The Flower’s Grand Opening

Translated by Sekyo Nam Haines

Eyes barely open, I lean against the headboard, think of nothing.

Before burning down one candle’s shaft, the short summer’s night flees,

over the threshold stone, suddenly, the pomegranate flowers explode.

Inside the bud, a new universe, squirms to open! O, here

the silent vapor of the primordial ocean wets the petals.

The pomegranate flowers color my entire room.

I go inside the Pomegranate flower and sit. Think of nothing.

Original poem by Cho Ji Hoon

화체개현

실눈을 뜨고 벽에 기대인다 아무 것도 생각할 수가 없다.

짧은 여름 밤은 촛불 한 자루도 못다 녹인 채 사라지기 때문에

섬돌 위에 문득 석류꽃이 터진다.

꽃망울 속에 새로운 우주가 열리는 파동! 아 여기 태고 적

바다의 소리 없는 물보래가  꽃잎을 적신다

방 안 하나 가득 석류꽃이 물들어 온다. 내가 석류꽃 속으로

들어가 앉는다. 아무 것도 생각할 수가 없다.

---

Born in South Korea, Sekyo Nam Haines immigrated to the U.S. in 1973 as a registered nurse. She studied American literature and writing at Goddard College ADP and poetry with the late Ottone M. Riccio in Boston, MA. Her first book, Bitter Seasons' Whip: The Translated Poems of Lee Yuk Sa was published in April 2022 (Tolsun books). Her poems have appeared in the poetry journals Constellations, Off the Coast and Lily Poetry Review. Her translations of Korean poetry by Cho Ji Hoon have or will appear in Interim, Asymptote’s Tuesday blog, The Tampa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Consequence Forum, May Day. Her translations of Kim Sowohl’s poetry have appeared in The Harvard Review, Brooklynrail: InTranslation, Ezra, and Circumference. Her translation of “The Dire Pinnacle” by Lee Yuk Sa appeared in And There Will Be Singing /An Anthology of International Writing by The Massachusetts Review. Sekyo lives in Cambridge, MA with her family.

Born in 1920, Cho Ji Hoon is a canonical poet of modern Korea and a renowned traditionalist of Korean aesthetics. Although his poetry is written in a modernist free verse form, his poems resonate with the deep root of Korean literati Sijo and have an intense local flavor, imbued with the sounds, smells and colors of pre-industrial Korea.  In 1939, at age 19, Cho Ji Hoon published his first poem in the literary magazine MoonJang. In 1946, he published his collection of poetry, Cheongnok Zip (청록집)  alongside with the poets Park Mokwohl and Pak Doo Zin. They were known as “Cheongnokpa,” the Green Deer Poets. A professor of Korean language and literature at Korea University for 20 years, Cho Ji Hoon served as the president of the Korean cultural society affiliated with the university and president of the Korean poet’s association. He received numerous literary awards, published five poetry collections, and many books related to Korean literature and culture.

Elegy for the River in the Desert

By Jemma Leigh Roe

––after Natalie Diaz

I thought I would not live until the end of that summer

feeding on the creosotic air and the turquoise sky

when I thought the body was imaginary

when I thought that love was real.

But the monsoon came in September

to flood the arroyo where I deserted

my body night after night.

The coyotes who wandered on the mountain descended

and stayed up with me to watch

the silent sun rise from my sluggish heart,

rise through my dry-stricken throat that stung

like scorpion weed with blooms of amethyst stones

I wore to protect myself.

Only then, I felt the river flow through my veins

pulsing in the chaste aridity, beating the never-ending heat

during that summer of wildfires

when a white-tailed deer bowed before it and drank

ignoring the hunter’s gun

when I died in the brush

and came back to life.

---

Jemma Leigh Roe studied art at the Université Paris-Sorbonne and received a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University. Her poems and artwork appear in The Ilanot Review, The Fourth River, Thin Air, Canyon Voices, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and others. www.jemmaleighroe.com

Here is a Tree Without Leaves

By Claire Kortyna

stark, honed form, hunkered down, waiting.   

This week I write until hunger sickens me:  

roils of nausea, black-spotted vision.  

At five p.m.: melt into the couch, hibernate the remaining day. 

Here is what the leaves say when they arrive:  

Here is where we hold joy in our bodies: 

Here is how joy feels:  

A cat’s paw on a laser beam  

on rainbows refracted through the prism in my bedroom window 

Here are things the cat catches: 

Here are things never caught:  

The cat dies, the prism breaks 

If you want to find something, stop looking  

Where do we hold joy in our bodies? Can we say how it feels? 

When I try to make you feel mine, what am I missing? 

How do I hold it against your skin? Me,  

who only vaguely remembers.  

Remind me what I forgot:  

of the rising, welling,  

of something in the gut 

of a tension that releases  

of the lifting at the base of your skull 

remind me of leaves. 

---

Claire Kortyna's work has been published in Blood Orange Review, The Maine Review, The Baltimore Review, Jellyfish Review and others. She is a PhD candidate in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Cincinnati. She reads for The Cincinnati Review. Her twitter handle is: @ckortyna

Small Globes

By Jen Schalliol Huang

Within is my body, and without

also contours my shape

like a sail: sometimes filled,

sometimes buffeted. Sometimes

we don’t get choices, only input:

temperature, pressure, nuance.

Deviation. Sudden and immoderate.

The body can be a leaf in wind

curled and scudding,

paper-thin toward the edges,

or petaled with decadence,

peony-crowned.

When the bloom is

too heavy for the stem,

it becomes the curving bow,

the head pillowed in dirt.

It becomes music. Song

in the most surprising places.

---

Jen Schalliol Huang is a disabled poet living pondside in Massachusetts. She reads for [PANK] and has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. Her work has been published or is upcoming in Jet Fuel, the lickety-split, Sou’wester, Shenandoah, SWWIM, and others.

The Lizard

By Lúcia Leão

curls its tail, leaves

the summer

behind−where

do I straighten out

this longing?

---

Lúcia Leão is a translator and a writer originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her poems have been published in SWWIM Every Day, South Florida Poetry Journal, Gyroscope Review, Harvard Review Online, among others. Her work is included in the anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing.

Imagining My Own Death

By Ann Hudson

is what I do on my most

difficult nights, the lamp

clicked off, the book bookmarked

and set beneath the reading glasses,

pills, and glass. I just don’t want

to let anyone down. What if

there’s some warning sign, some

important pain I should act on?

What if I mess it up? I cleaned out

the pantry shelves today,

emptying down the disposal

the pickled beets, the pears,

the raspberry jam I canned myself

but never had the faith to eat.

---

Ann Hudson is the author of The Armillary Sphere (Ohio University Press) and Glow (Next Page
Press), a chapbook on radium. Her poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Orion, Crab
Orchard Review, Colorado Review, North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, SWWIM,
and elsewhere. She is a senior editor for RHINO, and teaches at a Montessori school in
Evanston, Illinois.

Third Anniversary (or, First Anniversary After the Birth of Our Daughter)

By Lindsay Adkins

Into that skin:

a lone bull curls

its throat back to neck.

Arc of horn.

Empty gray fields.

Pink eyelid of morning.

In high school they rumored tipping,

sparse fences missing posts, gaps

wide enough for past-curfew bodies.

I imagined the feeling of toppled animal,

immobility, a spine in the dirt,

the quiet sting of mosquitoes.

Before fear, before boot thunder

and the impossible shotgun

there are true stars and fragments

of knowing no living

thing moves on its own.

***

My mother’s love was not

a manmade material. She bought

me leather shoes to walk in.

Your feet need to breathe, she’d say,

the tiny lungs in my heels huffing

while she pressed her thumb

on my toe to measure room for growth.

Thrilling, to be found, to feel

where my body stopped and started.

Many times I’d watched her

or my father sift through bins

of frozen supermarket meat,

looking at cuts, dates, fat.

There was always a right choice.

***

We can choose

rawness, then. We can

choose to have a choice.

Last year, cotton, next year,

fruit and flowers. Leather

between, but we’ve already seen

my body give and stretch,

breathe to cocoon another,

no exchange of coin.

How am I both

animal and its empty dried out skin,

both what I was and what I will be?

Our daughter lies here

rubbing her back into the carpet,

unable yet to roll.

We can show her how to move,

how to reach forward, pull back

without coming apart.

---

Lindsay Adkins is a Western MA writer whose work has appeared in Electric Lit, Narrative, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry, great weather for MEDIA, and Sugar House Review, among others. She is a recipient of the Amy Award from Poets & Writers and holds an MFA from Stony Brook Southampton.

Deeded Land

BY TIM RAPHAEL

It’s right there

in the Book of Plats,

D-193 at Page 967,

Records of Rio Arriba County,

our four acres

in the vicinity of Dixon,

as if even one

of these cottonwoods,

blaze yellow in October,

could be flattened

in a file drawer.

A deed should be

a watercolor –

a series of them to catch

the river’s swing

of steel and slate

through the day –

a vast palate

of desert rust,

all the tans, reds

and browns around,

but green too,

a splatter of garden,

and gallons of blue

for New Mexico sky.

And music –

moon-filled coyote cries,

the town dogs’ reply,

night frogs and day finches,

the thunk of a hoe

in spring.

Bloodless lines

of surveyor’s codes –

Tract 2, Section 28, T23N,

leave so much

unrecorded, no mention

of the King of Spain

or Francisco Martín

who was bestowed

this land in 1725,

as if no one

were here before –

this sweet rise on the Embudo –

as if the Pueblo artisan

who made this pinch pot,

shattered black and white

bits surfacing in dirt,

has no claim

nine centuries later.

---

Tim Raphael lives in Northern New Mexico between the Rio Grande Gorge and Sangre de Cristo Mountains with his wife, Kate. They try to lure their three grown children home for hikes and farm chores as often as possible. Tim's poems have been featured in Sky Island Journal, Windfall, Cirque, Canary, The Timberline Review, Gold Man Review and two Oregon anthologies. He is a graduate of Carleton College.

Compline

BY JORY MICKELSON

Even Walt Whitman wanted

to put me into a city

of his own devising: brotherly

love. But I refuse his landscape, no

ferryboat, no trolley car, no high-rise

by him yet unseen. Instead give me

a field, this field, dazzled by light,

a dayfield. The blessing of sun

and air revealing green

in deep, empty glister.

Here the lover comes, even

as the light fades, to watch

it go, to watch the goose,

the sparrow, the owl, the slipform

lake, its shore a string. Every

feathered thing, beaded

and bereaved into an endless

Whitmanian line. Patiently

allowing the night, the tender            

growing night.

Let no lover be found, not in

the city, not two men

hidden in its dirty scrawl

of noise, in concrete’s unbearable

narrowing—but let us be

received into this field. Two men

grasping hands, hands pressed

in prayer to wind, to darkness.

Two men pressed against the grass,

given to giving ourselves to one another.

---

Jory Mickelson's first book, Wilderness//Kingdom, is the winner of the Evergreen Award Tour from Floating Bridge Press, and won the 2020 High Plains Book Award in Poetry. Their work has been published in the US, Canada, and the UK. They live in the Pacific Northwest. To learn more, visit www.jorymickelson.com

Rules of the Game

BY BRENT AMENEYRO

The number of unaccompanied migrant children detained along the southern border has tripled in the last two weeks to more than 3,250
- NY Times March 11, 2021

The boundaries 

of the field 

were marked 

with sweaters 

and lunch boxes. 

When we played, 

there were no referees. 

Nobody told us 

whose team to be on. 

When the ball crossed 

the invisible line, 

everyone just yelled. 

Before 

a cañonaso—

to alert teammates,

to trick the opponent,

or, sometimes,

as a courtesy—

we’d point 

to the sky.

---

Brent Ameneyro’s poetry has been featured in journals, songs, and an art installation. He was the recipient of the 2019 Sarah B. Marsh Rebelo Excellence in Poetry Scholarship, 2020 San Miguel Poetry Week Fellowship, and the 2021 SRS Research Award for Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice.

Up from Red Soil

BY BENJAMIN UEL MARSH

I’m from an old place

where no one forgets the past, out of fear

of losing the present.

Fragments from history are the corner stone

of our modern structures. Old wood forms a new desk over which

I scatter my current endeavors.

I’m from a place of shade

where children hide in the summer woods

with bowing arrows bonded from their mother’s thread.

Where a backyard is a battle field and pine cones are grenades.

A place of twisters and thunderstorm,

bright flashes and rumbling booms. Good Jesus,

I miss the rain.

I’m from a place of deep roots,

of Black Origin, descendent of dark driftwood

mangled by mannish tides. Africa is lost.

I’m from a place that tested a nation’s resolve.

From which rebels marched to maintain a maliciously lucrative industry.

Where my great great grandmother spent her sweet sixteen lost

in the phonetic features of a presidential proclamation;

free at last.

I’m from a place built on red earth with sturdy steel,

while Liberty was reconstructed. 

Built right up, by men who look like my father, and Anglo-immigrants

just trying to sketch a dream with southern coal.

Where Jim Crow was born from the heads of stagnant adults

and buried under the soles of stomping children. That place,

presumed guilty because of its brutal past, the American story

disguised as a Southern narrative.

That place, from which Black men moved on,

to stop being boys and mature to adolescence.

I’m from a landlocked island, where good people approach your soul

but trip up on your skin,

where the institution of racism lies in rubble,

yet the dust still suffocates and separates;

you still don’t see me.

I’m from a place of worship, where God reigns

and churches blend

among homes as natural fixtures of life.

Where you can be sized up by the pew in which you sit.

Where preaching is the headliner and

the choir is just spiritual pre-gaming.

I’m from a small place

where the Other lives over the mountain,

and we struggle in the valley.

Where the money is tight as a mother’s hug,

where dreams are not lost but never dreamt.

A place where fathers fall short, and mothers

make due; there is no luck, only Faith and only Work.

Yet, I am from a place of joy;

instigated by good food, good folks, and the Father’s Grace.

I’m from that place,

Pittsburg’s younger sister,

who grew up so quick they called her magic.

I’m from a Tuxedo Junction, jazz note

played long and loud.

From a Livingston slave, and a deferred dream

that came to fruition in generational steps.

I am from that place where the past is not forgotten,

because the present sits on a foundation

of vintage steel, tattered cotton, and cultural conflict.

The topography

still bears the names of its former residents, and the current tenants

fight old ghost for new life.

I am from that place, that I have never forgotten;

it props up my present, because my past is too implanted in that red soil

to ever be uprooted.

---

Benjamin Uel Marsh is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Tampa. He was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama and began writing poetry in high school. As an undergraduate at Birmingham-Southern college, he founded a poetry organization where his love of recording thoughts in creative verse flourished.

Sinkhole

BY GEORGE MCDERMOTT

Neighbors’ yard is disappearing

with a distant sound of flowing water

like draining a swamp or flushing a toilet.

Sandy soil cascading inward,

municipal crews erecting barriers,

Action News drones overhead.

      Passersby stop and stare,

      cops can't disperse the crowd.

Move along, folks, nothing to see here.

More nothing to see with every hour—

the emptiness growing wider and deeper,

swallowing gardens, swallowing toys,

leaving neighbors no place to go.

They stand outside, wiping their eyes,

hugging themselves. Action News

      asks what they feel. They struggle to answer,

      look to each other, struggle and fail.

Nothing to see here.

People from other neighborhoods

hold their tongues, hold their distance,

hold their hooded eyes averted,

cling to their faith in separation,

in geography as privilege.

Neighbors murmur incantations,

      shading their eyes to squint at the sky,

      flinging flowers into the hole.

Nothing to see.

---

George McDermott grew up in New York, went to college in Massachusetts, and spent most of his adult years in Pennsylvania. He's now living in Florida, which is ... um ... different. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of literary journals, as well as in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Stetson

BY MIKE SCHNEIDER

for Melvin “Snip” Snyder

A gunslinger, if topped

by a rolled-brim white Stetson,

stands for justice — the code

was that simple. We were

the good guys. We won

the war. I was older brother, three

of us making trouble for Dad

& Mom, whose life was us. He’d

fought & killed for that. Driving

a Sherman over the Rhine at Bad

Godesburg, he eyed the high slopes

of evergreen darkness & many-spired

castles & veered south to waltz —

not quite — across the Blue

Danube & clank toward Munich,

deep into the land of wiener

schnitzel & striped pajamas. 1945,

he turned 18 that October. I grew up

incomprehending how all-the-way

violence engendered me. My first

therapist wanted me to see my Daddy

as a demon because he’d called me

dummkopf— dumbhead in Pennsylvania

Deutsch, old high-German dialect

that came down to us from King George’s

Hessians. Almost everyone I knew

as a kid originated in a land

where people Sprechen sie. All this

has more to do with who I am

than I can ever know.

---

Mike Schneider has published poems in many journals, including New Ohio Review, Notre Dame Review, and Poetry. Three times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, he received the 2012 Editors Award in Poetry from The Florida Review, and in 2016 the Robert Phillips Prize from Texas Review Press.

Shaping the Land

BY JAKOB RYCE

When you migrated to the south, beating your mouth in pitches, you claimed your wealth would bring prosperity for all. When you developed a taste for acquisitions, possessions, revisions, and cut the strings that tethered you to the fruitless land, the scorched land of willow and bark; far from the docks lined with mosquito fossils and the ceaseless choir of fowls. When you renounced the scrub and forest, pine and possum. When you stood up tall against the redwood that loomed over the entire wildwood bastille, said no more, and rallied strangers to bring axes and saws, their children to light spot-fires in the tall grass and burn anything that was not dead. When you rose early to raise steel towers against the flattened granite sky and showed them how to wield combustion. When you grew bored of the mountain’s secrets and cracks appeared in your eyes, you stirred up the muddy waters of want and of what was lost. When you chased the morning down with amber and strolled steaming into the yellow fields, striking down whomever crossed your path. When you mistook the dark women for wives and drove their children away; for all their talk of the seven mothers and magnetic horses and living things that should never touch the skin. When your neighbors spoke of consequences you still boiled with visions of land – land rich with blood, ancestors unbeknownst to you; oppressed in dreams, oppressed in visions, oppressed in earth; appearing in your dreams as rapt pale specters, drinking in rivers of sweat. When you held the branch of black angel flowers to your heart in dreams and held out your thick scoured hands, your family unable to look at you. Only after you churned the red earth for all its worth, for all their worth. Only after announcing that all ancient things be shaped into iron, after every animal had slunk away, and the sons and daughters of the past were rekindled with their shadowed families. Only then did you sit on your porch breathing in fire, master of your domain, watching the blackbirds plough and sweat for crops reserved for you alone – satisfaction on your lips, a hubris glint in your eyes. But even then, the land would remain unchanged, unyielding, and would always be as it had been, long before you and long after you.

---

Jakob Ryce is a freelance writer, teacher and poet from Melbourne, Australia. He has a B.A. in English Lit, and his work has been published in On The Premises, Drunk Monkeys, and the Wyndham Writing Awards. Jakob’s first chapbook of poetry is due to be published this year.