Fogged Clarity Podcast

Cast to the corner like punished women, or girls relieved to be

dismissed for now for five days for less for more for body’s unholy

action through no willed action, far from Book, Verses left

untouched, God’s Pages unsullied with our fingers unstained—why

assign this fluid with morality, no morality, bearer of DNA

how does it become unclean, this bright nectar channeling

breath, what could be more unpolluted than the ruby juice

of existence; of this, He said, I was made in the First Revelation,

a clot of it congealed, so why this monthly peel, liquid to solid

and thick liquid with softened tissue shedding renders me filthy,

passing through a cove with its once ripened half pre-person

bids me impure; the epitome of purity I thought is the release

of this curdled scarlet, a reminder of how you came to be,

and to become a being of pleading; what sin does it commit, these

layers molting that forbid me from worship, what evil is hurled

when my mouth hums righteous, body bends at marked times

the way a moon moves in cycle, that erases my space in a row

of praying sisters; who would I anger wrapping myself

in a fabric at risk of absorbing a few drops of blood dripping;

doesn’t God want to hear me most when I’m bleeding

Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad’s poetry has appeared in The Missing Slate, Passages North, HEArt Journal Online, Pinch Journal, and is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly and Silk Road Review. She is the poetry editor for Noble / Gas Qtrly, and a Best of the Net, Pushchart Prize, and Best New Poets nominee. She currently lives in New York where she practices matrimonial law.

My guide and I first purified before the sacrifice,

but can you be purified I asked her without being eliminated

or erased? My guide said it’s always but with you, why

can’t you just archive the whiteness or curate the liquidity

of the city and play your music or whatever you do? Here,

she said, is where the runaway slaves made a way through,

a cut through the thicket, a hairline crack in the salty progress

and the saccharine business of April, there, can you see it?

I don’t see it, I can’t see it, I said, I see mud and the under/

over story and gold green buds like a child’s coloring.

What were the names? Names? she said, they had spoilage

like fruit and a market price and an exchange rate but no names.

The shining things of your city are their names. But

what did they call each other when they rhymed, I said,

when they licked the salt off one another? It’s always rhyme

with you, she said. They called each other what lovers

call each other after they’ve been worked from can’t see to

can’t see: orphan and mi alma and baby and flaca and boo.

It’s always history with you, I said. It’s always ecstasy with you,

she said. We walked. It was trash day, translucent bags

in front of the church, pearlescent swelling cases like frog spawn.

Black bags in front of the shelter, little todesfugues,

minimal deskilled art. The cans are brutes or toters,

makeshift mausoleums or stops along the sublime,

equal in size to the body if it were smashed and bound,

leaking out pork chop bones, silvers, oils. Rats and crows

rip into human resource and order. Look at the relics

from Byzantium. Look at the maggots and the rubies.

Bruce Smith is the author of six books of poems, most recently, Devotions, a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Award, and the winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize.

Nettles could replace the cabbage, the salt and saffron milk-caps

halved and cut with stock, water, proportions intuited and spun wetly

over flame. My infant grandmother satcheled to the left hip, warmed

into consuming sleep while soup thickens kitchen air. Cities are fled:

Moscow and Vyazma, my grandmother in the same satchel spirited

to Bryansk, later tankered across the Atlantic. My mother’s version

exchanges broth for ground meat, her own border also an evacuation,

New York City too expensive a place to raise a family.

But I have no idea where I’m from. The first night after moving back

to the city my parents swore away, I boiled cabbage and salt,

divided the briney leaves into tupperware then laid flat

on the bare wood of my bedroom floor. There I dreamt already

of escape. I was too slow and outmanned to break the guarded lines.

I imagined them then taking the body, whiskered in arrows, beyond

Astoria’s blockaded boulevards and setting it to drift down the East River.

The truth is I’ve never been brave enough to stay anywhere. Strong arms,

the Egyptian trainer remarked after offering me my first job in the city,

enough for the room and a Metrocard. And I still don’t know.

These hectic arms. All those strange and lovely nights. On which hip

will the satchel rest just to be somewhere? What strong arms?

Jess Williard‘s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Third Coast, North American Review, Colorado Review, Southern Humanities Review, Barrow Street, december, Sycamore Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The New Orleans Review, Oxford Poetry, and other journals. He is from Wisconsin.

What about the dew-

sodden morning, eyes open

to the already turning

earth? Or batter blinking

in the pan? Because today

we have nowhere to be.

These movements are true.

They’re made by hands

toward a deer in the whistle

grass. It is somewhere

within arms reach

and there’s no way to know

in which direction.

But reach. Reach still.

When the hills

are finally blanketed

and our desires

for something brighter

become quiet, we can take

that light, work it

into the newly whitened

world, send it around

and back to mark our way.

We are full-hearted

and merciless, ready

to smother the shouting day

and invent a song for all

this incessant longing.

Jess Williard‘s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Third Coast, North American Review, Colorado Review, Southern Humanities Review, Barrow Street, december, Sycamore Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The New Orleans Review, Oxford Poetry, and other journals. He is from Wisconsin.

Whitman heard the “bustle of growing wheat” [I believe him]

as he loafed in the grass in Camden, one ear to the earth

enormous with corpses and vascular tissue, hairy roots

of cabbages, horseshit enriching the Great Experiment –

the other ear heard the “orbic flex” of a tenor and the soprano

and ghosts ravishing the superflux. Both his leisure and his work

make reparations for the father and the slave war, for love

of a man’s mouth. He was to exult and humble himself

in equal measures, to cup the radiance in one ear

and to knock on one side his skull with his knuckles,

his amative, adhesive skull, to dislodge the dirt. Writing

is to disappear into the pulp, the muscly brain of the editions.

I don’t believe he was the hunted slave, however humble

his excesses, however intemperate his debasement.

I don’t believe him.

Bruce Smith is the author of six books of poems, most recently, Devotions, a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Award, and the winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize.

A softer sound than the crude

x-ray chirp

of a sparrow or blue-bellied

finch. Violet crowned,

I can never not hunger

for things less tethered to earth.

It is through speed

and lightness that time slows.

Beyond that red-billed rhythm,

I imagine your inner weather

is nothing but wind,

an irregular albino sighted

against a dark scan

of shadows. Imagine being

fed, head first, to the mouth

of a machine. Each organ

a confused margin of mass,

more piece than place,

more pollen than beak,

a whole bitten flower breaking

down inside that bitter

landscape

of a bird’s pink muscled grove.

This is how matter moves

through the body, like memory.

All the daisies

picked in health, a whole

childhood of dust-sleeved

fields of wheat, gone gullet

and swallowed whole.

I have nothing

but sympathy for the tender

neck of a tulip. Seen

and unseen. Above, there is

a sterile sky of plastic

and that sourceless voice

telling the lungs

to breathe, exhale, hold.

Kristene Kaye Brown is a mental health social worker. She earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry and fiction has previously been published, or is forthcoming, in The American Journal of Poetry, Columbia Poetry Review, Harpur Palate, Meridian, upstreet, and others. She lives and works in Kansas City.

If I told you bagging groceries to pay for community college tuition

and a gym membership made me feel some kind of glamorous

it would be mostly honest and mostly, as I was then, ignorant

of any real responsibility outside of anthropology text books

and the push/pull full-body lift split I’d adopted from a thick farm kid

named Devin. It was the work, though, and the fact that I owned

what I was learning and what I was filling beneath my skin

that made hating what I didn’t know about myself something crucial

to wake up to and knead. If you’ve grown up in a college

town, let’s say this together: I’m not from a nice place.

On the fringes of academic enclaves are the battered and battering.

If it’s romantic or autumnal for waves of forgotten men to make trips

to campus drinking wells, to coax dizzy nineteen year olds

into their truck cabs, then it’s also important to pause

before reminding me that these things happen everywhere—

not like this. How can people measured against the beautiful-

brained and impermanent not be a little grotesque?

What if I told you although he pointed to the stud in my ear

and called me sweet heart, fairy heart, the father of a friend received

my rapt attention because he once worked masonry on St. Patrick’s

Cathedral? That the job trumped the man? How ridiculous

I must have sounded asking questions about New York City.

How full of sputtering nothing. But the grocery store gave way

to all the other necessary industries. Gym memberships

cost about the same anywhere. And though I never did go hunting

with him, I believed Devin when he told me that to wake at three

and sit in the stock-still air of a tree stand made killing more or less

a ritual of waking up. He made four thousand dollars selling venison

and racks that season. Enough for another two semester’s tuition.

So holler at me, he told me, if you more or less need something to do.

Jess Williard‘s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Third Coast, North American Review, Colorado Review, Southern Humanities Review, Barrow Street, december, Sycamore Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The New Orleans Review, Oxford Poetry, and other journals. He is from Wisconsin.

after Jim Harrison

There is a god of small thunder

in my chest, pounding commandments:

whiskey, birds, women, feed the strays.

His appetite grows as I watch

Manitou twins or breakers

in Grand Traverse. He reminds me

blood is still red without air and Escanaba

is a decent drive if you’ve been drinking.

I listen to him hungry mornings, walking

Michigan dawns, sleeves of ash

tipping the arm of my cigarette. The dog

bark of newspaper hits my screen door

like a bad decade. When I was younger,

the winds of Montana, the winds

of Grayling, tore pages from my hair.

One-hundred miles into the future

I still die in a field of baled hay, longing

to have seen Livingston one last time.

Take me back:

Leelanau, west arm of northern Bay,

Big Sky where graves are horses

with no tack on a farm by a windmill that slows

to the good eye. I didn’t disappear;

I switched to fiction, better weather.

My body became a flower

in the fist of a thick book. Find me

the mouth of a river. I am loose gravel,

a road tracing a mountain onto night.

The afterlife, two currents against each other.

The god has stopped; I am still

a climber of fences, a traveler

stepping forward, a salmon

killing itself to get back.

Cameron McGill is a second-year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Idaho and the poetry editor of the journal Fugue. He is originally from Champaign, IL, though spent many years working as a musician in Chicago. He received his BA in Political Science from the University of Illinois. He is the recipient of a Silver Creek writer’s residency, a scholarship to the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and a University of Idaho Centrum Fellowship. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry East, Measure, Aesthetica, and Grist, where his work was recently selected as runner-up in the 2016 ProForma contest.

First little reelings of knowing outer space is inner—

bad sci-fi movie where humans are fleas, or motes of shadow

in the amoeba’s eye(lessness).    I am fairly functional   for a spirit

walking around in a body. I don’t listen to messages,

merely transcribe them, as though the mind is a sphere

scraping other moving spheres

toolbox orchestra of opening

and closing latches, rusted hinges, but when our edges are soft

we allow things in—

become celestial bodies

falling into bed at such little provocation,

mechanical bodies wanting to love

each other with all of our electrons.

Do I love you electron-ically? I think    I do.    Therefore I am.

Today I feel like a robot programmed for the one task

no one needs done anymore. You turned up in my dream again last night,

lifted your shirt, revealing a torso

delineated by planetary circles and orbital arcs

your beautiful drawings grafting themselves onto you

in deep black chalk. And then I was a comet, eating my own tail,

and I couldn’t help moving towards you. I’ll burn

everything I have to dust.

Wendy Cannella’s recent publications include the essay “Angels and Terrorists” featured in The Room and The World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn from Syracuse University Press, and the prose poem “Immortality” selected for a special section of shorts in the 35th anniversary issue of Mid-American Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Free Lunch, Phoebe, Southern Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and Artword, an ekphrastic project sponsored by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and Beloit Poetry Journal.

count the times the police appeared in my living room,

barged in and bobbed like jellyfish on the tangible

resentment of my mother       the sea of her        crashing

on herself       my mother of get in their faces and tell them where to go

assault on an officer      broke her       delicate wrist      said it caused arrest

in her youngest who spoke from then on in television jingles

you could understand perfectly       at&t telecommunications

screaming      covering his ears      blocking out mere prayers (prayers of ma mere?)

once he whispered       we’ll be right back

after these messages       & locked himself in the bathroom for three days

so I was surprised at the protest today when the guards mingled, said hello,

and when I wrote she believes she was assaulted which I later deleted

I mistyped the word believes as believers she believers she believers she

believe-wavers she was assaulted      believe-wavers she was hurt

more than the ones she hurt—court dates   plaintiffs   experts    victims

among which I don’t count myself, not really, I’m fine, I’m nobody—

she is the Mother           she is the rights

of family, resists the detectives who invade our beach house,

charge into our lake cabin, tear through our ranch in the woods, wade

our shallow creek, barely enough to sustain the stranded fish

and when I wrote whispered it came out wishpered, part wish part vesper,

and the policemen and policewomen keep coming, cruising our coves and inlets,

circling the warming sound    I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid

the tiny shrimp of the gulf    pandalus borealis      have begun to disappear

dear translucent embryos of the quiet dark, tiny pink stars,

blinking off like nightlights, and the breath I draw in from the cold night air—

Wendy Cannella’s recent publications include the essay “Angels and Terrorists” featured in The Room and The World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn from Syracuse University Press, and the prose poem “Immortality” selected for a special section of shorts in the 35th anniversary issue of Mid-American Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Free Lunch, Phoebe, Southern Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and Artword, an ekphrastic project sponsored by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and Beloit Poetry Journal.