Editor’s Note: Countless elements go into the making of a riverbed—water salinity level and velocity; the interaction of plants, animals, and micro-organisms; the amount of sunlight; what the earth is made of. The same congruence of infinitessimal events and conditions is at play in our own lives, determining with whom we fall in love, what health issues befall us, and when we take our final breath. We like to think we are self-determining creatures but meanwhile, the great “web of circumstances” is working behind the scenes.  I love how the poet slips from nature to our own human experiences of love and grief, and how the ending encompasses all of it. 

The Internet of Things 
(n.): the networking capability that allows information to be sent and received by objects and devices

The low tide riverbed silt
of things. The cloud-swept

distant hill of things.
The open bedroom window

in spring of things.
The moonlit cricket

symphony of things.
The pitter-patter

tin roof rain of things.
The fifty-year marriage

loose skin of things.
The clipped winter light

of things. The stippled lymph
node of things. The grief.

Oh—the grief. The brief
ecstatic flight of things.

Erin Murphy is an American poet who is credited with inventing the demi-sonnet. She received her B.A. in English and philosophy from Washington College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst’s MFA Program for Poets & Writers. Murphy is a professor of English and a member of the creative writing faculty at The Pennsylvania State University, Altoona College. Her poem, “The Internet of Things,” appeared in her recent book, Fluent in Blue (Grayson Books, 2024). It originally appeared in Rattle magazine and received the Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award. The poem is posted here with permission of the author.

Editor’s Note: This is the poem that happens when you’re a poor young writer subsisting paycheck to paycheck and someone gives you an outlet for your creativity. What poem would have arisen, I wonder, if he had worked at a waffle iron manufacturer? DL

Tester by Edgar Kunz

I catch a bus out to the county
and check in at a beige terminal

and they ask me about the smells
and textures of various dips

and I click appealing
or not appealing, then elaborate

in the text box below. Artichoke
and French Onion. Spicy Three

Bean Queso. I got in
on referral. I live with seven

other people. I measure rent
in how many sessions I have to do

with the dips. I start testing
what I can get away with: notes

of bright espresso, mouthfeel
of a sun-ripe plum.

I write longer and longer.
I don’t think they read a word.

It’s weeks before you’re entered
into the system, more weeks

to get your tiny check. Aline says
If you think it’s a scam

why do you keep saying yes?
In the fluorescent room I receive

one dip after another from blue
gloved hands, always the same

plain tortilla chips to dip with,
the same hands clearing away

the tiny plastic cups. I tinker
with my descriptions. If I need

water, they bring me water
in slightly larger cups.

Edgar Kunz has been an NEA Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Poetry, the American Poetry Review and the Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College. His poem “Tester” is included in his second book, Fixer (Copyright© 2023 by Edgar Kunz). Posted here with author’s permission and courtesy of Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers.

Editor’s Note: I have tried and failed many times to tame the earth’s green, to be the arbiter of which kind of green prevails. Daffodils, yes. Dandelions, no. Despite my interventions, the shoots keep shooting, wanted or not, the season’s “green will” joyously asserting itself across my yard. 

Fearless by Tim Seibles
     for Moombi

Good to see the green world
undiscouraged, the green fire
bounding back every spring, and beyond
the tyranny of thumbs, the weeds
and other co-conspiring green genes
ganging up, breaking in,
despite small shears and kill-mowers,
ground gougers, seed-eaters.
Here they come, sudden as graffiti

not there and then there—
naked, unhumble, unrequitedly green—
growing as if they would be trees
on any unmanned patch of earth,
any sidewalk cracked, crooning
between ties on lonesome railroad tracks.
And moss, the shyest green citizen
anywhere, tiptoeing the trunk
in the damp shade of an oak.

Clear a quick swatch of dirt
and come back sooner than later
to find the green friends moved in:
their pitched tents, the first bright
leaves hitched to the sun, new roots
tuning the subterranean flavors,
chlorophyll setting a feast of light.

Is it possible      to be so glad?
The shoots rising in spite of every plot
against them. Every chemical stupidity,
every burned field, every better
home & garden finally overrun
by the green will, the green greenness
of green things growing greener.
The mad Earth publishing
Her many million murmuring
unsaids. Look

how the shade pours
from the big branches—the ground,
the good ground, pubic
and sweet. The trees—who
are they? Their stillness, that
long silence, the never
running away.

Tim Seibles was born in Philadelphia in 1955. He received a BA from Southern Methodist University in 1977, after which he taught English at the high school level for 10 years. He received an MFA from Vermont College in 1990. Seibles is the author of seven poetry collections including Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems (Etruscan Press, 2022); and One Turn Around the Sun (Etruscan Press, 2017). He was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award and a winner of both the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for Poetry. His poem “Fearless” appeared in Buffalo Head Solos. Reprinted with permission of the author.