On a forest hike, a man and son stop for lunch.

The boy lies back on a rock.

They’ve planned to go home

soon after tossing scraps.

But the man has forgotten the way:

the clouds peek over trees; the woman,

once his wife, has left with someone else.

In his hand, the father holds a tangerine

and a tuna sandwich that’s been stinking up the car.

Let’s wait until we see a bird or until

we see the first star, the boy says of a forest

crippled by bark beetles and in need of rain.

The father wants so much.

He wishes he knew more than what’s on the news—

more about nature so he might tell his son,

this grows only for a few days in the spring or

this many years ago, this mountain was flat.

He wants to say it before telling the truth

about the mother. Where is the strength

promised from faith? There is a ripple

in the trees standing next to fallen trees.

the waters will flow through the gutters with ease

without you having to interfere

hydrodynamics, you’ve said

and the clicks of the emails coming, will silence themselves

at least for a time, your head so heavy

maybe you can heal, hard as it can be, through the years

and you, lying so still, giving very little

while the rain pours down

so much pressure passing through the leaves and the gunk

through one small channel

or somehow going around all of it

I can’t imagine how that would look

we’ve crossed that line

all of the water’s pressure

moving through

it flows, is cleansing

the pounding on the roof

all of the information is gone now

So lost in everything

And I’m hoping

Snorts in the passageway, pinches the delicate ones—

those who wear the jackdaw’s gray plumage.

Kafka’s father and Kafka’s father’s two dead sons.

This trilogy in which a Czech accent flourishes, upon which

the holy days continue to riffle the year.

Can such a man corrupt the liver of a virgin goose?

A bread job, then. A useless son for Kafka’s father,

this loser looking into the lost fingers of workers.

A bit of blood spreads through the lungs.

Feathers ink the page. It’s 2 pm or 2 am?

At what hour does the incessant womanizing begin?

How to avoid marriage, how continue flirtations with

drowning.

Kafka’s father’s son, dirty with the sex of octaves.

Filthy to himself, and as for marriage,

that rumor died in Munich. That consummation—

a conjugation of who, with whom, when, and why.

The father above, the son below, High German spoken

to veil a lowly Yiddish dialect.

Its only remaining artifact—a few satin skirts

left to themselves like theater curtains,

in whose wake the story exists.

Give us a moment to learn to pray for Kafka’s father.

Pater in his silk dressing gown with the dusty lilies,

the one who rises early to begin his work again.

Grabbing a raincoat, I find a moth and ask:

What do you do here in my closet,

what of your light–

to which he says: At the end of each night,

my light goes into my soul, what of

yours? The day is then

the weather’s blue colors, mirrors and rain,

that almost white where a thick darkness

blurs with a thick light.

Standing there, I see myself almost a man,

almost a moth, pieces of

a remembered face

brought up, overlapping, as if the changing face

were on old film, and that old film

played across moth wings

holding their position. Almost myself

frame by frame and without sound,

imposed on dust

for an audience. Almost my face holding

still, and face turning away. Face

of wing-wilt and wend.

Grabbing a raincoat, I found a moth and asked

myself about light, and myself answered

light; a moth

throbbed at having been found. When

my words had flickered aloud, the moth,

too, flickered,

an unknown face caught cringing, unfolding

face laughing, face

forgetting its name.

Nights like these, when I am less a man

more a traffic light lingering on yellow,

more feet full of running, twitching over the gas

pedal,

more snake caught between rocks thrashing,

more a radio’s needle stuck between static and

station,

coughs and crashes of what could be

song or argument,

more the image of the moon as garlic clove,

as burst and leaking light –

when tourist season makes me feel I can stop

pretending –

I know I don’t belong here, I belong everywhere.

The engagement was over, so Amanda dug a well

in the middle of a field, tossed a pack of Camels

and a few cracked novels down the hole,

then dyed her hair redder in that water, so cold

it dried stiff. She wanted to see Maine’s lighthouses,

but the drive was too damn far, so she started digging.

I can see light when I look up from here, anyway.

She wears a kimono like a tired housewife,

blows smoke away from my face, clinks her cider

against my beer, a Cheers to every woman

who believed a man when he said love and true,

who let herself bloom when there was no rain.

Down there, the light becomes a white coin hanging

above her slack mouth, her tilted chin, her dull eyes.

i’m afraid of stars

fuck it

all of outer space.

how small it makes me.

i’d rather not count

the grains of sand

stuck to my thighs

after sex

on the beach

a millepede

scuttering next

to my shoulder

meteors shooting

blank over

my lover’s head.

not so blank.

i abort a galaxy

half named after me.

named ammo.

named nothing.

i don’t know how

to navigate a maze

without knocking down

walls. i don’t know

one place

one thought

one urge

from the next.

but i know

what it means

to roll over

in the middle

of the night

to shallow breath

of a quiet sleeper

who—when he wakes—

will disappear

inside me.

by Trina Burke

Who is my mom’s secret first husband

to me? No more a landscape feature

than the Zuiderzee. What can I say? I caved

when asked for a family

history. They are to me a collective

mystery, a game that is a book

in which we all write results

that are as strange to us as a dull butter knife

with its florid handle patina

obscuring bright plating, for special occasions only,

in a family that celebrates nothing.

And if my father could never be anything

but a used car salesman,

telling stories that are not strictly true

and in which we all wish to believe, then he did

wreck a corvette in Lake Spear,

then I am the one with the German mother,

then the waves in the sea

are the built-up energy of a finity of shad tails

swishing and have nothing to do with you or the moon.

There is no noun for my relation to a wave of the sea.

For salt is neither a texture thing nor

a question of taste. It is simply right

with the rightness of a baker baking. Allspice

does not encompass all spices,

it is no part cardamom, contains no mace.

It’s a hard hat to hold onto in a hurricane, yes,

but we were never meant to stand against gale force winds.

We are wily, we go to ground when we recognize

that our buildings weren’t built to code. We know

that we are Dasein, and this place at which we have arrived

is unheimlich. Only the call and response of a pair of cranes

might render it familiar. Only

the hen’s egg dropped too soon in the soup.

by Valentina Cano

I imagine my hair in a different era.

Coal-strewn and tobacco scented.

I picture it sailing through snapping sea air,

unfurled like a sail.

Threads of it let loose

to search out fresh territory.

by Valentina Cano

Bottles full of exhales

landed drunk on their sides.

Darkening patches of grass

with their humming plastic torsos,

leaving a yellow cross stitch

where they slept off the fumes.

Marking their spots like dogs.