Poetry

The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb Hubert and Jan van Eyck, 1432 Hush, lamb, lavish with blood in madder red, Your varnish overfed, Too fat for this thin season.Hush, choir—be-rubied, embroidered, unsomber As the lute tuned To your organ’s lustrous umber.And all you pious press in festal vestments, Silken chevaliers And saints, fold up your …

Assistant Editor Leila Chatti: “Self-Portrait with Vermont Forge’s Heirloom Weeder” is a poem about a weeder, yes, but of course more than that—it asks us to consider what we do on this earth with our limited, occasionally challenging or absurd but ultimately precious, time on this earth. The poem answers, I think, We do the …

Assistant Editor Prince Bush: “The Garden” is a poem of secrecy. With its end-stopped lines, it feels as if something unsaid, something unseen, occurs after every period—a feeling that the surprising final image seems to anticipate. Listen to Pamela Smith read “The Garden”: The Garden My daughter tells me to dig in the garden. I …

Associate Editor Blessing Christopher: In Littlejohn-Oram’s miCRo, memory is shown to be imperfect but highly malleable. Listen to William Littlejohn-Oram read “Elementary”: Elementary When I’m alone and not expected home, I pull over at the gates of the old school overlooking I-35. Time broke the windows. Wind stole the signs. Only metal ribs remain of …

Assistant Editor Leila Chatti: A. J. Worley’s luminous sonnet “May Storm” turns a careful eye onto the quiet divinity that exists in our daily lives. In it, we follow the speaker into and through a world made new by an unseasonable snow storm—all encased in ice, chapel of the ordinary, before us, shining. Listen to …

Assistant Editor Prince Bush: This poem has vivid defamiliarization, and certain objects one might take for granted—such as “urns” and an “oven”—are made suggestively human. The white space in the middle of this poem stimulates speculation, and the final two lines make a complex and provocative truth claim. Listen to Quinn Franzen read the poem: …

Visitors may not noticethat the windows in her room are sealed shutso the air is spent, used up days ago, and they’re not there later to hear the coursing of an underground river through her pillowthat stops as she rolls over.She must have been asleep when the flowers arrived. A shock of redin a disinfected …

No one can hide a body here.A hawk’s insistence. Someone. Thresh it. Get rid of these thoughts about the body.An orange sky unfolds a wheat field in the middle of nowhere. I’m a hide-and-seek girl without service.A person is a series of happenings.Seek and what I find is a guy stops his car behind mine, …

At the Standard they pay a man to lathe olive woodinto the softball-sized spheres they load the braziers within the heat of early afternoon. They douse them with gas, touch a match: and the guests with their crow facesand sky-colored suits emergeto sip from tiny eggshell glasses.Orchids lean out from jute baskets lashedto the palm …