A Visit

by Jed Myers This other light she’s wrapped in lifts the furrows life left in her skin. All her ages now, or none—no shadow where she leans at something like a desk. Her dark pen streams an ink- black shine along the vein-blue lines down one white page then the next. The letters weave like seaweed in a tide-swept river mouth. Silent lips move with her hand—a kind of speech. I start to wake, to drift between two lands. She couldn’t see me, and I couldn’t read. Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award),…

1840

by Sarine Balian

Gravity

BY KATE SCHOLL

When I sit up to get out of bed in the morning,
suddenly my breasts feel the weight of gravity
New soft tissue pulled down towards the center of the earth
Suddenly having to deal with the day
and the responsibility of wakefulness and work
And so for just a moment there is such pain.
And yet the world is saying hey, you have those new things, wake up girl
The earth is reminding me of who I am every day, promptly
My own personal planetary wake up call,
pick me up,
pull me down,
embrace me.

The Book of Moths

BY ARIANNA SEBO

The moths have their own religion
one of colour and flight
fuzzy feelers searching for luminescence
not so different from us humans
following our flights of fancy
allowing our imaginations
to pave the way for our good intentions
not always fulfilled
but we try
with Sunday school children
and church bazaars
Sunday sermons and tapioca pudding
searching for heights
and falling from grace
like the moths
obsessed with the light

Three Poems

By Jedediah Smith

Does the Wail Diminish?
            elegy for Miles Davis

You were a Hell Hound
howling at the moon
on a moonless night,

had enough bad taste
to believe in your own existence
despite every authority’s proof
.         that you were gone.
Pouring out the empty spaces between notes
like the sacramental wine in a goblet of solid brass
– sounding, like a bell
.         in the bass
                   of an ocean
                                  orchestra.

A Glass I Won’t Pick Up Again

By J. Jules

Why did I pick up that glass?
Wine doesn’t sit well on an empty stomach.
And I’m allergic to sulfites.

I could have avoided it all.
The nausea, the vomit,
the horrified look on her face.

No excuses. I did. And boy,
did it make a mess to clean up

Three Parts

by: Kate scholl

This thing has three parts;
Three will be returned thrice more
One, two,

Three times…
There is the before time:
the boyhood, the uncertain masculinity, the obliviousness
The now time:
the girlhood, the transition, the finally finally figuring it out, the contentedness
And the then time:
the woman I will be, the knowing altogether who I am, the victory

TCR Talks with Matthew Zapruder

By Martin Cossio

Matthew Zapruder is a poet, a teacher, an editor, a translator, and an accomplished guitar player. He is the co-translator of Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu’s last collection, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems, and editor-at-large of Wave Books (He edited Tyehimba Jess’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner, Olio). Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry—the second of which, The Pajamaist, was selected by Tony Hoagland as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award—and one book of prose on the art and craft of poetry. He is a professor in the MFA program at St. Mary’s College of California.

Instincts

By Jared Pearce

The fledglings out the dining
window are full and flown;
two weeks it took their down

to fluff, their pinions stress,
their constant parents snatching
moths to stuff their needy maws.

Lake Sagatagan Summer

By Denton Loving

After evensong at the abbey, we walk circles
in the woods, weaving through deerflies

in kamikaze flights. The cerulean warbler
mates among these trees, we’re told,

so we keep vigil for blue flickers in leaves.
So far, nothing. On half-submerged logs,

turtles perch like hard-shelled gods—
We canoe to the deepest part of the lake

before we can talk about who we were
before the other existed as witness.