Gaylord Brewer
More Honored in the Breach:
Fava Bean

Gaylord Brewer - More Honored in the Breach:
Fava Bean

Poetry
Gaylord Brewer is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, where he founded and for 20+ years has edited the journal Poems & Plays. His forthcoming books are a cookbook/memoir, The… Read more »
Michael Derrick Hudson
Scale Model of a World War II Airplane

Michael Derrick Hudson - Scale Model of a World War II Airplane

Poetry
Michael Derrick Hudson lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His poems have appeared in Columbia, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, North American Review, New Letters, Washington Square, and other… Read more »
Amorak Huey
Scientists Say One Language Disappears Every 14 Days

Amorak Huey - Scientists Say One Language Disappears Every 14 Days

Poetry
Amorak Huey, a former newspaper editor and reporter, teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His chapbook The Insomniac Circus is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press. His poems… Read more »
Piotr Gwiazda
The Propertyless

Piotr Gwiazda - The Propertyless

Poetry
Born and raised in Poland, Piotr Gwiazda is a poet, critic, and translator. He has published two books of poems, Gagarin Street (2005) and Messages (2012), a critical study James Merrill and W.H.… Read more »
Daniel Butterworth
Toward Death

Daniel Butterworth - Toward Death

Poetry
D. S. Butterworth teaches literature and creative writing at Gonzaga University. He has a creative non-fiction book from Algonquin, Waiting for Rain: A Farmer’s Story, and a book of poems, The… Read more »

Toward Death

Daniel Butterworth

Labyrinths of seasons lose us in the cries terns
make nesting on the island out in Ballynakill Harbor,
and the Twelve Bens scale the clouds. We find
our temporary homes brooding on roads the way
we find selves, or maybe the way souls make bodies.
But it’s actually bodies that make souls, isn’t it,
the brain conjuring all that ghostly meaning? Existence
is a sleeve thought pulls inside-out to discover
 
the invisible is more real than the visible
even though the elemental wind and stone
and sea of a person trump the blown circuitry
every time. Today, for example, it’s a woman
carried through town in a black wagon whose
wheels sound like grief and joy at the same time.
Hundreds empty from the church and wind
through the town until the memory of her spills
 
out past the harbor to drown. Ninety-six years
before her cladding crumbled and still against the sky
sea birds speak a language of wind and light
in their raging hungers. The houses move
darknesses across the bay. We have words
for the house, words for the sea, and words
for us. Inside a jar the words are beating
thin against the walls of glass.
Read more »