Haley Hodges 
Virginia Bluebird Lapis smear and arboretum’s ardor I’ve never not seen you here. Though if I do see you, you’re soon gone as God or gone as God appears to be. Appearing to be gone’s your party trick and paradox, you and your micro-flocks of three or four, gathered in some name invisible only your … Read more
It’s very possible that Renee Nicole Good reasoned, as I would’ve, that her whiteness would protect her when she put her Honda Pilot, dog in tow, in the path of ICE vehicles on a Minneapolis street less than a mile from where George Floyd’s last words were, just six years before, “I can’t breathe.” Unfortunately … Read more
JACK GILBERT WAS TOO HORNY TO BE A METAPHYSICAL POET not that sex and metaphysics cancel each other out— his was good news for Linda Gregg, until it wasn’t. Interviewer: Did you and Linda ever collaborate? JG: We were intertwined. We read each other’s poetry, appreciated each other’s poetry, discarded each other’s poetry. (Quick shout-out … Read more
And Me Naked for you, beneath some moon somewhere, which sounds like an ending, unless you begin with it. White as a page, as a unicorn’s horn, some skin—all of mine. So stare down—star-down is how I want to lay with you. Come further up. Go further in. Night is falling with us. Night, the … Read more
How would you feel upon discovering the objects of your daily, habitual use—ordinary objects of every imaginable function and variety—were inspirited, sensitively keen observers with their own desires, gripes, preoccupations, and ways of understanding the world? This is precisely the brain-tickling puzzle Jennifer Maier’s newly-released third collection The Occupant (University of Pittsburgh Press) shakes, opens, … Read more
If you count my two unsuccessful (all cough no high) undergraduate attempts to smoke weed and the later (nominally) more successful fractal bits of gummy I consumed (once) at a wedding reception, you must grant I possessed sufficient knowledge and experience with recreational imbibing to feel I was setting myself up for an evening of … Read more
Confessional poetry has had a haunted reputation from its post-war onset. The literary legacies of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and W. D. Snodgrass—widely considered ground zero for the entire confessional school—are crucified at least as frequently as they’re praised, and a healthy allergy to what contemporary teachers of writing pertly refer to as … Read more
TEACHER I know I’ve made a christ of you the way I gather up the crumbs beneath your table, the way I bathe your feet with my hair. But this blind worship won’t do, and I must take and eat new prayer. Teacher! It was not given me to sit at your right hand or … Read more
Like most of us, I spent the past week in a state of deep reflection over our collective national fate. Like some of us, I mourned. The American political sphere seems to have reached an anti-zenith, one culminating in some dystopian rhetorical Babel tower built and sustained by hatred. What have I seen in my … Read more
Calling All Angels Leaves fall like secret prayers— calling all angels September’s having her best orgasm in a century. Everything lingers in climax, the character of the light, earthy fragrances, a whole heaving calendar week with an arched spine. Here’s how I know the world is ill and absurd: a dead fawn stares up from … Read more
THEY HAVE GAINED AN AUDIENCE with the divine. The plumbline is vertical as the resulting verse, so that neither agony nor ecstasy travel horizontally but curl and rise, sweet smoke from the swung thurible. Perhaps these are the only prophets left to us, still able to loop the loose thread of heaven through earth’s needle-eye, … Read more
And Not Your Garments Lord, Lord this my heart full of secrets, seeds I know you did not send—Lord, I cannot rend. If I am choked, therefore, by weeds, I will not ask for a mended garden, I won’t beg your holy pardon at scythe’s end. These were difficult to bury, so little loam left … Read more
Year of The Restless at the kitchen table, year of our Lord twenty twenty-four, year my words marched backward into my mouth and forward only when forgotten, year of the idiotic Stanley tumbler, year of the subtle but far reaching machinations of neo-Marxism depending on who you ask, year of our lady of fuck around … Read more
No Record of Wrongs Love does keep a record of some things— your solitary walks in Coln Saint Aldwyn’s, a precise curl of Virginia Creeper tendrils, vermillion in autumn, the way you carefully smelled horses’ necks beneath the mane back home, velveteen crushes of cornhusks lashed to lampposts Love notes you’ve yet to find a … Read more
Belshazzar I never knew myself to have a Persian beard, now, This is odd, this will need some explanation So too the crown and concubines and all these Half-drunk vessels from the house of God Isn’t it 2023 or 2022—was I not, just now, Pulling up in a Subaru or whatever it is I Get … Read more
Advent We have endured long in the dark. It is a burden (A magic? A madness?) particular To us. Long endurance of darkness is not light, But speaks of a belief that light’s radiance Merits enduring long in the dim we know— In the dusk we are. The world is a bone Full of Christ-marrow; … Read more
Faking It When Cleopatra rolled Out of the rug, she thought: Don’t worry! Even if I do not enjoy your performance, You will enjoy mine—a lot. I’d like to credit myself As an actress, but the truth About men is: I’ve yet To meet one unwilling To believe he is a singularly Exceptional lover—yeah, baby. … Read more
Kyrie Rotten fruit, rotten root. Hands up Don’t shoot. Kyrie eleison. By the waters of Columbine, of Blacksburg, of Newtown, by the Waters of Parkland and Uvalde, There I sat down beneath my desk (Don’t shoot) to weep. Christe eleison. My soul to take. Kyrie eleison. My soul to keep. Gloria There is no No … Read more
The Sacred Mundane 1 We might say with confidence that the world is a lovely catastrophe—paradise buried in a rubbish heap; devilish, angelic, perishing, precious, priestly, proud; one home to the light that is oil and the water that is darkness, this poor dazzling Earth a jar cracking with the strain of their dueling dual … Read more
Make of me, too, a microcosm Make of me, too, a microcosm— Merger, marry, manifest As the bridegroom, as the stone-melted Heart. Move but do not remove me, for monsters Maraud in madness here, and we meet Mettle to mettle about the place. But you— Magnificent as mystery, as morning, you Are mooring the ship … Read more
