"Reason Sonnets (Sequence: Light)" by Sylee Gore

Reason Sonnets (Sequence: Light)

Find a room and light it. There is reason
For silence, the still taste of water,
The raw air of snow out of season,
And darkness? None. The eye makes matter
Mix and dissolve. White sky over rye fields,
A litter of screws, are air fixed by light
Into form. And night? Its slow, slack gaze yields
No force. (— Dreams, you mumble, seeing bright
Sails sheaved in gold, a child rapt over eels.)
So sentinels of sleep crowd our days
Interleaving intelligence in shade while
Across the dawn broad white kites laze.
But the breeze is so light that if felt, we take it
Not for a sough, but for the leaf itself.

ξ

"Reason Sonnets (Sequence: Light)" was first published in Bordercrossing Berlin.

Sylee Gore is a poet, artist, and art translator living in Berlin.

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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.

"Essay on Anxiety" by Mariya Zilberman

Essay on Anxiety

The song says there’s a bee in my bonnet, a birdhouse
in my soul, but really, it’s more like I’m wearing
a trombone as a hat: I can’t see anything and everyone
sounds funny. The air is so cold, people on the Internet
toss boiling water and it turns into snow clouds. In my hair
I’ve woven a honeycomb and my ears are dizzy buzzing.
The only thing I ever say to my neighbor: I’m gonna reset
the wifi. Her response: Got it. This is the script of American
longing. When fresh powder falls under lamplight, I walk
into the street, ungloved, to wet my tongue on it. Three cold coins
dance in my lucky pocket. Corpse pose, I’ve heard, is a kind
of revival, so I sleep on my back, sync my breath to the fog horn.  

ξ

"Essay on Anxiety" was first published in Columbia Journal.

Mariya Zilberman is a writer and educator who was born in Minsk, Belarus. She earned her MFA at the University of Michigan, where she currently teaches. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Columbia Journal, and The Kenyon Review, and she is at work on her first poetry collection.

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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.

"Estate Sale" by Erin Dorney

Estate Sale

I bend over cardboard boxes
laid out on the lawn
like eggs in their carton,
squatting, sift
through a glass pitcher
painted with blue cornflowers,
filled with jewelry
mixed with rat poison pellets,

and make a mental note
to raise my number
for the 1920’s typewriter.
At the hotdog truck
there is a Chevy Chase lookalike
wearing sunglasses, dirty sweatpants.
Maybe he’s gathering material
like the rest of us.

The owner of this house
stands with her children,
who climbed these trees,
tossed the metal hose nozzle
onto this crescent drive.
The bidding starts.
She is crying.

ξ

"Estate Sale” was first published in The George Street Carnival.

Erin Dorney is the author of I Am Not Famous Anymore: Poems after Shia LaBeouf (Mason Jar Press, 2018). Her writing has appeared in HAD, Passages North, Paper Darts, Juked, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of Fear No Lit. www.erindorney.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.

"Feather crane swarm" by Kelly Hoffer

Feather     crane      swarm 

the ravine between the highway and the field               fills with smooth sumac
broken in the hand      it stains            leaves red
on the palm 

my sister broke her                 her baby tooth at the zoo
same three-year-old body         on the bluff at that parade watching floats across concrete

stepped  in the fire ant nest in her jelly sandals, with her small feet.    
my mother stripped her of       her clothes of her terry suit too late    to save her the biting,
my sister still resents her      young nakedness  in a crowd       of people of insects,     she was

rough on her body.      we have always            been rough on             our bodies.      

spit shone from our foreheads,  ashed crosses smear and sweat out                from clay soil,
we didn’t want any baptisms,  didn’t want any           blessings          until we were left

without benediction for           our sick body leaving us, my                mother’s hands puckering
done drinking  and her limbs the first             to go cold. the blood stayed        to her belly.

when she died,             the nurse dressed her in       a clean dress                    
and I lay by her            simple body,

noplasticnotubes body             cotton  and skin as the muscles relaxed            from their living            
let her fluid go             stain her        pelvis
pigment swelling          clay soil            earth    to                     clouds take a color   swarming
reflect the brimmed     arsenals below    plants rusting,      all that iron in the cloth tooth            of her death dress

green holding white birds,        cotton settling down   

ξ

"Feather     crane      swarm" was first published in Hubbub.

Kelly Hoffer earned an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her book manuscript, Undershore, was a finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series and a semifinalist for Tupelo Press's 2020 Berkshire Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Yalobusha Review, Prelude online, The Bennington Review, and the inaugural issue of Second Factory from ugly duckling presse, among others. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Literatures in English at Cornell University. Learn more at: https://www.kellyrosehoffer.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.

"Frame" by Sandra Marchetti

Frame

Tucked in the western grandstand imagine
Wrigley: a sliver of light, orange-green

beams gone between Golden Arches
as scoreboard plates clink in place.

The fourth inning haze filters the sun—
a yolk yawning itself undone

in the upper deck air—to curve against
each pillar, straining my gaze in Aisle 228.


My father gripes and wipes his nose
through the April game—
the team terrible again—

yet players lope over this green hill
and our minds agree to rise
and clap for them.

ξ

“Frame” was first published in Southwest Review.

Sandra Marchetti is the author of Confluence, a full-length collection of poetry from Sundress Publications (2015) and four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays. Her poetry appears in Ecotone, Blackbird, The Hollins Critic, Southwest Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. Sandra’s essays can be found in Pleiades, Mid-American Review, Barrelhouse, and other venues. She edits poetry for River Styx Magazine.

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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.