The Pulitzer Prize finalist and Harper Lee Award-winning poet reads and discusses his work.

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...

Scott Hightower Rollerbladers cocooned in earphones occupy the site. A photographer busily shoots a lanky, posing model sporting a clear and extravagant tattoo. I shoot them from overhead; from the platform where the Führer and his industrious cronies stood and spoke, were photographed. A creative break from my own taking in of the expansive scale. Like miniature, the imagination creates vastness. Millions snapped their crisp...

Jean Kane It wasn’t a marriage, you said on the phone, because we didn’t always live together. A decade together, a decade ago. Now why should it matter? Still I hadn’t fully understood the complexities of subtraction. Take away Capri, where you convinced me they filmed blue Il Postino. Forget that you asked me to go there to marry you. Cancel the grave Don Antonio who consented, without all the documente, to join us in Santo...

Jean Kane Elbow in elbow, treasure in deskwell, object in perfect embrace of your subject, Beloved. You fasten tumbled sheets, pell mell with dailiness, ordering the old wrecked destiny of hearts. The stubborn staple bites with prongs; undressed corners join one fold as if pretense alone can hold them stable. ...