Howie Good I need an ornate new alphabet to say what I mean, a pull-down eye chart, a small Midwestern city known for its homicides, a window that only I can open, a foreign museum dedicated to magpies, a woman just back from there climbing naked into bed, and all around us, dipping and soaring, the vibration of wings. Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick...

Howie Good 1 Men are arrested overnight with nothing of mine in their pockets. I sleep late, while the morning, face full of gray stubble, waits downstairs. In another kind of world, I might have had my name and occupation detailed on a window in gold lettering. 2 The music is keeping secrets, but also telling stories. And I quote: Winning doesn’t feel as good as losing feels bad. Come autumn, the fog lingers longer, clocks fall back...

Howie Good What weather! We hang around the house all day, increasingly restless, like assassins for hire without an assignment. On one channel, there’s a question about who invented the combustion engine; on another, the start of a celebrity death watch. You and I were friends before we were a couple, but unreliable narrators before we were either. Light gathered us to itself, and I think I could hear, if you turn down the TV just a...

Changming Yuan Still, still hidden Behind old shirts and pants Like an inflated sock Hung on a slanting coat hanger With a prophecy stuck in its throat Probably too dark or ominous To yaw, even to breathe No one knows when or how It will fly out of the closet, and call Changming Yuan is the author of Chansons of a Chinaman. A three-time Pushcart nominee, he currently teaches English in Vancouver. His poetry has appeared in Barrow...

Changming Yuan South: not unlike a raindrop on a small lotus leaf unable to find the spot to settle itself down in an early autumn shower my little canoe drifts around near the horizon beyond the bare bay West: like a giddy goat wandering among the ruins of a long lost civilization you keep searching in the central park a way out of the tall weeds as nature wraps new york with mummy blue East: within her beehive-like...

Gary Metras The reader closes the book and whispers, elfinbone. Joyce in Finnegan leaping oceans and continents of language. He wants to hold a thin bone in air, release it to hollow wind. The way he wills it to float, to fly beyond understanding. A large foot stamps on the savannah; fleas let go each other, jump onto that shadow crossing the moon. Skeleton and Elfenbein under the cold glow. The way an eagle anchors itself on a dry tree...

Simon Perchik You can tell by the curtain how the play will end, this sill dusted word for word till your ear slides along the feathers and you hear a door open the way between the passenger’s side and just one wing ...

Simon Perchik As if the pump for the well is carving her shoulders out and the invisible stone you will hold when it dries broken up among the ruins though some rocks still squeeze one hand too tight and the faucet ...

Lisa Sewell Because his screech is melody and we are all in jeopardy and all have golden toadsongs semaphoring in our throats. Because the golden toad teaches us to flirt with day-Glo explosive breeding excess and to only emerge between the dry and the wet— though in the end all his flaxen chorusing could bring no darker gravid female to climb, to clutch and hang upon and his protective skin was also lung and kidney a failed-canary...

Lara Dolphin I look at my life before the war, chockablock with prayer requests, holy tomes and communion with a higher power. Then alightment on the field of battle rifle-ready, rucksack-relaying clad from helmet to combat boots in digital camo and body armor. From insurgent alleyways through booby-trapped homes, we skirted IEDs and spider holes. Fortified behind Jersey barricades, we waited for grenades to come. I remember the barrage...