saw you from across the Bunsen burners when we were 15.
Paul, we’ve known each other since 7th grade and that’s a real thing—the stamina of love.
You said, That’s why I am crying with you.
You said, Who will know me when I am gone?
You said What is the worth of me
when I will have no more words to say?
And you wept into the existential abyss that is muscle, bone, and flesh.
It was the most delicious meal we’ve ever shared being.
That’s when we looked outside, through the restaurant glass, at the wild animal teenagers
and the giraffes and the honking hyaenas,
the broken felines and all the gators and osprey,
and they were all crying.
Sobbing and heaving and weeping.
This wasn’t any zoo.
It was the jungle of existence and sadness
and you were the open-hearted vulnerability of a man in front of his meat
touching his deep animal in the forest of a love so deep we rip it to shreds
with our blazing hot teeth
and we can never get enough.
Matthew Lippman is the author of 7 poetry collections. His latest book, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On is published by Four Way Books. His next collection, Cry Baby Cry, will be published by Four Way Books in the spring of 2027.
Sanni Purhonen
Three Poems
translated from the Finnish by the author
with Stephen Kuusisto and Mika Suonperä
​​
​
like a doll I remove parts of myself –
some kind of relief
I’m ready to let go
while we’re alive feeling doesn’t stop
the body I’m talking to can always fail me
while we’re waiting around
maybe I’ll also take parts of you
a world full of cut open people
and miles of roadsides
dazzling red
**
where creatures of the deep are concerned
blood vessels and internal organs are sometimes visible through translucent skin
we're not that different after all
skeletons of light
reaching out from the mist to the real
everyone is afraid of loneliness
there is nothing original about it
I stay in the dark
there is nothing brave about it
**
when I grow up, I'm going to be
a one-legged dancer inside a box
I go to Home Depot to pick up a saw
fingers stiff as nails
a bolt of blood in my mouth
it’s fashionable to be a freak
that’s what everyone wants anyway
a poem about pain that isn’t real
as a child my hips were shot with nails
even that didn’t really hurt
I had the best pills
Sanni Purhonen is the author of three collections of poetry in her native Finland. Her most recent book Jos vain muuttuisin toiseksi (If Only I’d Turn Into Someone Else) will be published in 2025 by the Propel Poetry Series of Nine Mile Press. She is a leading figure in disability rights and culture in Finland and across the EU.
Allison Cundiff
Kathy Blue
Kathy Blue, in from out of town,
sat crisscross in cut grass,
an empty bottle of cola between her feet.
She had borrowed a creased paperback from the house,
and ignoring the boys, asked me,
“you ever read this one?” a chewed-up straw
in the corner of her mouth.
On the rag probably,
one of my brothers snickered as he stood,
arms-crossed, his homecut hair sweating
against his forehead, the July heat
hovering between ground and treeline.
I squinted into her face
and shook my head no.
And across the sagging porch, for a moment
I could hear the laughter of my father
from inside. The man who only ever had
coarse love to show his two boys.
The same kind of love
he had been shown
in the red dirt of what he could remember.
The kind that leaves you sick with low belly longing.
The love you’d get
from the kind of man
who was hard on his dogs
I’ll rub your nose in shit.
He hoped to make the two of them strong,
but they turned into pale brutes.
Not even summer labor could save them.
Kathy Blue looked up to where the lightning bugs
hung dandelion drunk in the air between us.
She reached her palm up
and lifted two of them, gliding them
like an iridescent bubble
into her bottle
to light her way.
Small Game Training
This is best done in the afternoon.
As long as more heat hangs on the earth than leaves it,
He keeps them penned, baying
except for the one bitch, he let me carry inside
only because Jerry didn’t come to pick her up
so he said, sale was void.
My daddy did it this way too, he says from my doorway
lifting the puppy from her cedar warmth, looking at her
snout snubbed, he says, till her mama’s milk dries up.
I don’t want her to learn, I tell him.
He sucks his teeth. 3 pm.
More heat leaving than coming, he says,
the chicken skin from the freezer, wet in his pocket.
The old dog pants unleashed at his boots.
I pull on my boots and stand.
Too big still.
The .22, he says, nodding to the corner.
I take her back from him, hold her
against my chest.
Let the old dog lead her, he says.
No bad habit in this one, he says.
I follow his mucks. He leads the dogs to the path.
She falls over her tree trunk legs, noses to the mousetraps,
booby traps to learn them off the deer scent, he says.
Now he has a frozen foot.
A rabbit’s, he says, No, it’s not a bad thing.
I bite my bottom lip red.
I spit into the dry dirt
one clear drop that sits unmoving on the brown clay.
She runs, follows the male.
Grasshoppers jump in arcs.
Then the male has nosed one. In the coverts, off the path, he howls,
haunch feathering the culms, a bloodline of memory
and then she’s wild from the smell of it, her back arching,
her bay shocking the warbler from its nest,
the hare’s adrenaline in the tips of the grass.​
Allison Cundiff is a beekeeper and teacher living in St. Louis. Her publications include the forthcoming novel, Hey Pickpocket (JackLeg Press) three books of poetry, Just to See How It Feels (2018, WordPress), Otherings (2016, Golden Antelope Press), and In Short, A Memory of the Other on a Good Day, co-authored with Steven Schreiner, (2014, Golden Antelope Press). Connect at Allisoncundiff.net
Kara Dorris
The Not-So-New Normal
Thinking about normalcy is one of the least normal things we can do.—Rod Michalko
Normal was Barbie & Ken
& Cindy Crawford.
Smile & sit pretty & think
good thoughts. I was
white & thin, a cute girl despite
it all, they said. Tumors
meant cancer. Curved spines
define scoliosis, at least
that’s what the nurse said
when she sent me home
with a doctor’s note. Thinking
about normalcy is the least
normal thing we can do,
someone smart once wrote.
I say, I have bone tumors
& you should see the look
on everyone’s faces,
worthy of any horror
movie. My way of embodying
this world is scary. I am
the one with a chainsaw
& machete. I am
the one who reminds them
we are all in this together.
Liminal Barbie (2)
after artwork of Persimmon Blackbridge
Wing or tangle-
weed? Feather-stitched
plastic or skin
that wears it bones on
the other side. Braces
hold our chests
apart. Disabled is not
the opposite
of symmetry. I see
myself in those stair-
stepped hips, arms curved
to sky one a hand-
length longer,
legs tied as if an infinity
bow. I’ve found
myself beautifully
balanced in
unbalanced art
more than any dolls
I pretended to be
when I was younger.​
I have always believed poetry is resistance. The best protest poems mix the personal and the political. As I write lately, I can’t help but think about the way intersectionality works to layer on injustices—the way gender intersects with disability until I cannot separate one from the other. For a long time I felt like I must hide my disability as if I must become an abled body when I walk into a classroom or store, when I teach. Now I know that isn’t true. These poems work to uncover the hidden agendas, stigmas, what aches. Poems as translators.
-Kara Dorris
Macallan Lay
An Addiction
I spent an eternity sleeping,
eyelashes fluttering between doses
like a heart. I pluck my dreams from the ash
and rub them between my fingertips.
My heart flutters between doses.
My parents worry I’ll disappear.
I pluck my sins from the ash,
God calls me between drinks.
My parents worry I’m disappearing.
I start sweating in my sleep.
God calls me between drinks.
When I pick up, no one is there.
I speak in tongues while I sleep.
Each lover becomes a faux pas.
When I call, no one answers.
My mother gives up.
Each lover becomes a faux pas,
but I keep making the same mistakes.
My father gives up.
A light bearer appears.
I fear I’m only meant for mistakes.
Plucking my heart from the ash,
a light bearer appears
but I have spent an eternity sleeping.
The Long Faultless Tongue of God
I focus on moving like the moon,
often praying in languages
the grass blades wouldn’t understand.
Our divinity can be drawn
in a Venn diagram.
Macallan Lay is an emerging poet. She is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Missouri and lives in St. Louis with her wife.
Rita Maria Martinez
Valentine for Doctor Van Helsing
Dear Doctor, I envy Mina. Instead of criticizing her
for being Type A, for memorizing train schedules
and expostulating theories on Dracula’s whereabouts,
you praise her keen mind, her deductive reasoning.
Well versed in matters of heredity and myriad migraine
triggers, you'd never claim I'm psychosomatic, too sensitive,
or hysterical. Unlike one man of medicine, you wouldn't
advise getting pregnant to spur possible migraine remission.
Why do the masses think procreating is a panacea?
Van Helsing, if you were my doctor, I’d swallow medicine
without complaint. I'd let you crown me with a wreath of feverfew.
I’d let you smear the daisy-like flowers on my bedroom's
doorframe in wide flourishes, tie clusters of Chrysanthemum
Parthenium to my headboard, demure white florets and feathery
leaves worthy of adorning blushing brides in Austen novels.
Doctor, evenings you may consecrate my room—sprinkle
holy water on my pillow and head, around the periphery
of my bed. As I drift off, you’d rub my feet, assuage throbbing
pressure points between my toes, caress neuropathy away.
Following a harrowing migraine onslaught during perigee —
when the moon is most merciless — you'd sit bedside,
permit I hold and squeeze your skilled hand like women
in labor do their spouses’ hands. Doctor, you'd whisper —
It will pass. It will pass, my Little Miss — while massaging
my temples and applying a cold compress. Who wouldn't benefit
from your benevolent bedside manner, from kind ministrations
performed on instinct, the vow to do no harm rooted
in your healing touch.
​
The Invisible Girl
In elementary we walk single file
to school mass. A distracted boy bumps me
from behind and I tumble forward,
hands and knees mashed against gravel.
At church I stand and kneel like everyone.
After school, Mami hitches up the plaid skirt,
cleans and mercurochromes bloody knees.
Why didn’t you tell the teacher,
so she could’ve taken care of it?
How to explain the need to remain unseen,
fervent desire for invisibility
the code I clung to, pseudo-existence I practiced
when Papi was mad, before the pediatrician’s
needle, and times I wanted to fly
under the radar so badly I deposited snotty
tissues inside my first-grade desk to avoid
standing and walking to the trash can.
How does one confess the desire to fade,
to remain undetected
like Claude Rains who elevated
insubstantiality
to an art form.
Rita Maria Martinez's current poetry raises awareness about triumphs and challenges when navigating life with chronic daily headache (CDH) and migraine. Her Jane Eyre-inspired poetry collection—The Jane and Bertha in Me (Kelsay Books)—was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Rita's poetry appears in publications like The Best American Poetry Blog, Ploughshares, Pleiades, and Tupelo Quarterly. Her work was also featured as part of CLMP's 2023 Disability Pride Month reading list. Follow Rita on Instagram @rita.maria.martinez.poet or visit https://comeonhome.org/ritamartinez.
Jeff Mock
Taxiing to the Runway, the Pilot Explains His Genesis
A raven snatched me from
My crib, settled me in
Its nest and fed me insects
And roadkill, and, a few
Weeks later, pushed me
Out. I could not fly—
I hadn’t even begun
To teethe—, but human weakness
Was not the raven’s concern.
All this I learned from
The coyote who saw it. I fell,
Snapping branches, flailing
My arms, a sort of flying
Down, down, downward,
Which set the nature
Of my desire, to fly upward.
The coyote told me the world
Deforms us early on, and then
We want what it has taken.
Who knows what was taken
From you, or will be? Now,
Fasten your seatbelt, please.
Jeff Mock is the author of Ruthless. His poems appear in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, New England Review, The North American Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He directs the MFA program at Southern Connecticut State University and lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife, Margot Schilpp, and their daughters, Paula and Leah.
Kenneth J. Pruitt
The News
for Jan Pruitt
My cancer felled my mother like a spell, switching on a deep blues she sang both skyward and earthward.
She did not say the word, as if to stifle a curse, as if a ghoul unobserved could unbecome a ghoul, descend from my throat, retreat into hell.
She placed her head into my neck, into that curve where a child seeks home base, receives, resets.
I imagined her long drive for one hug as silent. A mother driving alone still conjures her family, fits them into her mind’s car, buckle by buckle.
Without a thyroid, the body spends its spare coins on seeing, standing, holding tight to a newspaper, forgetting what you’re buying, snapping out of the murk as an older clerk calls to you, asks if you’re ready, son.
I never did tell her that the day before my surgery I had an omen of my own death and ascension:
rearview mirror
pickup truck
my eyes’ reflection
transposed on
an anxious sky
indifferent clouds
needles on my skin
then gone
I remembered today in the middle of sit-ups, blue towel under head, looking at a bluer sky, clouds loyal this time.
All else besides rolled under beneath the deck beneath the democratic patio beneath dirt then limestone beneath to underground tributaries down to the river.
All these beneath were of no mind to me—blood in my ears trilling, trilling—nor to the river holding an open-mouth tally of forever the number one, nor certainly to the ivy, cool on the south wall, pickling on the brick.
After the Dawn Birds
No down remains.
They’ve up and left
one feather mottled
in all whites like cold.
Her gaze breaks west.
The feather falls to pieces—
pulled from the center
pushed at the edges
like eyes on waking.
The prospect of sun
imminent in the grass
the pieces scatter
over ornery ground
slipping into holes
made for harvest.
Kenneth J. Pruitt is an educator by training who currently works in a nonprofit setting focused on community health and well-being. For four years, he has been the curator of Poetry at the Point, a reading series with the Saint Louis Poetry Center, where he is also on the board. Recent publications can be found in the Racket, Rain Taxi, and the Riverfront Times (RIP). He lives in South St. Louis City with his wife and son.
Melissa Qualls
For Nora
A possum waddles past me on my nightly walk,
silver white under streetlights,
so haphazard in its scuttling I am startled still.
And then suddenly
I am on another sidewalk, in another neighborhood
with you, almost two.
No longer scooting along on your big wheels
mesmerized instead by the too-near possum
giving birth, tiny pink
pups sliding out beneath her tail with ease.
One by one they cling to her fur, inching
their way up to the dark protection of her pouch
as she climbs her way to safety
in the rusted gutters of the abandoned brick house.
Your own birth was not so easy.
No sliding for you, pulled instead
from my sectioned stomach
tangled in the cord that had, until then,
given you life.
For months I had dreams you would come out a
furred animal with needled teeth
and ready claws,
even then wishing you the strength and fierceness
all women need
to survive.
Wednesday Afternoon, April 4th
I lead my children
around the backyard, searching
for the best place to bury
the cat.
A man on the garage roof
pauses, gutter in hand, watching as
we pick a spot near the back,
shaded by a large overhanging shrub,
under the ivy that has overtaken
all else.
Through the open back door,
Sherman wanders outside, listing, unsure,
a long line of stringy spit hanging from his mouth.
Cancer won’t let him swallow.
He blinks in the new spring sun.
In a few days, I will carry his
heavy, still body
to the hole my husband
now digs,
careful to support his limp head
the way I somehow knew,
as if by instinct, how
to carry my newborns home.
Steven Schroeder
After my Childhood Friend Shot Himself in the Heart
His father, at the bookstore
where I worked, ordered
several earthtone guides
to daily living with loss,
weights on the hold shelf
weeks later when I quit
without contacting him,
months deep into my own
sentence that’s taken me
eighteen nineteen twenty
years to incomplete—
​
Triple Jeopardy!
I’d like random facts
about state capitals
and fastest land animals
and baseball statistics
scored before I was born
and leaders who died
at historical battles
for a thousand, please.
Give me books
by plot, by character,
by subtitle, by cover,
by map, by creature,
by planet, by disaster.
Let’s try minor lines
in movies I haven’t seen
forever, ricocheted
rat-a-tat with my brother
instead of talking
for five fucking minutes.
You often imitate
your colleague’s hatred
of this vacation spot,
context inconsequential.
Eight months back,
your daughter left
her purple marker
in this toy chest
or this dresser drawer
or this basement corner
and now it’s urgent.
Once your brain starts,
it can’t stop this song
you loved at the end
of your night out
and series of errors
with your not-yet-ex
before you learned
it was already too late.
What are blanks
where answers were?
What is I know that
I know that word but
don’t quite anymore?
Who is what’s-her-name,
I met her yesterday?
Who is the face
I picture from the thing
about space, I think,
or chemistry class
or no place at all?
What is a slow soft echo
of my writer friend,
lost a decade ago
to a stroke at forty,
who said my poems
promise people laughter,
then drop the hammer?
​
I'd Like to Find my Final Line
The kind of line that lasts
the rest of my life, at least
as smart as me, as fine
as lines my friends have
and finer than some,
a line I think of often
without overthinking things,
line I could sleep inside
a mile deep and feel secure,
whisper line, whiskey line,
line that half-rhymes
with wolves, that brims
with witchery, that arcs
through my whole self
from follicles to toenails,
fireworks line, spotlight line,
line I search forever for
before the line finds me
right where I need to be,
line that reminds me of
and helps me forget
my first last line, the one
I lost long ago, and tells me
this line’s going well so far.
Steven D. Schroeder is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Wikipedia Apocalyptica. His second, The Royal Nonesuch, won the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University. His poems are recently available or forthcoming from South Dakota Review, Yalobusha Review, and Ballast, among others. He edits the online poetry journal $ (www.poetrycurrency.com).
