Author: Post Road

In the Time of Vanishing Kingdoms

Nancy Dickeman

Out of nowhere, winds flare, a spark catches 
the oak, its bark chars while flames hollow 
the trunks of the stand of trees:
a forest of candles.

Miles away, the beach once walked upon
is now the floor for an underwater kingdom
of seaweed and fish in need,
coral blanched and brittle at the ocean’s edge. 

Still, the earth’s rotation 
remains as reliable as anything 
the universe offers —  the red moon’s eclipse
over islands and storm-shattered palms.

The dank sludge of oil 
dredged from the earth 
alters the seas, skews the balance 
of hot and cold

until it is only illusion
that villages and cities wrapped 
along diminishing shores
and birds that rummage 

through grass 
or pluck fish from swells
will still be here 
in so many blinding sunrises.

---

Nancy Dickeman is the author of the poetry chapbook Lantern. Her poems, fiction, and essays appear in Post Road, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Hawai’i  Pacific Review, High Desert Journal, The Seattle Times, and other publications. She lives in Seattle and is literary curator for a multidisciplinary exhibit addressing nuclear issues, Particles on the Wall.

Gracilaria, or When She Grows A Whole New Body 

Wendy Cannella 

It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,  
out of all the indifferences into one thing 
—Wallace Stevens, 
“Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” 

Because I can’t think of — 
            this morning on Long Sands  
I bend to lift up 

            a clump of seaweed, purple-red, cemented 
into the muck where the wrack line ends— 
or begins—this slick-slime clump, thick 

stranded as a young girl’s hair, laced with sand, 
gracilaria, because I can’t think of — 
            I dig up rockweed, knotted wrack, 

can’t think of how dark it was about to get 
September, sunset 
                        when the boat flipped— 

so I let these gritty ribbons 
            rasp the grooved pads of my fingers 
I can’t stop breaking open  

            each glowing bladder, swollen— 
one gasp each, their only breath,  
            because— 

she built a lean-to out of broken branches, 
invited each of us inside, 
            shell-blue glow of halogen bulbs  

in the drafty garage of winter,  
            and a kind of life took shape 
within the frozen night, a seed, a bubble,  

 a dwelling  
            in the evening air 
in which being there together 

            is enough— 
so now, when I find a rope  
that snakes like a faded-green necklace 

            across the beach, I follow it 
until the tide comes in, and wherever I walk
            is soft as a belly and wet like eyes. 

---

Wendy Cannella’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Salamander, Solstice, Rattle, and Rhino, among others. Her essay “Angels and Terrorists” is featured in The Room and the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn from Syracuse University Press. She served as chair for the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Project board of directors and was named a Maine Literary Award Finalist in 2019.  

Farmhouse Room + Say What You Will

Jennifer Barber

Farmhouse Room

A fly buzzes the window
that looks out on a line
of sugar maples in bright leaf.

Goats vocalize in the yard,
plaintive; caesura; insistent;
then the same again.

If my friend were alive,
would he tease me for taking time
in the country, as if my stay
could do the work of an elegy?

Or would he only be thinking of
erasing the years ahead?

The goats stop bleating as if
they too were listening
to his last dark thoughts.

The only sound is no sound.

Say What You Will

The trees are entering
the carmine and old gold of their leaves,

dropping an alphabet of twigs.
I don’t know how to crack the code.

Is it about wholeness? Brokenness?
Is it about my friend

who stepped from a ledge last week
rather than endure his blood disease?

Or does the alphabet spell
the consoling turn in a prophecy,

the worst already past,
the exiles finally traveling home?

I could live another twenty years
with no inkling, though I lean

against the trunk of the giant oak
till the leathery leaves cover my feet.

---

Jennifer Barber’s newest collection, The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made, came out in 2022 from The Word Works and her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Ibbetson Street, and upstreet. Her previous books are Works on Paper, Given Away, and Rigging the Wind. She is the current poet laureate of Brookline and the co-editor, with Fred Marchant and Jessica Greenbaum, of the anthology Tree Lines: 21^st Century American Poems (Grayson Books, 2022). The founding editor of the literary journal Salamander, she served as its editor-in-chief from 1992 to 2018.

Guest Folio Introduction

Suzanne Matson

Though I did not begin selecting for this folio with a theme in mind, the poems I was drawn to seemed to cluster around a tactic of pairing human longing and loss to the physical presence, and now, precarity, of the natural world. Whether it’s the poet’s self-entanglement with metaphorical nature in Jahangir Hossain, or the way in which C. Dale Young represents the sea as a site of return for two people who are “like children again” as they bathe, these works speak through a natural register, though, as Jennifer Barber writes of her “alphabet of twigs,” we may not always be able to discern whether the speech is about “wholeness” or “brokenness.”

            Alexis Pauline Gumbs pairs each of her trio of poems with a photograph her mother took of her in an outdoor setting when she was very young. They all show a child reaching, grasping, and stretching to not only touch, but be one with nature—“my tiny hand/ a tree”—in an intuitive connection to the living world around her. It’s a connection that won’t always hold, as the older “girl inside keeps whispering/ not safe to love in green.”

            The poets collected here know we are parented into being by more than our actual human families. There is the “every open sky” rushing to fill maternal absence in Derek Sheffield’s poem, and the disoriented boy “waking one summer night in a meadow” in Christopher Merrill’s fragmented stanzas of trying recuperate the past. The pull of an old belonging becomes a “full-bodied” scent to the shark-hungry speaker in Will Dowd, while for the speaker searching along the shoreline in Wendy Cannella’s poem, recollection dissolves like “muck where the wrack line ends—/or begins.” 

            Using nature as a backdrop now means previewing or acknowledging loss. With 21^st-century uncertainty, any notion of permanence is illusory, as Nancy Dickeman reminds us through the image of the candled forest where, “Out of nowhere, winds flare, a spark catches.”

            These poems all have different shapes, timbres, and aspirations, yet in their very variety they constitute a field, like wildflowers springing from a common ground. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I did. 

Suzanne Matson

Catfish Heart

Beth Suter

of course the fish didn’t want to be in the poem
would rather have been left 
to wallow in the muddy bottoms

its scaleless skin soft against silt
not gutted, its heart left beating on the cutting board
as some lesson to a child

but we were hungry and the image keeps feeding me
how a thing could be so alive and dead
the sharp beauty of after

like how my father’s heart kept beating
after the crash spilled him
through a shattered windshield into the creek—

no one said drunk driving, the old folks called it:
there, but for the grace of God, go I
gin running the generations like water downhill

whatever he meant to show me
in the twitch and pulse of it
I can’t remember        or forget

---

Beth Suter studied Environmental Science at UC Davis and has worked as a naturalist and teacher. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, New American Writing, Barrow Street, DMQ Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and others. Her forthcoming chapbook Snake and Eggs was a finalist in FLP’s New Women’s Voices Contest. She lives in Davis, California with her husband and son. You can find her at facebook.com/bethfsuter.

Let’s Be Mushrooms + Night Blooming Cereus

Tom Paine

Let’s Be Mushrooms

Let’s be mushrooms, you and I, when we die—
we are not egotist trees, pith and heartwood,
raging, cursing with raw bark and wild sap,
shaking influencer fists at the bemused sky.
We will do the work in the eternal crematory, 
roasting coffee and crimes; senators and saints.
Little will be known of our gracious generation.
What they will proclaim as us—our fish-bellied, 
gilled-umbrella eyes, peeking like whack-a-mole
from the forest floor, belies the supreme scale 
of our secret selves below their hustling feet, 
where we will live as one, unseen and unafraid, 
in our conspiracy of rebirth, a subterranean veil 
of life-giving lace–(neither of us ever needed 
earth to spin to know sun is not the only star).

Night Blooming Cereus

There is a light, a light like angels rising from the grave, 
sneaking in, blinded with love. Angelic light is bright 
on you as you sleep on this morning. Sometimes I feel 
a night blooming cereus has stalked our bed into clouds. 
Unbidden, insane sensibility; a strange displacement, 
but extra-real, there is emptiness except our bedroom.
This disassociated floating arises like this: a lone scarf 
of swirling silken chalk slowly pinwheels, permeates. 
Love: it is happening again, I whisper, everyone is crazy!
Let those awake to death-making go drive and work. 
I bless your moist, flickering eyelids. Everything else, 
everything outside this box of love, their time, is a lie. 

---

Tom Paine’s poetry is upcoming or published in The Nation, The Moth (Ireland), The Rialto (UK), New Contrast (South Africa), Volt, Vallum (Canada), Glasgow Review of Books (Scotland), and elsewhere. Stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Awards, and twice in the Pushcart Prize. His first collection Scar Vegas(Harcourt) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a PEN/Hemingway finalist. He is a professor in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire.