Tag: Poetry

“Summer Song” by Sophie Farthing

MPJ 
I have decided to be fat.
I am going to eat a snickerdoodle,
	two snickerdoodles, and after
	the last crumb's swallowed I
will not run until my knees twist.
I will walk slowly through the heat
 	and drink up birdsong.

I have decided to be fat.
Butter and cheese belong with grits,
	and if you do not fry the hash browns,
	are you really living? I will
sweeten my iced tea with honey, roll
the broccoli and Brussel sprouts
in olive oil, split dark cherries with
	my tongue and
	suck out the scarlet.

Saturday scones and strawberry preserves,
Cat's cradle stir-fry in the wok, and I
	have decided to be fat.
I will float in soft dresses,
	wave my inked arms, sing
		when they are silent,
nourish the blood bursting
	from my red pulsing heart.

Author’s Note: This poem plays with food words, swings its stanzas around, celebrates. This poem is on the move! This poem is a toddler bouncing around with their hands full of birthday cake.

Sophie Farthing (she/her) is a queer poet and artist living in South Carolina in the USA. Her work has appeared in outlets including Right Hand Pointing, Beyond Queer Words, Impossible Archetype, and Anti-Heroin Chic. She is the 2024 recipient of the Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Fellowship in Poetry from the SCAA.

“Field Notes: Worcester County, June (II)” by Carolyn Oliver

MPJ 
A neighbor mows away half his small meadow, and crickets return to unstitch the morning quiet’s seams.

Poison ivy oozes out from sumac shadow. Multiflora rose drips over silver guardrails. Haze creeps down from the north, ours and not ours. 

Stormless, sun-welted, day drives us indoors. 

Our heads ache. We shut the windows. What use are peonies and fraying poppies?  

A rabbit eats white clover as if the neighborhood hawks have taken to their beds with fever. 

To save a rhododendron, cut it back two years ago. Burn the spotted leaves. 

Behind a cavalcade of robins, a phoebe founders in the grass.

There’s a tactile quality in the croaking of the gray tree frogs in the rain, something curved that asks for my fingers to curl around it, makes me aware of every knucklebone.

[Interlude: what goes on unwitnessed.]

Returning, we find the brick walk purpled by clematis, the leaves of the dock and the beans and the strawberry and the turtlehead beetle-bitten, and beetles big as thumbs dead in the mailbox. 

The fields burst green, though chipmunks have eaten all my works.

Author’s Note: I want to love the whole summer. I think I used to, before I knew enough to worry. So lately I’ve been trying to love summer again, one fragment at a time. Writing this series of monthly field notes poems has helped; I’m learning names for plants and creatures, allowing myself to linger over views and sounds. I drafted this poem—nineteenth, I believe, in the series—in June 2023, noting down images and noises encountered in neighborhood walks or short drives around this area of central Massachusetts, then revising and shaping the poem once the month ran out.

Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, 2024), Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; Agha Shahid Ali Prize for Poetry), and three chapbooks. Born in Buffalo and raised in Ohio, she now lives in Massachusetts. Visit carolynoliver.net for more.

Three Poems by Sarah J. Sloat

MPJ1 Comment
see it
Ponds
Summer

Author’s note: Who doesn’t feel a few ways at once about Thoreau? Pure of purpose, yet kind of a know-it-all. But he puts his heart into his experiment, and when I wander off to work on my poems, I feel affinity with him in that I am also conducting an exercise in solitude, undertaking a project that maybe only I find worthwhile, much of which might come out crooked.

Sarah J. Sloat splits her time between Frankfurt and Barcelona, where she works as a news editor. Her book of visual poetry, Hotel Almighty, was recently published by Sarabande Books. You can keep up with her at sarahjsloat.com.

Citation: Thoreau, Henry David. (1854) Walden. Reprint, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.

“After the Start of Summer” by Kevin Risner

MPJ 
the lake blooms a bright green more vivid than geckos.
When these blooms enter the household, it’s only natural
to collect them, place them in a glass vase, burn eyes
with pollen. Pink and orange petals flutter onto the table.

They say that algae blooms mean an overabundance
of phosphorus. It’s toxic.

We drink up facts, reap the consequences, even when
it’s not our fault. I am a wooden raft headed down
the river after a heavy rain. The water’s thick there.

I hope to make my way out of this sand trap
through storm into sunlight, no longer
hidden by mattress-stuffing clouds in
the endless overcast that is November.

Author’s note: This poem spent a long time percolating and undergoing changes, much like how lakes do each year. In 2014, a severe algal bloom formed on Lake Erie off the coast of Toledo, which led to extreme water restrictions (for drinking, bathing, washing dishes). The result of agricultural runoff, this particular bloom shows vividly how much we, humans, have adversely affected waterways of all sizes and shapes. I try to explore the beauty of such events and how they can become disastrous, and how often they may return. The blooms will be pretty severe this year, but not as bad as the ones a decade ago in 2014. That’s a small sliver of hope. And I hope we can find these slivers from time to time, not just here in the crevices of this poem, but elsewhere in the world.

Kevin A. Risner is from Ohio. He is the author of Do Us a Favor (Variant Literature, 2021); You Thought This Was Just Gonna Be About Cleveland, Didn’t You (Ghost City Press, 2022); and There’s No Future Where We Don’t Have Fire (ELJ Editions, 2025).

“Sacrifices” by Staci Halt

MPJ 
My favorite film has an original script;
is shot, and directed by me—
I’m the star, too, in a cast of three. 

Your wife speaks no lines. 
The opening scene starts after she dies

painlessly, expectedly, unavoidably—
you were prepared as one can be 
for the kindest possible removal 

of a sympathetic character, 
sadly unprotected 

by the plot. My character attends 
the graveside service—
notes her stiff hands do not claw

through the rain-black earth in protest 
of my presence. 
The sun supplants the clouds on cue, 

and I hold back
while out-of-focus mourners disappear
off screen conveniently. 

Our eyes connect with static shock—
the shot breaks to follow a wet, ripping sound 
near the trees 

at the far end of the cemetery—
a Cooper’s hawk has caught a vole. 

Her talons pierce and quell 
the fruitless struggle.

Her banded belly and golden eyes 
are striking against the faultless lawn

as she eviscerates her prey.
Nature undeterred and matter-of-fact
requires sacrifices. 

The camera leaves the carnage 
and we stroll towards your car—
lean back in easy silence

against the immaculate black of the doors.
We pass a flask of bourbon back and forth—
we’ve done this before. 

The lens zooms in to capture how your lips 
and tongue linger on the flask’s rim. 
Time slows, music begins softly, 

then swells, heightens 
the impression of a quiet, buried longing
which never dissipated

but collected itself; 
grew deeper without outlet over years.

I’m collected; controlled: not touching you, 
not leaning close—
despite memory of how you used to breathe 

in as I exhaled as if I were an antidote, 
and you a dying man.
The camera angle shifts to capture your hand 

surprising even you
as it finds its way home,

your thumb a gentle knife 
on the underside of my jaw— 
fingers hardly squeezing 
the back of my neck.

The audience holds their breath. 
They know what kind of kiss comes next,
and no one

not me, not you, not the hawk, 
has done anything 
wrong at all.

Author’s note: I have often been asked if I ever write happy poems and or love poems. The answer is, to the first, I think never, and to the second, only if the love poem explores the pain, grief, and hunger that so often accompany love. I recently reread this poem, written a few years ago, wondering if it didn’t need revision so much as the proper title was missing. The annoyingly cliched MFA workshop question rose up to face me, like a spectre: What’s at stake? The speaker of the poem here imagines a world where wanting what they cannot have is not transgressive, but totally acceptable, socially, morally, and emotionally. Issues of conscience are easily and matter-of-factly dealt with, something that is not possible in reality, but in the world of poetry, all one needs is imagination to open doors to possibility that reality locks up with impenetrable finality. I changed the title to reflect what is at the heart of this poem, which, in the imagination of the speaker, is bargaining about a longing that in order to be admitted to and explored, must occur within an ecosystem of morality.

Staci Halt’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, december Magazine, Salamander Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, Driftwood Press and others. She parents six rad humans, and a slew of cats, and teachers and writes near Boston, for now.

“Ten Minutes Before Closing” by Shannon K. Winston

MPJ

       Inspired by “The scent of the archive” website, City of London

An archive smells like licorice, a faint cigar,
bergamot. Some might think of a butcher shop or
cat urine when leafing through yellowed papers.
Dust is skin, is horsehair, is struggle, is stymied desire.
Even almond-like odors linger in parchment.
Faint embers nestle into unsuspecting letters.
Goji berry? Rose? Reader, what do you smell? Tired leather,
hints of cocoa and earth. The breakdown of
iron gall ink is burnt and sugary sweet.  
Just how many odors does an archive contain?
Kneel in an aisle, if only for a minute, lean in,
listen— do you feel the tingle of the archive within the archive?
Make room for taste, touch, smell swelling in, around, within the records.
No one told you, guest, patron of this place.
Open the book before you. Walk through wild mushrooms,
patches of tomatoes, and wet grasses. Stop taking notes.
Quiet overtakes you again and you smell an odor you can’t quite name
rippling between your hands. Yes, yes—you’re a child in the kitchen,
sourdough starter sticks to your hands. You want to shake it off.
Try as you might, it clings to you. The scents of the archive are like this.
Uncertain, you linger. You’ve forgotten why you’re there.
Vixen, confidant, hoarder—the archive slips under your skin.
Without a word, a woman in a picture book holds out a suitcase to you:
xylophones, violins, flutes. Beautiful music, she says. You can’t hear it.
Yes, yes, she insists. Listen harder, every smell has a sound.  
Zinnias swell like yeast in the dark. The librarian has turned off the lights.

Author’s note: Archives have always fascinated me—they hold so many wonderful stories and mysteries. In writing this poem, I was inspired by the article “The scent of the archive” published by the City of London, which discusses the different types of smells one might encounter in an archive. I fleshed out some of those details in this poem by imagining myself into that space. The abecedarian form (where the first line of the poem begins with the letter “A” and each line thereafter begins with successive letters of alphabet) allowed me to explore the expansiveness of my imagined archive formally, as well.   

Shannon K. Winston is the author of The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press, 2021) and The Worry Doll (Glass Lyre Press, forthcoming). Her individual poems have appeared in Bracken, Cider Press Review, On the Seawall, RHINO Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives in Bloomington, IN.

“Love” by Reyzl Grace

MPJ 
—for E. R. Shaffer

You tell me I said that really fast.
But I spent a night, once, alone
on the beach in Coronado, living
a whole life.

                      For hours, I held 
my fingers like woody stems in the surf, 
letting foam gather in slow layers,
wave upon wave.

                              At the time, I thought
of St. Brendan’s tree, all covered with white
birds of fallen angels singing
for their release, waiting.

                                          It took me so
long to think of the rose and the pearl
—to step off that beach fully 
formed and living.

                                But I was alone.
You were not there. And it is okay
if you need more time to remember.
 

Author’s note: My girlfriend and I had not been (officially) dating very long when I–who am known for keeping things close to my chest–accidentally let slip the words, “God, I love you,” folded in a quiet sigh, almost under my breath. She sat bolt upright, finger in the air: “Can we just acknowledge,” she asked, “that you said that really fast, and that I am not there yet?” “Of course,” I conceded, and I sent her this poem the next day. Two weeks later, at two in the morning, she suddenly asks me what day it is. “Well, it’s past midnight now,” I answer, “so, technically, it’s Imbolc.” I watch a dam long guarded crack across her face, and she–who famously says everything that comes into her mind the moment it lands there–blurts out at last, “Fuck it! I love you!” The writer’s moral of the story? It is often the things we say against type that are the most honest.

Reyzl Grace (reyzlgrace.com / @reyzlgrace) is a poet/librarian with work in Room, Rust & Moth, So to Speak, and other magazines, as well as an editor for Psaltery & Lyre. She lives in Minneapolis with her novelist girlfriend, arguing over which of them is the better writer. (It’s her girlfriend.)

“The Meat of the Plum” by Emily Kramer

MPJ1 Comment

1.
A drupe—the flesh of its fruit enclosing
the fruitstone-pit
of its seeds.

To droop and sag on the branch in the heat,
fresh swelling beneath taut sun
seared skin.

2.
To break skin; to bite into
flesh; to drip down yourself
into crevices.

To be atopic to stone fruits
and to eat them anyway, desperate
and ripe for the anchoring.

3.
And I think to kiss your mouth
is to eat a seed; to kiss and to eat and to seed.
And I think to kiss your mouth

is to cede ourselves to the blank
palimpsest, rubbed out hard
for growing.

4.
Oxidation of flesh; slight foxing;
lentigines that persist past fall.
The age and the wearing

of the page and the fruit,
sliver of thigh, high rise
suggestion of blush-pale meat.

5.
So what I really was doing was kissing myself
the way I used to kiss the side of my hand
when I didn’t think I’d survive you.

So what I really was doing was subjecting myself
to reaction the way the catalyst persists
unchanged and unchanging despite.

6.
Drupe—so close to dupe; to
duplication; to mark. Long lessons
patient bees can teach you.

Fuit—it was missing
the r for reduplication. Erit—it will
be loose transposition for writ.

Author’s note: “Fruit” came into Middle English from the Latin frui, meaning “to enjoy” (cf. fruition and fruitless). Fuit / erit: Latin indicative perfect and future indicative tense of esse, “to be,” respectively. The title is from W. Paley’s 1802 Natural Theology: “The flesh of an apple, the pulp of an orange, the meat of a plum, the fatness of the olive, appear to be more than sufficient for the nourishing of the seed or kernel. . . . when we observe a provision to be more than sufficient for one purpose, yet wanted for another purpose, it is not unfair to conclude that both purposes were contemplated together.” 

Emily Kramer is an editor living in Boston, MA. She received her BA in English from Barnard College, and her PhD from Boston University’s Editorial Institute. Her critical edition of Arthur Henry Hallam’s collected poems is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. This is her second publication in Moist.

Two Poems by Jack B. Bedell

MPJ 
I could no longer play. I could not play by instinct

	—Francesca Woodman, 1977

Not after design revealed itself—shadow,
	dark dress, sunlight, bare chest,

loose hand, knife blade. This math
	forces direction toward a

cut, somewhere. The lines between
	black and white, between

what’s revealed and what hides
	away from the light. The urge

to slice inevitable, not instinctive.
	What spills out a sum, not a choice.
Self-Deceit
	—after Francesca Woodman’s photographic sequence
 
Get close to ground—as low
	as you can, like a snake.
 
It won’t matter. As long
	as there is glass—mirrors,
 
windows, lenses—you can’t
	escape from yourself. The glass
 
will catch every angle you want
	to hide, every line where
 
there should be curve, every
	gap that should be full
 
of flesh, of fire, of light, of
	life. Even if you manage to
 
keep your face out of the frame,
	you know, we know, your
 
elbows, your back, the crevasses
	behind your knees. It’s all
 
plain to see. Even your desire
	to blur into darkness, to float away.
 

Author’s note: I’m fascinated by Francesca Woodman’s photographs. The composition, the perspective, the way light is exposed, it all seems like truth to me somehow, like the photos show a dimension of understanding I couldn’t see without them.  Whenever I write about Woodman’s work, my only goal is to let the photographs bring me to that dimension, to that level of understanding, or at least to the questions I have to ask to get there.

Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Moist, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, The Hopper, Terrain, and other journals. His work has also been selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction and Best Spiritual Literature. His latest collection is Ghost Forest (Mercer University Press, 2024). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.

“Knee High by the Fourth of July” by Amorak Huey

MPJ 
I’m driving through the pinkness of an Ohio sunrise
where everything around me is Ohio
bathed in pink light & somehow
looks exactly like the Ohio
someone who has never been to Ohio
imagines Ohio to be & the cornfields
are just where they should be
this time of year. This is how life goes:
every moment a simulacrum of itself, 
every season on a loop
back toward itself, every place 
a snowglobed version of that same place,
nothing so unique as we’d hoped,
not even love. I’m driving 
neither toward you nor away.
The distance between us holds steady.
It’s amazing we found each other in the first place —
think how a bee carries pollen
from one singular tiger lily 
on the side of a highway in Ohio
to another a mile away, or miles,
& for the rest of their time blooming on this planet
those two flowers are swollen with each other,
the possibility of each other,
& that possibility, it turns out, is enough 
to sustain all of it — each stem, pistil, petal
stretching open each morning 
to drink deep the pink-lit dew.

Author’s note: I moved to Ohio, of all places, a year ago. Moving at this age (I’m older than I think I am) has me thinking about distance and disconnection, about toward and away, about what we carry with us. Our kids are suddenly out of the house. Someone else lives in the house where they grew up. None of this has anything to do with this poem, or it has everything to do with the poem. Since the move, I’ve been trying to pay particular attention to Ohio, to what Ohio looks like, to what Ohio represents in my life — I think this is a way of holding on. It’s a kind of love.

Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He also is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024).