Glenn Freeman, “Pupils”

Pupils

How beautiful the
open lens; the di-
lated aperture;
the clear instrument.
The credits are al-
ways rolling. Half sleep
half silence; this is
the movie of your
life, how the roiling
clouds blacken the
horizon, and from
the distance pierce
the lens, through
the membrane in-
to memory.

 

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Glenn Freeman has published two collections of poems, Keeping the Tigers Behind Us and Traveling Light. He lives with his wife and two cats in small-town Iowa where he teaches writing and American literature and watches the tomatoes grow.

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Glenn Freeman, “The Poetics of Uncertainty”

The Poetics of Uncertainty

     —with apologies to Schrödinger

The other night I dreamt I understood
quantum mechanics. Position X should

be determined simultaneously
with momentum Y but can’t be. Reality

should be represented in its gritty
particularity but can’t be. Indirectly

is the only way art can represent.
There is no outside outside the present.

I’m not sure if the universe even scans,
but entropy’s only a problem in the hands

of a closed system. The world is not
even close to what you thought.

This poem may or may not be a sonnet.
We may never know while the lid’s still on it.

 

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Glenn Freeman has published two collections of poems, Keeping the Tigers Behind Us and Traveling Light. He lives with his wife and two cats in small town Iowa where he teaches writing and American literature and watches the tomatoes grow.

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Brennan Downey, “Sympathy Dart Frog”

Sympathy Dart Frog

I have to hire
a sympathy dart frog

to sit, and wait, in the palm
of my hand

to mutter the things
that feel strange for me to say

and so that I can effortlessly hand
to strangers this frog

when they are crying on the train, and
my body language

will convey something about
the universal nature of human suffering

instead of something about the
prevalence of human apathy

 

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Brennan Downey is a wilderness therapy field guide in Vermont who was raised in Virginia and who once won an award for his laugh.

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Tanner Lee, “Let’s Start with the Body”

Let’s Start with the Body

down to roots that suck the inner thickness
between your hip and collarbone—
if your entire body were a mouth
then pour me in like a cracked egg
—what flesh of you reaches down
with its churned, folksy swell
and hangs on an iron hook
above a man who thinks he owns
your right to nakedness. harp
of bones strung from yolky sinews
sweetened with honey pistil
I want to reach down and sing
the old familiar. The west of Eden choirs
that crackle your heartwood
until there’s a heaven in your hands
a pink-white crease
a wildness, a careful suture
of a thread that only unravels
to catch droplets
that couldn’t find ground.

 

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Tanner Lee lives in Ogden, Utah, and studies at Weber State University. His writing has appeared in Hobart and Glass, and is forthcoming in The Comstock Review and Lost Sparrow Press. He is an assistant blog manager at The Blueshift Journal. Find him on twitter @heytannerlee.

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Tyler Gabrysh, “The Escaping”

The Escaping

We climbed into the anytime night,
swept into the heavy forest like Jews escaping,
animals without worry of tripping
over freshly mounted headstones.

The hustling below hawkish owls
piercing us with their centrifugal yellow,
the brute trees quarantining us
through an unrelenting maze.

Thinking of safe cover
(imagining bear and wolf dens),
considering that if Buddhism is right,
we can indeed break our very minds.

And yet when darkness eventually lifted,
with our beds of moss and rock,
we thought only to reach
the river and map out a new future.

 

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Tyler Gabrysh is a Canadian writer who has been a contest winner in Geist, Other Voices, and Open Minds Quarterly. He also writes his self-coined ALPs (alternate lyric poems), and his book reviews and interviews have appeared in several other publications. Among his inspirations are his two cats. He is yet another writer working on a novel.

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