Poetry from Issue 18, 2024-2025

Shaan Manocha

Back Bay

I used to have vision

of us subverting

the history

filling the cobblestone

cracks with Boston

pickling in the sun

it’s always new

the sex in the picnicking

the stickered lamp posts

the idle bicycles

the temptation of home adjacency

the familiarity

of Monopoly and a cottage

that rests in half a photograph

the 3:30 train changes

to 4:40 the order of goodbyes

is always changing

in this aching that starts

in the tunnel like the water

going cold I see it

in the gloss of leaving

it’s the drums of the old

war it’s the hooves

of statued horses

it’s the eaves of the brownstones

whispering a hidden language

it’s the ease of the recklessness

the self I was

owed is trapped

in the way a liquor store

masquerades as a town

is trapped in a son

of the history is trapped

in the slats of a bending wicker chair

until the train wheezes in

bringing us a final offer

of old dogs alone in the yard

too used to the leash

to go anywhere

Ahmaad Zaatar

after Mahmoud Darwish

My body is the fortress

Let the siege come!

mother used to tell me of the war

dogs so well fed they ate only livers

or supple organs or soft eulogies

using train cars or orange camouflage

leaving gorges half-eaten

the Land singing to its sister-half

in Earthen dirges a haunting

tenor tattooed on tarped rickshaws

or collective memories

or arms of the children

on these streets violence

lives in the eyes of the dogs

or the death-colored walls

or the sway of a baton on a hip

these songs have an echo

these prisons are the same color

a half-world apart

this grief wails in the same tone

the wet scream of a mother

or bullets firing downward

or the shared practice of breaking

that demands a shaking off

there is a beauty between us

like the drums of war

or a half-peeled orange

or our lives banging together

there is a beauty between us

like the stretched breathing

of Earth’s Wretched

or the running daughter

along the river

or the moments his mother

gave him birth

in a vessel of banana leaves

or Ahmad

made of thyme and stone

For my breast is the shelter of my people

Let the siege come!

Dane Lum Hohmeyer

Club

Winner of the Editors’ Award in Poetry

When I am seventeen they are in my basement drunk,

sweating, bellowing men whose wives are Chinese.

White men. I bring their beers—my father

his new expat friends—their assessment

White women won’t cut it anymore. Nothing can

replace what they now possess. One will

recount to me truckers who chew a tobacco-like

substance. Stop by a woman stripped down to nothing

in a plexiglass box on the side of the road. This

is where they get the stuff that

dyes their teeth red. I watch

my father from the stairs. I know I am made from

love. But when I go to bed I ignite completely.

Tamir Gray

Descending The Mountain

the last sound I would make that year

filled the room,

the walls—flimsy to our nigun—bursted at the tape

like a cardboard moving box, our

wordless melody pressed the seams,

ready to leave, scared to loosen itself,

dance. who will be the first

mouth to let out its story? the rest will follow—

chests filling from air as hands drum to

give the nigun a body,

I think of divinity in its spatial form—

HaMakom, meaning “The Place,”

one of many names for God,

who is always named and always borderless,

“The Place,” as though you could enter

or leave infinity.

I too am spilling out of myself

in this Friday night bedroom,

always asking the next note to hold

a whole year away from home

so I can let go.

I have nothing to show for my time

with The Place in the place

whose name I fumble, just this sound—

just this scared sound, scared

until the first shout tumbles into the first

laugh and clap and my I, my “aiyy”

joins the rest in the song of pure syllables,

filling my sternum with light, like

how God takes brightness from the top of my skull

where the eyes meet the spine.

and God does take brightness

from the top of my skull where the eyes

meet the spine.

my hands prefigure the date palm fronds

we will shake in autumn to coax the rain:

held above me, smacking, clapping

thoughtless thought into this loudness which

quickens, then slows as our eyes all widen

and attend to this pot of notes we’ve offered to

the center of our circle, swirling around

each next repetition.

smiles surround the noise which surrounds

the ears and we blur the air-body boundary with our

heat. our souls

get out of hand

enter elbows, loosen knuckles.

The crack of the slow soul. I didn’t realize, then,

that this would be goodbye

to my direct line to God.

Goodbye to barefoot prayer and inhaling

a whole world into my lungs every morning.

God in the towel hanging over the drawer,

in the sliver of light creeping under the door, in my leg

cramped against another, sitting three to a twin bed

as the nigun builds and snaps and ripples and

stops and rests in the space between breaths.

between sounds. between windows cracked in May.

in silence the beds-turned-couches creak, a tear traces a laugh line down

the cheek. where did the song go? where the year?

I hug my knees to my chest. like the nigun,

I have no words.

Dane Lum Hohmeyer

Megabias

I’ll summarize what I understand here:

Megabias is when we lose large swathes of information in the fossil re-

cord. We miss ancient organisms because their bodies don’t print well

into stone, we are unable to find accessible rocks from those time peri-

ods, or perhaps the stones themselves cannot weather time. The earth’s

crust is like pages of a book, the shale layers are chapters, a sheet of

granite is a millennia. I am told most of our most famous dinosaurs in

the US are from the western badlands—which is not to say dinosaurs

weren’t populating the East Coast, but those pages of rock which held

their bones, footprints, and memories have simply melted away. Half a

continent sinking. I imagine their ribs, spines, skulls poking out as the

mountains turn to muddy rubble deluge. I imagine that mud drying,

wind blowing those chalky rocks smooth down to nothing, a grain ev-

ery hundred years—a grain containing just a shred of a life. I imagine

chasing one in the wind a thousand years, finally catching it, holding it

between the fingernails of my index and thumb. Imagine that as many

times as there are grains in a rock. I glue those grains back together

with my spit. I take those trillion rocks I’ve made and push them one

by one back into the shape of that mountain. I have died more times

than there are stars doing this. I look out on my still-dead dinosaurs.

My mom gives me advice for a grave cleaning ceremony I have never

done before. She tells me to buy chrysanthemums and to lie them on

the earth after I wipe the headstone down. I learn that 1) they should

be pale white-yellow and 2) this color means mourning.

June Jung

Peridot Paradiso

We got engaged at a bus stop and the next day I had my hand around your throat.

You looked at me like I knew when to stop. I always know when to stop. Not yet.

There were days when I wondered if we would be better apart. Every night I

was proven wrong.

I loved you time and time again. There were days when I wondered if you were

allergic to it.

But here I am, peridot and diamonds on a gold ring around my finger,

My hands tied behind my back with a cuff around my neck.

I gasp my last thought out and for a moment, it’s completely silent.

The day after Thanksgiving and the city hasn’t woken up yet, we are

Sitting outside the cafe and smoking. Everyone’s home or hungover and it’s just us.

I wait for life. I never know when to start. I don’t think I ever met you,

My chest simply shook open and I fluttered into you. You caught me midair

and we’ve been Falling ever since. Along the way we found lamps and drawers.

I buy things bigger than my suitcases. I make promises I know I’ll keep.

We talk about moving to Queens, where I’ll be closer to Koreans and the Mets.

I want to kiss you in a courthouse. Karaoke at the afterparty.

Every morning I wake up with a new wish. Every morning you grab an

eyelash from my cheek.

I blow it away and it comes true every time. I wish for another day with you.

I love you and I always know when to stop. Not yet.

Poem by Matthew Rohrer, Guest Contributor

Matthew Rohrer is the author of eleven books of poems, most recently Army of Giants,

published by Wave Books. He was a co-founder of FENCE magazine. One of his tattoos has

appeared in two books of literary tattoos. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches graduate and under

graduate creative writing at NYU.

Sonnet

He uses a dog to meet a woman with a dog

they pass beneath an arched bower of bamboo

at the end is a monument

where they once killed their king

now beautiful women ride bikes

over his bones

I take all this in I’m going to keep it

alongside the vision of the sun

bending the trails of the 2 jets apart

oh apart and to distant lands

and passing wild rosemary in the park

I snap off a piece for pork

is on the menu tonight with onions

and talking to myself