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
[Venice]
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 'til 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 in
Measure, Literary Matters, Modern Age, Denver Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Able Muse, 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
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
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
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
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
The lady of the lake is at the bottom in a body bag.
They found her when the reservoir was drained
Excalibur lodged in her petrified heart.
“They will never find the body”
her husband once boasted behind bars
but he’s already served his time
and now his guilt glints in full view.
It took years to be re-filled
water crawling across the barren hollow
edging out the animals two by two
like a prophecy waiting to be fulfilled.
I can’t watch - I turn myself
from what I once admired to the overgrown roads
full of weeds along the county lines
remembering the bioluminescent algal bloom
whose density obscured decay in the depths.
Did the fly fishers who jealously guarded
their rights to this place eat their catch?
I have forgotten the sound the bluebell makes
the immensity concealed in so silent a cap.
Black lambs graze the shadows
and white lichen coruscates up the trunks
as the land itself starts to bend
a hyperbolic paraboloid saddling the mounds.
If only we could re-roll the hills
and take them with us take our memories away
from the poisonous plants in the garden
the torso forever tied to the concrete kitchen sink.
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.