Tag: writing

“Midrash on Judges 15:4” by Reyzl Grace

MPJ 
I don’t know why I always imagined
the fields in dusk—the little flame-
tailed foxes dragging their torches
behind. Do you think, as they rushed from their doors,
the Philistines saw how beautiful it was?

It must have been: the purple twilight
crushed against the grain like the velvet
of a noblewoman in adultery, her robe slumped
to a mosaic floor; the breeze slipping
through the guard hairs of the foxes like a quiet kiss.

God, how we love what is in pain—how it reminds
us of youth. You know that the sun was created
setting on a Tuesday? I think Samson
knew . . . but where was I? Yes,
looking out on the fields, on stalks become candles, 

on foxes, coats rusting in the gloom 
against the golden crop. The rabbis
hunt every letter of Torah
for sport, shoot each with a thousand arrows,
yet the Talmud glosses this only once,

when R. Bar Abba tells us the fox
was a symbol of renegation—the only creature
that runs in reverse. But don’t we all?
Don’t we run from the Ark and the Tabernacle 
still turning toward them, enraptured? Yes.

We are on fire, but still must breathe—
little kits gulping air
as we twist and writhe around each other.
In a moment, all will be desolation and burnt
hair, but for now, it is lights gay

as summer bonfires, bobbing up
and down the rows of the vineyards and the oliveyards,
the rigid ranks of wheat and barley,
the tangled foxes snarling as they spin
and snap like firecrackers. How I wish

I could make you see it as I did—a child
who had lost nothing, felt nothing,
never asked what happened to the foxes. 
Sometimes I wish I had never asked.
Sometimes I think that the rabbis were wise.

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.)

“MERMAIDS EATING OYSTERS” by Stephanie Burt & Mara Hampson

MPJ

How do they get the things open? If they smashed the closed wholes against rocks, as otters do, the fragments could cut their delicate tongues. Instead they sing. They journey in cliques to the oyster bed, then hum at a resonant frequency, so that the oysters, charmed or fooled into attention, start to open themselves up to their underwater world.

The pearl harvest comes as almost an afterthought: no one needs more than a few, unless for ball bearings and other mechanical uses, where polished pebbles do as well. Fine oysters, once eaten, survive in outline and memory because the mermaids save individual shells, some for ornament, more for construction, building slow shelters, sharp-edged hiding places, for when the trawlers pass overhead.

Good oysters taste creamy and semi-sweet, since the mermaids and their environs are already salty. Other words mermaids might use include tender and wholesome.  Some of us believe that mermaids eating oysters heal their vocal chords, necessarily more powerful than ours, since mermaids’ speech must carry underwater: otherwise they could speak only with their closest neighbors. Young mermaids whose voices will not carry get asked to eat oysters by the half-dozen in order to shape and strengthen their sound.

Except for those cases—rare and vexing ones—most mermaid cliques regard the first oyster as a rite of passage: the first time a young mer sings to open an oyster herself, she gets to display the shell. It’s a sign: you can now use songs for other purposes—tempting sailors, or keeping sailors away; repelling sharks, dolphins or orcas (distinct songs for each); attracting and directing food fish in schools.

New York harbor oysters feel stodgy in the mouth, enormous, nutritious, with strong shells, but not much prized compared the Gulf of Maine. Nonetheless mer populations lamented for decades the apparent extinction of oysters in Long Island Sound. They cheer the replenishment of the oysters beds: one of the few human schemes they approve. Some even sing new songs about the far future, when they will live alongside us again.

Stephanie Burt is Donald and Katherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard. SUPER GAY POEMS, a collection of 51 poems (none by Stephanie) with an essay (by Stephanie) about each one, came out (as it were) in April 2025; her book about Taylor Swift will follow in October.

Mara Hampson is an aspiring artist and jill of all crafts. They live in Boston with their cat Pico. She bites (the cat, not Mara.)

A Review of Ayesha Raees’ COINING A WISHING TOWER

MPJ

COINING A WISHING TOWER by Ayesha Raees (Radix Co-op, 2024). 72 pages. $17.95

by Burgi Zenhaeusern

COINING A WISHING TOWER BY Ayesha Raees (Radix Co-Op, 2024)

As little as we write in a vacuum, we read in one, and I feel that a reading memory is akin to a body of sounds and images, of wavelengths all in a jumble (like an orchestra before a concert) until the wavelengths of one text hit another’s, producing an accord of sorts. Coining a Wishing Tower rang with collections as seemingly unrelated as Benjamin Niespodziany’s whimsical and poetic one-act plays in Cardboard Clouds, the sparse poetry and rich interiority of Josie Foo’s Tomie’s Chair, or the sharp-eyed portrayal of existing between heritages of Monica Youn’s From From, and Maureen Seaton’s wryly celebratory Sweet World; and of all these, particularly Seaton’s short poem:

I think in spirals;


	therefore,


		I am infinite.

The numbered sequence of prose poems in Coining a Wishing Tower manifests a spiral formally—by the use of anaphora for example—and thematically. Unlike a circle, a spiral implies direction—inward/outward, up/down, as in the -widening scope of the collection’s narratives. The spiral embodies and symbolizes infinity as recurrence in changing contexts and as continuous motion. Poem number 40 could be read as a metaphorical, mini abstract of the collection’s spiral storytelling while also presenting one of its central themes. I quote it here in its entirety:

Google says: No! Cats have one life just like any other living creature! The fiction of feline immortality is due to how cats function! In awed resilience! Prone to survival! Yet in a fashion that is always barely! To survive and heal and continue, cats strive in chapters, skipping from one existence to the other, from birth to separation to shelter to settlement to abandonment to ravagement to wilderness to car accidents and then to eventual demise. Each chapter becoming a disappearing act from the last, a knowing deeply settled in a body, a knowledge that permanence is a human fantasy, that in the end, living is dying many times in one singular life, to grow and adapt is a technique to survive, to give adherence to a lineage is continued as a mark that we were all once here, occurring in the narratives of the ones that will lead us into the future. (50)

On its own, number 40 may not be a captivating read. Its effectiveness is rooted in its placement deep within the fabric of the poems’ sequence; and all it says—with the concise language and matter-of-fact tone characteristic of the collection—feels necessary: key information thrown in as if an aside and easy to overlook, thus imparting understatement and irony. This poem smiles at itself and at the reader by the time they come to it. There are other moments where the hint of a wry smile shines through the dioramic series of scenes—scenes arranged like lit windows of a building otherwise in the dark, behind which various dramas unfold.

Prose poems especially favor fragmentation, a stop-and-start flow, loose ends, a permeable border between the imaginary or interiority and what counts as empirical reality, and play. The poems in Coining a Wishing Tower do this with ingenious imagery and a combination of memoiristic and myth- or fairytale-like stories, which keep getting recontextualized, underscoring the speculative and ever-shifting nature of all stories—the ones we tell ourselves, the ones we tell each other, and what we hear—depth acquired by offering layers and the freedom to peel them back or not.

The collection begins and ends with House Mouse, who is one of its mythlike figures and undergoes a metamorphosis. It is also an alter-ego of the speaker who left her home in Pakistan for the US, a long-imagined destination:

1.
House Mouse was running to the mountains but nothing came out of its climbs. Every peak held another peak, and every reach held another reach. At the end of all possible height, House Mouse found itself inside a tower. The tower looked like a black, elongated box, sharp at the edges, smooth and silky on the sides.

Behind all there was was just was: a view called beautiful only because it was now distant. (11)

In the course of events, House Mouse dies, House Mouse returns, and nothing is the same, as in all coming-of-age and emigration stories. The tower is House Mouse’s living shrine in both senses of the word: “to be alive” and “to live in.” Its significance overlaps with the Ka’bah’s significance in the speaker’s life. House Mouse’s story with the tower is in part a meditation on faith/trust and religiosity, especially on the tension between wish, prayer, and ritual, and the pervasive question of authenticity. “Coin” and “coining” as verb/noun imply shaping and monetizing simultaneously, as in the minimal statement “A wish a coin” (20)—a softening of distinctions, resulting in fluidity and an interrogation of intentionality.

Godfish, another mythlike figure, “lives in the crystal clear aquarium behind the crystal clear window of a giant wooden house in New London, Connecticut” (13), where it is the focus of both the moon’s and the cat’s unconditional love, while it itself is happily infatuated with an oblivious sun. Their impossible love is trusting as a child’s, and reciprocity is assumed rather than sought. Its story is as sad as it is endearing. An untrodden “Desire Path” leads to the isolated wooden house:

22.
A Desire Path is created through an inevitable erosion by an animal. It is a constant back and forth trod in the same narrow area. It is a natural act that connects two suffering destinations in their lack of constant hold. No one liked coming to the giant wooden house in New London, Connecticut, where the winter had a bad bite, the summer brought strange pesticides, and spring hardly lasted in the rain. There was no path, no trod, and no desire deep enough for any kind of create. (32)

Here, the usage of the infinitive as verb/noun creates tension by blurring the line between in progress/motion and outcome/stasis, foreshadowing a similar blurring of animate/inanimate later on. The wooden house isn’t simply the setting for “windings, convolutions, and unnatural happenings” (26). Unwittingly or not, it impacts the action. Godfish’s story might also be read as a parody of the biblical fall from grace—“Paradise Lost” in a “giant wooden house” in New London, CT.

Maybe the speaker chose New London as an imaginary scene for her quasi-American “dream” because it could well embody small town USA: mostly white, overly tended lawns in summer, cold in winter. She sets New London, CT’s remoteness against one of her first encounters with “America” in the form of Happy Meal toys, pinpointing the ubiquity of US culture everywhere, including in her Pakistani childhood, yet with an added local flair. The localness is what she needs to trust: that something in her heritage remain inviolate and resistant: “These toys are different from the toys American children get. I believe. I believe. I believe.” (42)

Coining a Wishing Tower also reflects on different ways of learning and knowing. At one end of the spectrum is the speaker’s mother, who imparts traditions—knowledge built on experience and relationships over a long time—and at the other, knowledge obtained by way of Google—factoids and an uneasy trust in them. Both meet in the speaker’s imagination. As House Mouse and Godfish, they tell a story of aspiration and discovery, of leaving behind the assuredness of home, of loss which can be a form of liberation, as can adulthood. The prose poems’ multifaceted interiority shifts borders, strews sand, sows doubt, then wonder, and joy about yet another beautiful re-invention of the wheel. Ayesha Raees’ Coining the Wishing Tower has added its clear voice to the chorus on my bookshelf.

Burgi Zenhaeusern (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Behind Normalcy (CityLit Press, 2020). She co-edited the translations of the anthology Knocking on the Door of The White House (zozobra publishing, 2017). Her work appeared, most recently, in Sugar House Review, JMWW, Little Patuxent Review, Moist Poetry, and as broadside (Ashland Poetry Press). https://linktr.ee/burgitree

“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).

Self Portrait as a Leading Man

MPJ 
Less than fur but more than shadow. If I were a boy:
a good start. But I have always been a girl,
even when I wanted
not to be,

wanted to play Harold Hill and lean across the desk
to sing to Marion (in the moonlight, a man
could sing it. In the moonlight…).
Why was it the boys
got all the best 
songs?

Now, with age, I hardly see it, have to tilt my face
to the bathroom spotlight to find it. 
Grown blonde, somehow,
on its own.

Not the harsh practically shimmering gold accusation
it became at age twelve, 
Charlene and I

pinched in her tiny, back-of-the-medicine cabinet
mirror, buttering the top of our lips, 
school paste thick and thicker the bleach
because we couldn’t get it
gone, make it
disappear 
fast

enough. Out out damn spot. Oh, those auditions
for grade school plays. Charlene, Prince John.
Charlene, Lady MacBeth, instead of me
because I didn’t think I’d be allowed
to say damn.

Damn you, mustache, you resistance
to a dainty kind of girlhood,
shoes I couldn’t 
kick the ball in,
dresses frilled
with itch.

I wanted to pitch overhand. I wanted
to sing Dulcinea. I wanted
Danny Zucko’s 
leather jacket

and a pair of black Chuck Taylors that could
run me out of the neighborhood’s
bracket of lawns to the
outskirts,

new houses going up but no walls yet,
foundations only in that
good red clay

my Mama would scrub all day
and never get the stain out.

I wrote this poem from the following prompt in Jessica Jacobs’s and Nickole Brown’s Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a glorious, generous book that I highly recommend:

“An ode is a poem that addresses a particular subject, often in praise. In the poem “Ode to Fat,” Ellen Bass revels in her wife’s boundless breasts and marshy belly. / I adore the acreage / of your thighs and praise the promising / planets of your ass. Standing in front of a full-length mirror, see if you can look at the parts of your body you tend to criticize and resee then as opportunities for celebration. Write a description in which you extol the virtues and strengths of these parts, making them—just for the brief duration of this page—each their own kind of superhero.”


Rhett Iseman Trull‘s first book of poetry, The Real Warnings (Anhinga Press, 2009), received the 2008 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, as well as the Brockman-Campbell Book Award, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and the Oscar Arnold Young Award. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other publications. Her awards include prizes from the Academy of American Poets and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. She received her B.A. from Duke University and her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she was a Randall Jarrell Fellow. She and her husband publish Cave Wall in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Postmodern Breugel’s Icarus Poem

MPJ 
if his intent
was to confine
the moral
to the edge, to
the puny feet
by which the boy’s
muted entry into
the water is made
known, then, yes:
the eye is masterfully
misdirected to the plot
of land, the farmer’s bright
red sleeve, the slope
beneath
him, his plow;
but the painter’s hand,
whether he intended
so or not,
returned
repeatedly to the pot
of blue, applied
a wash
of brine
to everything:
every eye,
from every height,
conceding
consanguinity with the sea

Prompt: Consider Bruegel’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” and W.H. Auden’s response poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” alongside William Carlos Williams’ response poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Responses to art need not remain any more static than interpretation of the art itself–with this in mind, and using the above touchstones, write your own response to Bruegel’s landscape.

Jennifer A Sutherland is a poet, essayist, and attorney in Baltimore, and the author of the hybrid, book-length poem Bullet Points: a lyric (River River books, 2023). Her work has appeared or will appear in Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, I-70 Review, Cagibi, Appalachian Review, and elsewhere.