"The Sleepers" by Derek JG Williams

The Sleepers

The kitchen table wants to be a chair. It’s tired 
of standing still all the time, 

it wants to swipe the floor with its paws 
and be stood on to change light bulbs and help 

paint the walls a darker shade of green. 
It wants a little bit of paint to drip across its back 

so it can be green too. It’s tired of carrying 
the weight of dead things. 

Nothing speaks when the knives by the sink get angry. 
It’s been years since they’ve been 

sharpened. It’s hard to debone chicken 
with blades so dull. The knives complain to an army 

of ugly country tile, but it’s not listening. 
It daydreams at night, imagining the smell 

of its flowers blooming in the spring, how beautiful 
each petal would be if it spread in more 

than two dimensions. The dripping faucet only recently 
explained what three dimensions are— 

and the living room carpet is disgusted by all 
this dreaming. This is serious, it thinks; we are serious, 

it says. But the carpet wants to be a chandelier. 
One night when it was lonely, it almost told 

the doorknob its secret. If it had three wishes 
it would say, I want to be a chandelier. I want to be 

a chandelier. I want to be a chandelier to feel the pretty tug 
of so much crystal and have my many lights turned 

on off on. It wants to be best friends with 
the light switch. It doesn’t want to be forced 

to talk dirty to the vacuum cleaner just because 
it’s clever, because it has leverage and is clever. 

The sounds you hear at night are not 
what your parents told you, not the house 

settling on its foundation, not possums in the backyard 
rooting though trash. They are the murmur 

of all these desires rustling like silk. 
Mingling with the sleeping dreams of children 

who want to be adults, adults who want 
to be children. 

ξ

"The Sleepers" first appeared in Bellingham Review.

Derek JG Williams is an American poet and essayist. He is the author of Poetry Is a Disease, forthcoming from Greying Ghost Press. He holds a doctorate in English and Creative Writing from Ohio University, and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Derek teaches writing courses online and develops curricula for GrubStreet. His poems and prose are published or forthcoming in Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Plume, Best New Poets, Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, and on Boston's MBTA trains as a part of the city's Poetry on the T program. He lives in Germany with his wife and dog. Learn more about him at http://www.derekjgwilliams.com/.

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Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.

"If the Body is a Miracle" by Conor Bracken

If the Body is a Miracle

then so is the ball gag.
Vinyl siding. The small 
trembling of the earth 

as Oklahoma settles into 
the new vacancies blasted
by fracking into the shale. 

The weather and its ostentatious 
flocculence and alternating layers 
of mist and frost, has always felt miraculous,

but when we get it to pound Texas 
flatter by a couple millimeters 
with its thundering dozens of inches of rain 

aren’t we also the miracle for teasing 
the sky into a steam-hammer?
Praise the nipple 

as much as the rubber tubing. 
The needle-nose pliers as much 
as the patient hand that shaped 

the wing-like iliac crest. 
The shrill discrete beeps 
of the machines that draw

out of the body’s darkness 
the murky pulsate doings of the body
and as much the beeps that tell us 

the newborn is coding
as the ones that tell us 
the newborn is stabilizing

in a sound as tremulous and sweet
as any dragged out of the rare 
shadow-barred hold of a Stradivarius

whose Alpine spruce is supposed by experts 
to be the reason for its sonority—
extra resonant due to its denseness 

from growing through The Little Ice Age 
which a bumper crop of trees brought on
by sucking extra carbon from the atmosphere, 

able to reforest the plains of the Americas
because genocide had decimated 
the half-agrarian native populations.

What a miracle, the word decimated, 
the words population and genocide—
stainless, almost, and smooth

like the lucent synthetic fibers
archeologists use to brush off the femurs
of history

the little crumbs 
of ruptured spleens and broken teeth 
and bashed-in skulls and smoldering hair

so we can see instead this potsherd
and consider the craftsperson
instead of the fact it was shattered.

ξ

"If the Body is a Miracle" first appeared in New England Review.

Conor Bracken is the author of Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press), as well as the translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center) and Jean D’Amérique’s forthcoming No Way in the Skin without this Bloody Embrace (Ugly Duckling Presse). His work has earned support from Bread Loaf, the Community of Writers, the Frost Place, Inprint, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and has appeared in places like BOMB, jubilat, New England Review, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares, among others. His first book of poems, The Enemy of My Enemy is Me, is out now with Diode Editions.

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Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.

"The Charges Are Stalking & Arson" by Amy Beeder

The Charges Are Stalking & Arson

The sizzlepop. The bang bang bang. The air 
a stage where cherrybombs & I play spark

to vacant lots; it’s nothing new, this tune
of Zippo click, of fuse, the blue-tip plume

on resin, weeds & shed, historic barns
exploding first in swallows. Don’t shush me.

Powder speaks: dirt is mute. If I’m denied
I’ll fire the lot; I’ll gladly woo with gas—

o love, my love’s a cuff-struck match, my suit
the fabric’s curl to petaled ash—take me,

take ruin, a realm of ether, atom-bright, a pause
before the flint’s quick kiss; take me—who else

can hear how shot glass sings the grass’s name;
how bale, dry & quiet, speaks its love to flame?

ξ

"The Charges Are Stalking & Arson" first appeared in AGNI.

Amy Beeder’s work has recently appeared in American Poetry Review and Beloit, and her book, And So Wax Was Made & Also Honey, came out in January 2021 from Tupelo Press. She teaches poetry in Albuquerque, NM.

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Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.

"After" by Jennifer Stewart Miller

After

Once there was a ringing phone.
Which was answered.

Words ripple out, float blithely off
as if they think they can disappear.

The heart may still beat—
but it is a beast

raging in its bone cage.
The mind curls in a corner—

must be whipped out of its lethargy
and forced to perform: gather

what is required, buckle
the children in the car, drive them to

their lesson. Necessary acts,
necessary order. The old life

flickers in the distance,
so beautiful now—

like a Rust Belt city
when viewed at night

from the window
of a passing plane.

ξ

"After" first appeared in Tar River Poetry.

Jennifer Stewart Miller’s book Thief (2021) won the 2020 Grayson Books Poetry Prize. She is also the author of A Fox Appears: A Biography of a Boy in Haiku (2015), and a chapbook, The Strangers Burial Ground (Seven Kitchens Press 2020). Her poems have lately appeared in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, The Night Heron Barks, RHINO, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.

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Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.

"Opioid" by Cassandra Cleghorn

Opioid

When Narcan up the nose fails they drilled
a tiny hole in shinbone to juice the marrow
you took to the trail free radicals streaming
benzyl bisphenol dimethyl diethyl dibutyl what
softens without binding my binky my cup desk
sofa this vinyl floor I kneel upon off-gassing
our litter as suck-scape your pastel shit gleaned
& timestamped her skin was hectic yours blue
when the medics got there your skin was blue as
the tiny bag sitting in my palm how did it get
here who kicked it behind this thrift-shop
sofa she watched your skin pink up she tried
to count the little mice moving under it she
tried to count the little mice moving under

ξ

"Opioid" first appeared in Green Mountains Review.

Winner of the Iron Horse Literary Review NaPoMo 2021 prize, Cassandra Cleghorn published Four Weathercocks in 2016 with Marick Press. Her poems and reviews have appeared in many journals including Paris Review, Yale Review, OmniVerse, Poetry International, Boston Review, Colorado Review, and Field. She lives in Vermont, teaches at Williams College, regularly reviews poetry for Publishers Weekly, and serves as poetry editor of Tupelo Press. For more info, see www.cassandracleghorn.com.

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Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.