Robert Wrigley We were to know we would never know as much about it as he did. He knew we didn’t care and believed his knowing was evidence. He was a scholar, a critic, a wielder of wit for it, its minutiae and mysteries, which, for him, were no mystery at all. Machinery, maybe. Cogs and pistons, the pinioned heart in the heat of it. Someone asked about love, the fool. Our backs ached. The sun was relentless. He leaned on his hoe...

Robert Wrigley The inquisitive look on the dog’s face makes me happy, suggesting not only her intelligence but my own, for having such an intelligent dog in the first place. Although what it is she wonders about I do not know. Seated in my chair, a book in my lap, I looked up and there she was, regarding me, as though she wondered what this book from the library, so redolent of others like myself, might offer me that she herself...

Adrianne Kalfopoulou There is too much here, the sapphire, the thistle, the oregano blooms in June, everything extravagant – the rich peat of what decays, the ruins that don’t decay, these especially are too much, the temples and statues in their stark marble glow, that simplicity which is not simple at all. This sheen of time, the wear of wars, the famine years of Occupation, lucent as the columns standing stoic, Doric – their...

Winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award and six Pushcart Prizes, Robert Wrigley has long been one of our favorite poets. This month, we are proud to feature him debuting and reading three new poems.

Jonathan Wells Not just a crack but a chasm in the floor Not just a room but a helix of rooms Not a hall to follow but a hallucination of halls Nor a load-bearing wall but the Great Wall of China Not one mountain between us but a range of mountains Not one sea but generations of seas Not just the harbor of Harbortown but the Gulf of Aqaba Not just bread to share but flour and salt Not a cold mug but a mortuary of teacups Not the...

Jonathan Wells Dogs fetch an unthrown ball and children smash softly together. Finches twitch in the upper branches, antennas for the soul of winter. I lie down rib by rib across the sled’s hard slats and kick into the terror of the hill. The horizon ridge holds out an unstirred cup of gray. Words I’d nurtured surge past me, faces, situations. The glow beneath what’s spoken ravishes like an orchid blossom on a browning stalk. My...

John M. Anderson That world was the ivory v, flush with the basketball floor of the pinball machine—I could open a door. The landscape was painted in that Bad Day at Black Rock matinee poster style with counters ringing tens of thousands of points with the same springing bell sound the Esso gas pumps made all the way to L.A. My father would have found a percentage in the way half of the quark’s globe spins backward in time,...

John M. Anderson The hayloft doors were wide as they’d go and the shining snow on the ground outside crowded the barn ceiling with projected light that rose into those inhabited rafters warm against the slotted wind pouring frost like a hard mist through chinks between the back wall’s warped planks. Shining I entered—ladder, trapdoor—to bow and scrape among my old shivering shadows: myself against the wall, self thrown careless...

Amy Lemmon You, a two-year-old with a Goldwater button on your nightstand, better that the television isn’t color, better that you grab the pull string of your duck on wheels and toddle to the playroom, dragging a rose-print Turkish towel down the stairs and across the sculpted carpet, stop to study the particular green-brown sludge of its color and manage an alley-oop past the coffee table with the sharp edge that will have its way...

Scott Hightower “What will survive of us is love” Philip Larkin December, 1971. A light snow. The Taft Hotel. Our room across the street, overlooked the Winter Garden stage door. I was green and this was to be my first taste of Broadway. By the time the lights and trumpets lifted on the “Loveland” number, I was lost in years monogrammed across silk sashes, wigs, and in the follies of relationships...