Hilary Sideris

Christ Is Risen

We ate a lamb in Aliveri.

The whole body on a spit.

Kristos anesti, we said,

an Easter greeting in Greece.

Indeed he is, our host replied,

the way we’d say Bless you

after a sneeze. The lamb was his.

He knew how well it ate.

Tipsy on kokino krasi—

red wine—I put the lamb

on Instagram & in the morning,

took it down.

Hilary Sideris is the author of the poetry collections Calliope (Broadstone Books, 2024), Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press, 2022), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press, 2020), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press, 2019), Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books, 2019), The Inclination to Make Waves (Big Wonderful LLC, 2016) and Most Likely to Die (Poets Wear Prada, 2014). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Originally from Indiana and a longtime Brooklyn resident, she is a co-founder and curriculum developer for CUNY Start, a college preparatory program within the City University of New York.

Erica Reid

Weatherman

The biggest mistake a beginner can make

is to collect the wrong things. Rain, clouds,

sun, sure. But weather is a texture that lays

across our days. The way we cough in the haze

of summer wildfires. The laundry that is never

hung to dry before the storm. Not only a warmth

but the smell of the melt. The taste of a mist.

How my sinuses act on a morning like this.

Folks assume you need a bunch of specific tools

for this job, but for the most part I find

simple household items work best. I catch rain

in a bent thimble my wife was throwing out.

I use a measuring tape, same as you’d get

at Home Depot, to scrape the clouds—

the tape reaches tall, then packs up neat.

I sift through snow using an old fitted sheet.

It’s difficult at first, but you learn over time.

Now the line of slim vials on my dining room wall

tells a story of each freeze and thaw, of the depth

of every fog. I’ve gathered the hiss of sleet,

the texture of wind, the crack of the bough when

the lightning split. The exact shimmer of dew

at the day’s first light. The umami of night.

Erica Reid is the author of Ghost Man on Second, winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize (Autumn House Press, 2024). Erica’s poems appear in Rattle, Cherry Tree, Colorado Review, and more. ericareidpoet.com

Ellen Sander

Repair

for Claire Millikin Raymond

A hole in the red cashmere stretches,

more fray, the strands’ surrender.

One flaw in the entire jumper. A puka.

Let to grow, it’ll eat the whole thing. And

if noticed, what?  Shame?  Sloth?

The needle is curved, wide slit for floss.

In and out, a weave, stitches a bit off-kilter

but every turn tighter until the last

in/under, two loops and a skinny knot.

Colors merge, the stitches pinch,

a barely perceptible dimpled

wrinklet in time, imperfect

evidence of how I can’t let go of damage.

With so much wrong, it helps to mend

even something small, in a world so mean

that ravel and unravel mean the same.

A native New Yorker, Ellen Sander came to Belfast, Maine from Bolinas and L.A.  by way of Beijing, and was the Poet Laureate of Belfast in 2013 and 2014. In the first pack of writers in the 1960s to invent and establish rock journalism, she's the author of Trips: Rock Life in the Sixties, a widely cited chronicle/memoir of those times recently reissued in an augmented edition by Dover Publications. Her most recent poetry book is Aquifer, published by Red Bird Chapbooks.  Hawthorne, A House In Bolinas, a poetic memoir, is published by Finishing Line Press.