Michael Blumenthal

The Choice

I had to choose the one I’d rather be

A heart of stone, or else a flower

Untrue to you, or else untrue to me

The choice was clear to you, and clear to me

Under your thumb, or under my own power

I had to choose the one I’d rather be

A man who’s caged is never quite so free

No matter whom he stands with in the shower

Untrue to you, or else untrue to me

You don’t concur, you surely don’t agree

To you it was mere minutes, and not hours

I had to choose the one I’d rather be

The self can be a whole, or just debris

A life can be so sweet, or can turn sour

Untrue to you, or else untrue to me

I danced with you, but sometimes we were three

Some birds will build a nest, and some a bower

Untrue to you, or else untrue to me

I made the choice, the one that had to be.

I Hear the Materials of This World Weeping

Sometimes I think the materials of this world must be weeping.

I swear I can hear the wailing of the bricks and mortar,

I hear sobs coming from the dust and detritus of stones,

I hear the electrical wires screaming from their entrapment

between crumbled walls and I can hear, I’m certain, the plumbing

and the copper wiring, the plastic tubing and asbestos insulation

crying from amidst the rubble, I can listen to the plaster, unable

any longer to hold up the plasterboard and to the large staples

that have held rubber gaskets and exhaust pipes to the walls

and it seems to me sometimes that I am living near a hospital

for the moldings and structures of this world, where so many

objects are spending night after night in the intensive care unit,

where there is such a shortage of nurses and doctors to tend to

the life-threatening emergencies that have befallen limestone

and cement, the ceramic tiles of kitchens and bathrooms,

the reinforced concrete, adobe, lumber, and steel beams all

now gathered in shards in their corners, praying for comfort

and, just beneath them, almost overlooked amidst the chaos,

I can hear the cries of human beings, scarcely audible.

Objects, An Apology

All my life I have loved and desired women

but now, as I watch my beautiful wife

painting the front gate so patiently and perfectly

it occurs to me that I have not loved objects enough,

that I have not loved the front gate,

and the now-perfectly-stained shutters

nor even the stone wall holding up my studio

enough, that I have been negligent towards my desk

and the picnic table beneath the arbor in front of me

and, somewhat less so, harbored an indifference

toward the echinacea and butterfly bush.

Now that I am well on my way toward becoming

an object myself, I am taking an inventory

of the pens, the candles, even the small pillows

that gently buffer my brain into the air,

and the wooden bench on which I was just

lying and taking in the sun, and the ceramic vase

I so carelessly dropped the other day in a haste

to satisfy my own earthly hungers, and now

I am watching my wife, with her meticulous care

of everything that breathes and doesn’t breathe,

with her loving and generous care even of me

and I am feeling ashamed of what I have

become—a man so interested in flesh

he has ignored both wood and stone,

even ignored the incredible beauty of his own wife,

who renders all objects luminous with her patience

and care, who is kind enough to consider even me

beautiful. O forgive me, dear objects, forgive me,

dear wife, for I have sinned against all of you,

let me please spend the rest of my days

with a small paintbrush in hand, painting

all the crevices and corners I have missed

and blessing the heavy wooden-and-metal chairs

surrounding the picnic table, and feeling blessed

myself for having found such a wife, for living

in a world in which there is paper and wood

and stone and porcelain and steel, and may

whatever god is watching over this object-filled world

forgive me, and may my lovely wife forgive me,

and let me breathe more gratitude into this object-filled world

and rest my head tonight on these pillows I so love.

Michael Blumenthal was previously Director of Creative Writing at Harvard and, more recently, Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Immigration Clinic at the West Virginia University College of Law and has taught at universities throughout the world. In addition to ten books of poetry, most recently Correcting World: Poems Selected & New, 1980–2024, he has published a novel, a memoir, short stories, essays, and translations. He spends his time between Washington, D.C., and in the small Hungarian village of Hegymagas near Lake Balaton.

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Christopher Buckley

In Shoreline Park

Despite every good intention, I’m nodding off alongside

zinnias and birds of paradise as we face into the blue . . .

perhaps there’s something up there to take my mind off

all that’s left to do, and the time I don’t have to do it?

Fairweather clouds shine as bright as mirrors . . .

but they don’t reflect much beyond the grab bag

of our fates, about which I’ve registered complaints

and 2nd guesses all the way to this bench where no one

in a sharkskin suit with Brylcreemed hair is about to

pop out from behind a hedge with a microphone and

shout, “This is Your Life!”, signaling the control room

to fire-up the highlight reels and bring back the lost . . .

my buddies and me on long boards, walking the nose,

pearling into the soup . . . hanging out the windows

of a rebuilt ’56 Bel Air . . . walking home from school

in broken shoes, content with nothing more than

the remainder of an unburdened afternoon. Now,

I can just hear the tide echoing below the cliff,

rushing in my blood . . . wondering how I managed

to turn up here, losses outweighing every affidavit

of joy—byproduct of stardust, a legacy from whom

or who knows where? But there’s always someone

who will declare “best day of my life” as if lives

were something we came by as easily as flowers?

I raise my hand into the mist, into the incessant salt

of memory, to spice finches and sparrows speaking up

in the last of dusk with every bit of insight available

beyond the eucalyptus, above the sea, along which

we cruised blissfully half-conscious 50 years ago,

burning up every atom of oxygen that came our way

as quickly as we could because that’s all there was to do.

And this might be the place where it’s best to pause,

to count the small change, the few fair bits of fortune,

despite the blanks I’ve never managed to fill, all that

went missing between stars, content now not to waste

one more minute worrying about the road to hell.

Walk Away

There is no investment strategy

                                                   for tossing

a potato peel or even a stale bit of tortilla

to the ½ of the world

                                   doing all the work.

I’ve long seen myself set against the stars,

against the deep

                           blue film of evening, much like

August roses.

                       Again today, no one stops to ask

about the rain

                       that never falls

                                                on cabbages or

sea-dull acacias.

                            And by the time I sit down

and reconsider things,

                                    it’s too late

                                                       to do anything

about them—to think

                                   of something beyond

the imminent

                      consequences of our cells spilling

into the palimpsest of night.

                                              All that’s clear

is that nothing’s been revealed

                                                  about the unsolved

equation of time and space,

                                             given the lateness

of the hour. . . .

                          This could be it

                                                    for those of us

paying attention?

                             On paths in the park

                                                              dust scurries

this way, then that . . .

                                     eucalyptus lining the cliff

have surrendered—

                                their bare arms lifted to a sky

that appears to be

                             tired of everything.

                                                             Hernandez said

rain calls out the dead,

                                     but so far not a soul

has shown up offering help

                                             as I’ve sat here

trying to unravel

                            the inconclusive

                                                       clouds, and what,

if any, good

                    hosannas sea birds send

                                                           to the blunt corners

of the sky might do?

                                  When I reach back

                                                                 into the bucket

of best guesses

                         there’s just the implausible

                                                                     heavens

that have led me

                            in circles most of my life as if

                                                                             the be-all

and end-all

                    was something,

                                              and not nothing

                                                                        more

than this azure dot

                              on a carousel of light,

                                                                  no matter

whether I stand on the shore

                                               and wave my hands before

before the dark immensity

                                           or, with the last dimming

cloud, walk away. . . .

Christopher Buckley has recently edited The Long Embrace: Contemporary Poets on the Long Poems of Philip Levine (Lynx House Press) and NAMING THE LOST: THE FRESNO POETS—Interviews & Essays (Stephen F. Austin State Univ. Press, 2021). His work was selected for The Best American Poetry 2021 and he was a Guggenheim Fellow for 2007–2008. He also received NEA grants in poetry for 2001 and 1984. His most recent book of poetry is One Sky to the Next, winner of the Longleaf Press Book Prize, 2023.

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Natalie Eleanor Patterson

Sonnet Northwest

It was the landscape I loved: driving north, the oaks giving way

to evergreens, orange pines, fog lifting off the river gorge

at the state line, a scenery knifed in two. Clouds canting low,

wild dogs roving in the blue dark, as if the car we rode in

was nothing. It was nothing: inside, the varied psychodramas

of neither lover able to explain why she loved the other,

I don’t fucking know & I probably shouldn’t & We’re not

stopping for the night this time. Outside, the earth rising

to meet more of itself, no divide between one green body

& the next, the interstate brutal with loose viscera

carpeting the asphalt between each mountain pass, a stain

for every deer that got in the way. It was the landscape I loved,

half a moon for every highway, counting herds at the edge of the road,

trying not to become a stain myself, an offering, a blight.

Kraton Divine

            after “Dahmer Does Hollywood” by Amigo the Devil

She said that sometimes it’s not the body, but what you see,

                        speaking of fleas that will jump when your finger comes near

but cannot be touch. It’s true, the truest love

                        is panic, spending my time parsing the alchemy

of another body, Commercial Street in the south district,

                        trying not to step on broken glass in the parking lot.

Some nights, just dead meat living. She’s capable of making

                        me disappear. 

We made the drive back to my place less & less,

                        & anyway it always rains on Interstate 5.

Sign by the exit reading                                  KRATOM

                        DIVINE,

& along that backwater turn-off, red-

                        tailed hawks would sweep down over prey in the wild grass,

playing along with the game she made of them. I used to say

                        that I would scatter little frozen mice in the fields

each morning, flinging fistful after fistful of already-dead bodies,

                        & like me, they too would thaw in the heat

of something that wanted to consume them.

                        We counted those birds as they circled the sky, watching

for the telltale blood. In the end, all I did was kiss

                        the tattoo on her thigh, the one that reads sorry or forgive me,

next to the one that only asks why.

We Must All Eat Beautiful Women

            after a line by Anne Sexton

I am the rain come again        the side wound

in the tree where the moss points north

I am the stupid baby        the drowned rat

doll where children point out places

they should not have been touched

a red miasma        fracture of space

in the whitest page                the smallest

illness        blood in the rain before it ever

stained your bedsheets        I am        the dark wave

in the dive bar        in the hot light

where a man screamed & you called it music

I am the body  under the body                    under

the omen writ large upon your wall

the juniper blooded like light

the branch that looks like a human remain

rising out of Snake River        deer

carcass                         the rain

Natalie Eleanor Patterson is a poet, editor, and instructor from Atlanta, Georgia, with an MFA in poetry from Oregon State University. She is the author of the chapbook Plainhollow (dancing girl press, 2022) and the editor of Dream of the River (Jacar Press, 2021), and has work featured or forthcoming in Sinister Wisdom, Hunger Mountain, CALYX, and elsewhere. She has received awards in poetry from Salem College as well as Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations. She is Managing Editor of Jacar Press, an editor for One magazine, and a reader for the Julie Suk Award. She is currently pursuing her PhD in poetry. You can find her on Twitter @natalieepatt and on Instagram @imagine.nat.

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