"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.

"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.