New Poetry with Audio!

Donald Revell
Stephen Burt
Paul Hoover
Jonah Winter
Cathy Wagner
Reginald Shepherd
Nin Andrews
Sophia Kartsonis
Sandra Miller
Joshua Harmon
Devin Johnston
Chuck Zerby
Sara Henning
Ognjen Smiljanic
Lance Phillips
Peter Drake
Kathleen Byrne
Ernest Hilbert
Garth Greenwell
Marc McKee

Criticism

Brian Henry on Kinsella
Gabriel Welsch on Northrop
Gabriel Welsch on Smith
Cecily Iddings on Ruefle
Christopher McDermott on Wenderoth

Joshua Harmon's poems are published or forthcoming in The New Criterion, Colorado Review, Volt, Arshile, Mid-American Review, Verse, Quarter After Eight and elsewhere.

Escape (Overheard)

Crown of character, I dis-hire you. I will muddle within the copse.

I solved you only as a simple scratch of a him against a her. Something perhaps broken.
Mere splinter of listening. Cast out. Native. A burden. A winter.

I banged my me against your us. A germ of being. Slack scraps.

My bearing: bent. My blather: blurred. My blot of understanding. My abrasions. My pocket economy.

My own dereliction.

Escape (Cliffhanger)

Because I imagined this strung-along town containing me

Because I believed the interest rate low

Because I saw too much through the curtain (though pretending to

            turn away)

Because the pill bottle was already empty (if chalked with chemical)

Because I spent all afternoon reading the personals

Because Rhode Island smelled damply (because my house smelled

            damply)

Because I attempted to resist the sky with tinfoil and string (an old

            family recipe)

Because I was invited for dinner (and accepted)

Because I did not share in the washing-up

Because I misremembered the dead (because I misquoted the dead)

Because I forgot my orders (and substituted false ones)

Because I suggested the boy be home-schooled (his T-shirt bore an

            out-of-date slogan)

Because the reporter paused for the cameraman’s cue (because I

            noticed it)

Because the Scrabble set is missing too many tiles to continue

            playing (because I wanted to continue playing)

Because I stutter when I mean to speak

Because I’ve always spent too freely

Because the boy’s mother wept on camera (because I wept at the

            televised photo of the boy)

Because the snow seems only soap flakes (sifted from a stepladder)

Because I said snow when it was rain (because we are always

            under the weather)

Because I watched the boy steal the bicycle, and did not hinder him

            (his T-shirt torn)

Because of the boy’s taste in breakfast cereals

Because the roots of the trees are the only things keeping the soil

            trustworthy

Because I walked half a mile in stocking feet to view the public

            telephone

Because my documents proved counterfeit

Because I never bothered to ask the boy his name (because I never

            bothered to give the boy his name)

Because I forgot where I began, or where I intended to go

Because I am still uncertain what is on the other side (because I

            waited, but nothing happened)

Because the most interesting story is the one left unspoken (the one

            left unfinished)

Landscape

The trees indicate every failure of the imagination, the wind likewise. The scuff marks in the grass recall a window-framed face (the grass itself a foreign terrain, its borders meant to be sidestepped). The smudges moving through the landscape—birds, for example, or pedestrians—should be ignored. However, to see a dog, to dream of a dog occupying a landscape, a dog reefed amid a landscape’s weedy habit, should prompt you to kneel (clear a space in the weeds). The bones of a building suggest your first theft, or an ignored nighttime thirst. Disregard the clouds’ attempted disguises. No, a cloud—blued, wisped, a singular tatter, a heap of being, passing fancy—any cloud—is simply a lack of appropriate effort. A crumpled or rusted beer can is a poor sign. A pornographic magazine, pages rippled with rain, scarcely better. The lazy flowers, yellow and unnamed, refer to an invented story—unexpected business travel, the benefits of the local youth soccer league. The pinecone: call your mother (see also: molt). This still and silent thicket means that soon there will be no birds left in North Kingstown. A circle of stones: please do not spark a fire here. A sandy patch, a paving square (cracked or otherwise), a beach (dusked), a barbecue grill (blackened, sticky), packed and crystallized snow, a feather (gray or brown), a stretcher (antique), a tree frog, a tiny hexagonal structure (of unknown material), a hitching post (granite), a horizon-far water tower: consult the corresponding guidebook. The acorn, capless, worm-bored, is not forlorn, if at first it seems so, nor intended to indicate such: it is merely the remains of the lunch you forgot to carry to school seventeen years ago.

Landscape

An echo’s answer: repeat after me. This is only an interrogation of

the bullet

The bullet fragmented in memory of a hit song and we

We collected at the bedside of our friend. Her name was kindness,

a kind of violence, or caused a kind of violence—

a tear, a rope, a glass of whiskey, a yolk

I’d prefer a recording of silence,

A fear of the future

In the holy city we live inside the wall, in the shadow of the wall

stone-bent, bed-kept, a dabbed smack in the middling smoke

We sleep homesickly and leave verse at the door

in the wall, the frayed end. I am less interested in

a peek at the garments of understanding, to fingerprint their cloth,

than to have once worn them.