"All winter" by Isabel Neal

All winter I pined.
I coned, caved.

I held my bridle lip,
my bride. My mouth,

my bride. Rough
jeans. Jeer.

Rubbed
with bristle brush.

Fed feed.

What if, fearing
being led, I lead?

ξ

“All winter" was first published in Best New Poets 2020.

Isabel Neal is a teacher and poet from New England. She holds an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan, where she now teaches, and has been awarded fellowships by the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and Rackham International Institute. She is currently at work on her first 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.

"Travelogue" by Hua Xi

Travelogue

Blue nights draw a border
around the imaginary.

I imagine the branches,
which are mangling
a sky spangled with night again.

Out there, a doomed star
makes a noise
like how the quiet yells out to the living.

Now the damp mouth beautiful with trees
draws a shape inside of the painting.

The landscape painters say beauty
is a line in the shape of an S,
like flight, rattlesnakes, or magic blooming.

Stones are standing side by side in a field again
and the Easter Island heads tell a story about time
we keep retelling with motion,
the two possibilities being
whether you will lead or follow your body.

Maybe into being beautiful. Otherwise into wreckage.

Our skins remind me
of how heaviness
enters through a trapdoor.

Listen at the door, and elephants
are making invisible music again,
scales at the scale of minutes, water.
See how the animals sing to each other,
at long distances, in infrasound.

As our hands sweep low over the Mojave,
kissing mallow, five-spots and Spanish needle,
as my cab driver modulates the radio dial
on an endless foreign road, asking me
where I come from. My bark
and howl.

We go driving past
a bark of trees. Howls
encircle my hair like a crown.

On my person, many borders across which
only the unsaid could pass.

I leave my body everywhere.

ξ

"Travelogue" was first published in American Poetry Review.

Hua Xi is a writer and artist. Their work has appeared in The Nation, Boston Review, and elsewhere. They love large leaves.

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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.

"Swatch Test" by Rachel Edelman

Swatch Test

Close one eye. Look
at the paint chip, then the wall;

paint chip, then wall. If you tick
back and forth quick enough,

the shade will cast an after-image,
your own eye speckling

the space you want to change.
I keep shaving my upper lip

even though it’s hidden under
a mask, even though it will be

as far as I can imagine a future.
Close one eye. What would it take

to take in what you’re repulsed by?
If I let the shadow grow back. Shade lingers

like the sulfur a matchstick leaves
when it’s shaken out. Tick back and forth —

You can choose what you want to be ashamed of —
back and forth across the wish.

with a line from Corinne Manning 

ξ

“Swatch Test" was first published in Poetry Northwest, Volume 16 Number 2, Summer and Fall 2021.

Rachel Edelman is the author of Dear Memphis (River River Books, 2024). Her poems have been published in Narrative, Muzzle, The Threepenny Review, and The Seventh Wave, among many other journals. Raised in a Jewish family in Memphis, she now teaches high school English in Seattle.

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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.

"More Enlightenment Ideas" by Carolie Parker

More Enlightenment Ideas

I like a fine incision,
a field of moving rain,  

flat black thunder

considering the body
is hard to inhabit,
considering (coldly)
the faculty of reason favors
whip, leash, collar,
and we don’t know
what’s down there

a soul, or
just more animal
than I care to handle.

ξ

“More Enlightenment Ideas" was first published in Denver Quarterly.

Carolie Parker is a visual artist and writer with a background in foreign languages and art history. She was recently a MacDowell Fellow and a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Her poetry has appeared in Sixth Finch, The Yale Review, Denver Quarterly and River Styx. What Books Press published Mirage Industry, a book-length collection of her poetry, in 2016. In 2019, the Fellows of Contemporary Art selected her for a Curator’s Lab Award, which funded an exhibition focusing on the relationship between language and visual image. She has exhibited her visual work widely in Los Angeles (images on Instagram @carolieparker). She holds a BFA in studio art from UC Irvine and an MA in comparative literature from UCLA (Latin American, US and French poetry).

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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 Cashew is the Nut of All Sadness" by Jennifer Martelli

The Cashew is the Nut of All Sadness

Every embryo curls like a cashew nut.
Every cashew nut hangs from its red strange apple,
drops from its drupe with the thin-lipped

leering look of a devil.
Every devil, like the cashew, has smooth skin
like an old man’s chinos. An old man hunches

over a cart in the Stop & Shop
looking for yesterday’s Sara Lee
all by himself because his wife is dead or

confused. The wife
curls into herself, her back curved, her hands
curved, too, into her breast bone. She’s small now,

a newborn, translucent and apart. The skin
of every cashew is toxic. When roasted the smoke
burns the pink lung layers right off —

sometimes I think: when I pull all sadness from my sternum
it will be a cut-glass bowl I’ll put out for company.

ξ

“The Cashew is the Nut of All Sadness" was first published in The Sycamore Review.

Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens and My Tarantella, named a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.

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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.