Susan Cohen

How the Story Starts

The sad little human, a six-year-old begins

when I ask him to make up a story.

We try to maintain the color of cheer

around children and I don’t know why

a six-year-old’s sweet piping voice

is already matter-of-fact about sadness.

All children are foundlings, raised by adults

who did nothing to earn them.

While they bivouac with us, we hope

we don’t cause them too much harm.

I put his words to paper and suggest

he illustrate the story with his paint set,

so he adds a chrysanthemum in sunshine yellow

and ripe-apple red, unconcerned

that watercolors cannot contain themselves.

They leak their brightness

all over his page and into his smile—

childhood being more complicated than we like

to pretend, than those of us who were once

sad little humans prefer to remember.

Of Thievery

Arrested for stealing the Mona Lisa, Apollinaire implicates Picasso. Aren’t the painter’s eyes as greedy for what’s beyond the frame as the Mona Lisa with her impoverished smile and conniving glance? Picasso weeps that he doesn’t even know this poet Apollinaire, though together they toted two stone heads—ancient, Iberian, and stolen—from Picasso’s studio to dispose of in the Seine just days before. The judge finds them guilty only of a lack of shame and lets them go. Of the real thief, I can say he was a laborer at the Louvre, this crime his one footprint on history. Of the Mona Lisa, obviously it was found. Of artists, they are born to steal: clouds and spires from a Paris sky or the look of Africa looted from a hollow mask. They’ll slip a sip of eau-de-vie (delicious word) from a poem by Apollinaire or anyone’s intoxicating and unguarded glass.

Considering Luck

How some people are forever

down on theirs

while others thank their twinkling stars.

Some nursed from the start

on godsends,

while others scrounge

a crumb of kindness.

There are those who get up

from a puddle with silver fish

in their pockets.

Those who rise drenched

and with the same old holes

gushing sludge.

Just his luck, we say, though

justice has nothing to do with it.

Remember the legions,

how one soldier survived

while twenty fell, luck

faltering at the sound of the bugle.

Fortune rains on everyone,

irrigation filling

the open mouths of crops

unless it’s a downpour

that drowns your last milk-cow.

---

Susan Cohen is the author of two chapbooks and three books: Democracy of Fire (2022), A Different Wakeful Animal (2016), and Throat Singing (2012). Her poetry has appeared in 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, and Southern Review. Recent honors include the Annual Poetry Prize from Terrain.org and the Red Wheelbarrow Prize. She has an MFA from Pacific University and lives in Berkeley, California.

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Jed Myers

To Be Heard

Awake tonight again, risen from a place

I looked for someone in, and who was it

I’ve now forgotten, but the body’s left in

an urgent state of search without an object.

So I’m just about as in the dark

as some mad kid with a gun, he grips it

hidden in his pocket—he’s got no clue

who it is he needs to drive a bullet through.

I do remember wandering the alleyways

between the rows of houses, the concrete’s

long cracks venting up the under-night

to a music like dust pouring over itself.

I’d hear my name called as if from close

behind. It was a gust or a truck’s lurch

out on City Line. I’d turn and find no one

there but the world’s ruptured eardrum.

Gavel

A question, a when, in that train-coach-narrow

living room, at our creaky dining room

table, in our tiny galley kitchen—

a when again, in those quiets between

our mother’s eruptions. We knew there would be

another tearing at love’s strained tendons,

but no words for it on any tongue’s tip—

no, tongues held in our dread’s silencing

grip. As though we were caught in a hard surf’s

rush—sure we could drown if

we opened our mouths too much. So we wouldn’t

inhale deep, not even to sing

the trouble’s name, if we knew it. Which wouldn’t

save us. It was about safety but not

about Russian missiles aimed from that island

outlined on the nightly news. Deathly sleeping

sickness mosquitoes might pass? The polio

licked off a friend’s red popsicle? No,

there’d be no reporting outside our skin

for these blasts, or for apprehension’s current

our limbs dreams thoughts shivered in

each moment, even through the long troughs

between the last and the next crests to crash

against us, her voice a howl-and-screech wind

of memories we’d never see but which were meant

to sudden us. What, an enraged god’s sentencing,

or our inoculations for sensing

the blow, the galloping in the earth, the torch gang

again out of nowhere, that ever-raised gavel

we’d damn well know is about to land?

Unveiling

for my brother

We step softly so as to not wake

a soul, arrive either side, and each

take an edge of the gauzy cloth.

With a nod to one another we lift

the white fabric—day splashes

onto the polished gray, what stands

for our earliest love, light-sharpened

shadow letters and numbers carved

deep enough our grief seems

to bleed from the rock. But look,

it’s sorrow’s dark spores, like swarms

of tiny flies—they surround us

and buzz high dirges. What loops

we’ll follow from here—old commutes

or cheap winter seats to Cancun, empty

eyes out for fresh fill-ins—we’ll stay

stuck on repeat, our dazed longing

easily caught by the bored bus driver,

the half-asleep checkout clerk, laughing

gull guarding its garbage heap, even

the gnashing cash machine…a shame,

how this loss you’d never bring on

and couldn’t stave off you still take

as a sign you caused the pain. It was

no one. Look, in the unmasked stone,

it’s time playing the daylight. Time

winding all the way back, and up close,

notice, her house burns

to the earth, her first husband blows

in a landmine blast, her aching

wrists freeze at the crib rail over

the infant’s wail—it’s in the glinting

stump, here on these ill-tended grounds,

grass tall, hedge barely groomed, sky

a rowdy gallery, gang of cumuli,

pack of grinning voyeurs.

We take the rabbi’s Aramaic cue,

keep staring through the granite screen

and there, also, our innocence

wavers with the shade of the beech

swaying over the grave. And isn’t that

us now, jumping up and down

on the night-blue sofa, you and I each

other’s clown? It takes nothing

to keep our small selves in stitches.

---

Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and, forthcoming, Learning to Hold (Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award). Recent writing appears or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Poetry Review, RHINO, The Greensboro Review, Rust + Moth, Terrain.org, On the Seawall, The National Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Myers lives in Seattle, where he edits the journal Bracken.

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Stephen Campiglio

Chelonia Station

In a cramped, dingy foyer

of a train station in the countryside,

I’m seated opposite a mother and her child,

with the vague presence of a clerk

moving about in a backroom office.

Between the three of us

there’s a turtle on its shell,

belly up on the floor, trying to right itself;

its four legs and tail, wriggling in the air.

It seems too big to be the child’s pet.

Perhaps it was just caught outside

in the grassy yard near the stream.

The mother is oblivious to the animal’s distress,

and the child seems self-satisfied.

I feel helpless, as if watching a foregone conclusion,

but why must it be so?

Why can’t I simply reach over to the turtle

and return it to its feet?

What a slander to its beauty and intelligence

should one call its plight

a symbol of our brutal and ignorant era!

There’s no train coming,

and the clerk won’t show his face.

I can’t execute a basic remedy,

can only get up and leave

to wander the countryside

and search for other signs of life.

The mother will become childless,

the child, motherless, the turtle,

destined for an unearthly fate:

to be absorbed by the floor,

and discharged as a dark mosaic

along the dim passageways

of our bewildering days.

Camp Robinson Crusoe

Near the crater of an empty foundation,

overgrown with brush and vine,

an old basketball court’s been replaced

by a stand of young pine;

the aged backboard, like a strange treetop,

up on twin metal posts whose rust blends in

with the colors of the surrounding trunks.

Amid this bygone summer camp,

I blend in, too, and so aligned,

resurrect the past with a penetrating

ear that reaches far enough

to hear splashing water,

children playing, and a bouncing ball,

then disappearing into silence, all.

---

Stephen Campiglio founded and directed for 12 years the Mishi-maya-gat Spoken Word & Music Series at Manchester Community College in Connecticut, and more recently, co-edited and contributed to Noh Place Poetry Anthology (Lost Valley Press, Hardwick, MA: 2022). Other poems and translations have appeared of late in Aji Magazine, DASH, Gradiva (Florence, Italy), Italian Americana, Journal of Italian Translation, The Octotillo Review, SLAB, Stand (Leeds, England), SurVision (Dublin, Ireland), and VIA: Voices in Italian Americana. Winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize for his version of a poem by Giuseppe Bonaviri (1924-2009), his current project, with Elena Borelli of King's College London, will result in the first, complete translation of Giovanni Pascoli's (1855-1912) volume of poetry, Canti di Castelvecchio. Campiglio has published two chapbooks, Cross-Fluence, and Verbal Clouds through Various Magritte Skies.

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