III.

Shane McCrae

Boy with Rifle

A rifle gives a man authority
I shot a target once in a brown field
Holding the rifle I felt big and free
 
I saw no impact     a cloud flinched from the tree
To which the man a family     friend had nailed
A paper bullseye     his authority
 
Was in the rifle he had passed to me
From the cloud of men to me     I was a child
Holding the rifle I felt big and free
 
But also bound     by a new loyalty
Not to the man but to the gun I held
The gun had given him authority
 
I fired from deep in the dream of who I’d be
-come if I hit the bullseye     dead and wild
Holding the gun I felt     big I felt free
 
Smoke bled from the dead trunk’s living injury
In a fire’s blood I signed my name in blood
A rifle gives a man authority
I was a child     as big as I was free

Shane McCrae’s most recent book is New and Collected Hell. His awards include a Lannan Literary Award and a Whiting Writer's Award, and he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Henry Hart

Walking Home After School

I never heard Popie chant Cobah at his cows,

never saw his bull shuffle from the dirt

road up the bank where I kicked at weeds

under a hickory tree and filled my Superman

lunchbox with nuts. Exhaust from the school

bus hovered in the humid September shade.

Backed against a stonewall topped

with barbed wire, all I could do was stare

at the bull’s dung-crusted horns,

its nose-ring drooling sweat or snot,

its eyes glistening like obsidian arrowheads. 

That was the first time I couldn’t move

or think. Popie shouted Cazzata!

Cazzata! and hit the bull’s ribs with a stick

until it turned toward cows already loping

through a field of corn stubble

to the swaybacked barn that would collapse

that winter. I had to learn to walk again

up ruts crisscrossed with strange shadows. 

At home, I had to learn to speak again

as I dumped nuts on the patio, broke the shells

with a hammer and picked out the tender meat.

Henry Hart has published several books about modern poets, including biographies of James Dickey and Robert Frost. His most recent book, Seamus Heaney's Gifts, received the Lewis Simpson award from LSU Press. He has also published four books of poetry, and is hoping to publish his fifth book, After Sandy Hook.

Amy Bagan

The Piano Lesson

Allegro, ma non troppo

for Lina

My piano teacher's ear for metaphor

means every cadence is a soughed farewell

with lowered lids, or moon and waves' rapport—

those longing tones no distance can dispel.

She never fails to conjure as I start

a Bach Prelude, an escalator's stairs

that run like water over ground's mute layers,

“Now tread the pulse that issues from earth's heart.”

I'm surfing Mozart on a Baby Grand,

release its lode right through the windowpanes                 

to sunning rooftop lizards, my deaf hands

hearing each other's dithyrambic strains.

My teacher's pleased till on us unawares

is launched a foul din, fetid as a wound,

grief's subjugating agents, Venice-spewn—

the effluent pump to drain the city sewers.

Can I mask the offal, spilth, dreck, the crud?

She urges me to play, so I fixate

on bodies as machines, the course of blood,

valves, breath and sparks that make us animate.

The lyric's done but not the septic dirge.

“Listen,” her finger sinks on one black key.

“E-flat....Hear it?” Pause. The two sounds converge

their weight on ours like long-lost family.

“So, all is music to you?,” I say, amazed.

Across her face a phrase of Chopin plays.

Amy Bagan's “Native to Now” was named a Finalist for the Richard Wilbur Book Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Nimrod, Measure, Literary Matters, Modern Age, Denver Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, and Salmagundi, among other journals. Her essay on Shirley Hazzard was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and she is Associate Poetry Editor for Able Muse Review.

Mark Fryburg

Lady Hallett’s Piano

Her estate sold it:

black, box-shaped, long

legged piano from England,

heaviest heirloom

of great-grandmother Emily Hallett,

spouse of Lord Stanley Hallett.

(Masquerade title invented

while sailing for Seattle,

this humbug

son of a London tailor.)

Stanley could only lord

little Medical Lake, sand-washed

middle of nowhere Washington town.

There, he built his so-called

castle, spending cash

from who-knows-where,

narrow brick Victorian

three-story, dominating

brickless, one-story,

one-horse, hamlet.

Residents swarmed to watch workers

block-and-tackle Lady Emily’s

piano, necks craned as mighty

ivoried instrument swung

high above their heads,

then through window

hole in highest half-turret.

Music centerpiece

of upstairs parlour

intended for her pleasure.

Emily left all pleasure in London.

So in-castle she performed, alone,

elegant favourites of her Queen,

harmonies of England

against deep discords

in new unwanted home.

Or, windows open, sang,

“I stand again in the Northland,

but in silence and in shame…”

Hallett Castle

still stands, subdivided,

some bricks missing,

garden ragged,

grandeur abandoned

to a broken stove

rusting on front porch,

blocking view of

Medical Lake’s

historic marker.

To this day, locals

speak of the mansion – make

multiple Facebook posts. Insist

they’ve seen Lady Hallett’s ghost.

They still crane necks as Emily

floats, elegant as her songs,

blue-white long-gowned

blur behind parlour windows,

searching, searching,

for her piano.

Mark Fryburg started in journalism and flight instruction. Retiring in Virginia—poetry seduced him. Mark received 10 local, state and national contest honors in 2024-26. Included: A First Place, Poetry Society of Virginia; Honorable Mention, Passager Journal; Monthly Finalist, Only Poems. Find his work in Artemis Journal, Clinch Mountain Review, Tadpole Press, Journal of Medical Humanities, and several anthologies.

Rachel Hadas

Cryptozoology

             If that the heavens do not their visible spirits

             Send quickly down to tame these vile offenses,

             It will come,

             Humanity must perforce prey on itself,

             Like monsters of the deep.

                                                         —King Lear

Last summer’s floods, and floods the year before,

carved out deep trenches, each with its raw scar.

Floods happen swiftly and leave wrecks behind.

Drought proceeds slowly, drying out the land.

Dust coats zucchini, and the beans look brittle.

Pine needles crunch. Leaves prematurely rattle.

Parched as any overheated creature,

I’m not alone in being drawn to water.

Last week at Crystal Lake: a cloudless sky.

Shrieks of children frolicking nearby.

Mothers bounced babies, ducks swam in a line.

True to its name, the lake was crystalline.

What was that in the water, small and white?

A condom. Then it floated out of sight –

its provenance a minor mystery,

but it was on the surface, plain to see.

I think about some other lakes up here,

carved out by glaciers, narrow and austere,

secretive and stern, forbidding, old,

unfathomably deep and icy cold,

the rumored homes of something never known

or knowable. Some things are too far down,

hard to envision, ageless, multiform,

surfacing to disappear again.

Legends last and memories endure.

Indians warned settlers “Don’t go in there”

centuries ago. There’s a society

of Memphremagog Dracontology.

Poised between urgent myth and murky body,

cryptozoology’s a blurry study.

We want to learn; aspire to mastery.

We chart our genes, the oceans, and the sky.

We map the realm above, the world below.

But there are some things we will never know,

blithe in our surface element up here,

laughing, cavorting, also making war.

We bask in light, we creatures of a day.

But also we are one another’s prey.

Memphremagog. Willoughby. I take

a sip of coffee. On my mug: a snake.

The most recent of Rachel Hadas's many books is PASTORALS (Measure Press 2025). Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers University-Newark, she lives, writes, edits, and teaches in New York City and Vermont. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry.

Jane Blanchard

La Loge

by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1874

This work is now more popular

than it was long ago.

The label says the setting was

the artist’s studio.

So those who posed were not inside

a box above a stage.

Yet their demeanor and attire

epitomize the age.

Apparently, he wants to see

while she wants to be seen.

Distinctions such as these remain

discernibly routine.

Jane Blanchard of Augusta, Georgia, has published ekphrastic poetry in venues around the world. Her collections with Kelsay Books include Furthermore (2025) and Phenomena (2026).

Barbara Lydecker Crane

My Letter to that Critic

     Impression, Sunrise, a painting by Claude Monet,

     1872, France

My dear Monsieur Leroy,

                                              Perhaps I’m not

a great painter. Neither am I a great

writer, scribbling this to you on the spot.

You say my painting’s “unfinished, an impression.”

Let me enlighten you with this confession: 

my rapid brushstrokes aim to just suggest 

rippling water, smokestacks, masts, and boats.

A moment’s sight changes in the light,

and painting quickly can arrest perceptions

that artist friends and I attempt to capture.

Not for us slow weeks of work indoors,

laboring till all is lacquered rapture.

Sun and breeze can blow the cobwebs away

from artists’ eyes—and critics’ brains.

                                                         Yours,   

                                                             Monet

Before My One-Man Show

   Mont-Sainte Victoire, oil painting by Paul Cezanne,

   1895, France

My Paris colleagues thought me cranky, cold,

reclusive. That last is true a hundredfold.

Now in Provence, where light is iridescent,

I live in a stone cottage like a peasant.

Outdoors all day, I look. I wait until

I feel the harmony of field and hill,

then paint not just with eyes but with my mind.

Each basic shape in nature is carved, outlined.

I seek nature’s structure in my expressions,

while former colleagues make their art “impressions.”

They sell their landscapes at a decent rate,

but sales and brilliance may not quite equate.

I’m fifty-six. What will I come to know

when, soon, I have another one-man show

in Paris? My paintings over all the years

will fill the walls, and likely me with fears

that critics won’t receive them well. I’ll not

expect to make my name. On further thought— 

I shouldn’t care. What has to matter more

is what I’m seeking, what I’m working for.

Barbara Lydecker Crane has won the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Crown Contest, the Helen Schaible Sonnet Contest, and has twice been a Finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize. Her five published collections include You Will Remember Me (2023, Word Galaxy Press, an imprint of Able Muse Press) and Art & Soul (2025, Kelsay Books). She is at work on another ekphrastic collection.

Brian Brodeur

Cocaine Hippos

The drug kingpin [Pablo Escobar] brought four hippos to his estate in the 1980s. Officials estimate that about 170 now roam Colombia, and say the population must be controlled to protect the country’s ecosystem.

     —New York Times, 2023

Submerged in murky pools, they wallow and sprawl

by middens swarmed with morpho butterflies.   

Some doze, indifferent to our tour, or rise 

to honk at us and grunt a rubbery call

as common here, we’re told, as motorboats

tearing up the Magdalena’s banks.

Our own boat stalls. The stalwart tour guide yanks

the pull cord. Hippos splash. Their green shit floats. 

“La plaga,” he says. But there’s talk, he grins,

of airlifting whole pods to Mexico

far from the thick invasive grass they know.

A big bull groans at shrieking tamarins.

The guide points, “Miren,” and we crowd the stern

to click pics of coati kits. A girl’s 

sunglasses drop into the current’s whorls,

disappearing where fat lilies churn.

Like lit cigar-butts flicked across our sight,

fleet wings—scarlet macaws—flash yellow-red.

Surfacing off the prow, a hippo’s head

regards our idling craft and starts to bite

at leafy scum. Nearby, more hippos roll.

Immersed in peacock-colored oil smears, they

blend with the turgid bilious sludge the way

an actor vanishes into a role.

We drift too close and make the hippos bark.

A birder curses his bird-finding app.

Our guide: “Siéntese.” The bulls could snap

at any moment, flip our meager ark,

leaving our drowned and trampled bones behind.

A girl whines, “But they’re cute.” The trawler purrs. 

Our guide tells us they kill more villagers

than snakes and jaguars every year combined.       

He says to clip our vests and keep our hands

inside the boat and please stay seated please.

How many times has he recited these

same lines? The surface streaks with inky bands.

A herd on shore stands so still they look fake.

One rubs its pink-gray flank against a tree

as dim reflections of the canopy

rumple behind us in our lazy wake.

Brian Brodeur is the author of four poetry books, most recently Some Problems with Autobiography (2023), which won the 2022 New Criterion Poetry Prize. Recent poems and literary criticism appear in The Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, and Pushcart Prize XLIX (2025). He lives with his wife and daughter in the Whitewater River Valley.

Selena Wisnom

Beauty Spot

Selena Wisnom is a writer and academic specialising in the poetry of ancient Iraq, and adapts ancient Babylonian verse forms into English. Her book The Library of Ancient Wisdom is published by Penguin.

Jeff Young

Turning Points

We walked with quiet muttering and slid

Each wooden rosary bead across the thread—

An evening stroll along the trails to rid

Ourselves of nagging thoughts—what students said—

As we graded during finals week.

My thoughts meandered. Tired from teaching, mind

Distracted, I could not know the gurgling creek

Suppressed his footfall. He came up from behind,

His gun in hand, demanding all our cash—

A kid in desperate flight to be a man.

He hid beneath a red bandana and flash

Of steel. Time’s fabric snagged—a tightened span.

And then the string of seconds shot ahead—

My breath a bead drawn tight upon a thread.

Jeff Young holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of St. Thomas, Houston. He resides in Covington, LA with his wife and children.