Oberlin College Press

Contents

C.D. Wright: A Symposium
Jenny Goodman		Tough and Tender: The Speaker as Mentor
Laura Kasischke		Brighter Is Not Necessarily Better
Pamela Alexander		Fire and Water
Sharon Olds		On a First Reading of "Our Dust"
Kazim Ali		On "Crescent"
Stephen Burt		Consolations and Regrets

*****
Max Ritvo		Uncle Needle December 29
Mimi White		The ER
James Haug		Wood Came Down the River The Turkey Ideal
Traci Brimhall		Künstlerroman
Ralph Burns		One Afterlife Blue Star
Kay Cosgrove		Wake Up You Dead
Chris Santiago		Hele in C Unfinished Poem
Gisela Hemau translated by Sara Edinger		Singing Lesson The Time Has Come
Daniel Lawless		Vine
Dan Rosenberg		A Space Telescope Tilted at Us Delilah We Will Not Be for Him
Megan Snyder-Camp		The Plan Tomorrowland
Kaveh Akbar		What Seems Like Joy
Owen McLeod		Mother Tongue
Lee Sharkey		Farewell (Der Abscheid, 1913) Das Ende (1918)
John Rybicki		Stay Alive
Dennis Schmitz		The Other Side
Bob Hicok		All together, on three
Peter Leight		Reunion of the Class of the Present
Mikko Harvey		Vial
Bridget Sprouls		It Has Been, Yes Episode
Kirsten Kaschock		Circle of Fifths 7 Circle of Fifths 9 Circle of Fifths 10
C. F. Sibley		Woman 1 as Exhibit
David St. John		Pasternak & the Snowy Heron The Old Wave
Vanessa Couto Johnson		Render Billow
Jon Loomis		At the Lake House Imaginary Friends
Sandra McPherson		Hoh Imprint
Ben Jackson		One River

UNCLE NEEDLE

Today my uncle gave me the death I always wanted.

He touched me with a couple needles
and my arms went to the bed

and my legs felt like they went deeper
into the ground two stories below.

I noticed half my life was floating
in cotton. Almost all of life is floating

if you count the air beneath floors
or the tar above earth.

For a moment my nose
had to deal with so much violence

just there, in the air trying to reach me,
that there was no time to think my violent thoughts.

And my uncle sat in a chair by the bed
and thought tenderly of me--he didn’t ask me to think,

to keep thinking. But there will be a next death.
You can't hold a cut shut.

You can't stitch a heart into beating.
Why can't everyone be more like uncle?

--Max Ritvo

WAKE UP YOU DEAD

Once a man sent me a valentine under the circumstance
that he "found it on the floor & decided to send it," a circumstance

which required me to throw it away, just as I threw
a book at John once to make him love me. Circumstances

shift, and today John's small baby who is my small baby ate
a blueberry for the first time. Magic, under the circumstances.

It is time to vote for President again and I've watched a house
be torn down brick by brick the past three weeks. These circumstances

feel connected but the reason sits shiva on the tip of my tongue. Like
"as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he" & the circumstances

on an exit ramp in Newark, NJ which led a man to hold HELP
on a piece of cardboard. I didn't, given the car & the circumstance

& I'm sorry. Oh wake up you dead language, you who place a circle
which is constant inside the blue heart of our stormy circumstance.

--Kay Cosgrove

TOMORROWLAND

Family dinner night, and we are deciding what to save:
polar bears or slipper limpets. Girls in Afghanistan

or the wolf. We can't save everything
but the kids are ready

with their banks, the season's extra, the not-
ice cream. How does the Afghan girl feel

to make our list? We bring more and more
money to the table but the list outruns it.

My mother comes in from visiting a friend in hospice,
sick from all the chemo. When I get whatever it is, she says,

I want you to do nothing. It's only May
and already they've declared a statewide drought.

Yesterday I hiked over a river that was not there.
Coral reefs, my son says, that's what I want

to save. And so we do. Whatever is happening to us
is deductible. Silence of the was-river,

was-bear. In the movies everyone is building
some kind of ark.

--Megan Snyder-Camp