Editor’s Note: Imagine if you could free yourself from the rules and expectations of society, step out of the confining clothes of civilization and be your natural wild self. What form would you take? Would you grow fur or feathers? Howl at the stars? Hoot at the moon?

In Seclusion
xxxhouse-sitting in the Pinelands

When, finally,
I learned how to not be in the world,
the earth turned trusting

the forest began sharing
its old rhythms

gradually I wore less
until it was
that I stood unclothed
on the deck each night,
glad for the beginning of fur
on my body.

And my own sound came
from me then ⎯
that primal noise I had,
for years, swallowed.

That noise, the slow starting of fur,
was there for
what darkness allowed ⎯

that soft opening below,
of the dirt breaking
for when the flesh springs.

Therese Halscheid’s poetry and lyric essays have been published in many magazines, among them Rhino, Gettysburg Review, and Tampa Review. Her poetry collections include Frozen Latitudes, Uncommon Geography, Without Home, Powertalk, and a Greatest Hits chapbook award. She holds an MA and MFA and has taught in varied settings including an Eskimo village in Alaska, and the Ural Mountains of Russia. For more than two decades she has traveled to write by way of house-sitting. She especially likes house-sits in rural areas, where she culls inspiration from natural environments. Her photography chronicles her journey, and has been in several juried exhibitions. Her poem “In Seclusion” appeared in Reed Magazine and in the author’s book, Uncommon Geography (Carpenter Gothic Publisher, 2006). Reprinted with the author’s permission.

Editor’s Note: These days, it’s hard not to feel like the speaker in this poem. There is a great “perturbation” in the air, to use one of poet Stanley Kunitz’s favorite words. We will get through it, as we always have. In the meantime, try to get some sleep.

There Was a Great Want of Civility

All night in the trees,
the whispering,
a great disorder, not the way

leaves talk among themselves
during the day, not the rustle
of squirrels and birds among them,

but a tossing, shiftless shadow
weight of darkness,
leaf to leaf.

I dared not close my eyes
for fear it would have
its way with me.

How
could anyone sleep?

Julie Suarez is retired from Hartwick College where she was an assistant professor of English for 34 years. Her poems have appeared in Salmagundi, Phoebe, Women’s Voices of the 20th Century, La Presa, The Traveller’s Vade Mecum, The New York Times Magazine, Plant Human Quarterly, and others. Her chapbook, It Does Not, was published by Bright Hill Press in 2006. In addition to writing poems, she also sings with the Catskill Choral Society and gardens. This poem was published first in The Traveler’s Vade Mecum (Red Hen Press, 2016), and then, in the New York Times Magazine (February 5, 2017, p.17). It is posted here with the author’s permission.

Editor’s Note: Every once in a while, amidst all the distracting minutiae that fill our days, something calls us to stop and pay attention, to take in the sheer immensity and fullness of being alive and for that to be enough. I have always loved this poem, and so, apparently, does Padraig O Tuama, the Irish poet and host of the weekly Poetry Unbound podcast, who has the line “This is what the living do” engraved on his pen. This poem was written to Howe’s brother, John, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1989.

What the Living Do by Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

Marie Howe was born in 1950 in Rochester, New York. She worked as a newspaper reporter and teacher before receiving her MFA from Columbia University in 1983. Howe is the author of New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2024), which received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry this month. She is also author of Magdalene (W. W. Norton, 2017), which was long-listed for the National Book Award; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W. W. Norton, 2009), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1998); and The Good Thief (Persea Books, 1988), which was selected by Margaret Atwood for the 1987 National Poetry Series. In 1995, she coedited the anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, 1995). A former poet laureate of New York State, she is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and poet-in-residence at The Cathedral of St John the Divine. Her poem, “What the Living Do” is excerpted from What the Living Do (Copyright 1998 Marie Howe) and used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., and the author. All rights reserved.

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.