Michael T. Young I used to read while nestled in a crook of maple branches, or seated on a slab of concrete that jutted into lake water, striders coasting the rumpled sheets. Reeds on the far shore needled the shallows writing a subtext into palms of sunlight alluding to trout and bass tunneling the deep, to the early alphabets of mud and rock. Mallards skirred the surface by day, bats skimmed it by night, their wings scratching brief...

Jaydn DeWald This village is even dreamier than the original. Who, for instance, would reproduce the old snakelike impressions of our bodies In the amber grass, or reenact us, in a thunderstorm, flinging our undergarments From a cliff? It was lifetimes ago, those times. Now we cast no shadow over the plucked swans, and are left to sleep in corners Like a mound of coats. The path to our rowboat is even narrower, dustier; gnats Blot out...

Michael Tyrell Almost spring, & our dictator’s new order: everyone in our country must French-kiss the frozen utility poles— the boulevards become maypoles of muffled wailing, move too much & you lose the mind, to keep the tongue & the mind pick a word to keep in your mind, blunt like starve or trowel or cudgel, say it will be coming up crocuses soon those clouds not the shoulders of ice-storms,...

Michael Tyrell For Rachel Wetzsteon (1967-2009) The friend, the late formalist who slips into my last REM cycle— whose new language I can’t get or hear in the swarming dream-terminal, but it’s urgent to try, there’s something she must tell me now, holding my wrist rougher than she means to— leaving a mark I know you won’t believe. You’ll say I’m wrong, it’s crazy, the wrist’s barely black & blue. As usual,...

Brandon Lewis That is how the last buffalo herd is culled. I read on, spilling drops of tea on the news page, letters darkened in spots. Across the road, a tree I can’t name buds red. To squint at its branch spellings, to iterate its Latin root does not tell the story quite. Time to relearn spring— clover leaf or cherry blossom, what arrives at first blush and second. And then the herds returning each season. Rangers say they...

As we await release of his forthcoming collection, "The Wanted," Brooklyn poet Michael Tyrell debuts and reads three new poems.

Bruce Snider See the brown mutt bleed through its garland of burrs, a torn possum drooling dried streaks of foam, lice-flecked raccoons on the yellow line, split wide. See how wholly they open to us in death, to the moon, to the red elm scabbed with mites. They open to riverbeds and the song of the wren, to flowering plums and the barbed wire fence. Over and over they open to carrion birds catching scent, beginning to rise. Even...

Bruce Snider Because her hands are chapped from raking, she tucks a pair of gloves beside the coffee mug in her coat. Aisle by aisle, she’s drawn by the gleaming racks of glass, the strange melancholy of dish detergent. She takes what she needs and what she doesn’t – metal pail, deck of cards – a small meanness filling her. Some days she dreams her sons: the oldest outside Millford, the pipe-fitter in Des Moines, their...

Bruce Snider Take me back where hag moths feed on sweet gums, threshers crushing wild grapes. Where fields curb the slaughterhouse, tractors weighted with wheat. Take me where cars feed turnpikes, and bones break down in their graves. Where roads pass smokestacks; steel pipes scored on the lathe. Apricots sleep inside branches as the hunters slip deep into spring. And a hog drowns in the culvert. And the muskrat gives over its...

His stunning collection "Devotions" has been nominated for both this year's National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award; this month, we're honored to debut four new poems from Bruce Smith's latest series, "Thinly Sealed," supplemented with readings by the poet.