Oberlin College Press

FIELD #86 (Spring 2012)

Contents

Michael Teig		There is a day under a box
Mekeel McBride		Black Branch Ghost Cake
Dore Kiesselbach		Bulb Auger Ward
Vincent Guerra		Sardine Lake 1992
Carol Moldaw		Since Then
Richard Robbins		Old Country Portraits
Alice Bolin		Covered Wagon Oregon
Nicholas Hundley		What the Wires Feed Widow in the Labyrinth
Amy Newlove Schroeder		The Magician's Assistant Less Remains
Tracy Brimhall		Dear Thanatos, Dear Thanatos
Camasin Middour		Bone Poem
Mark Irwin		There's a jet
Thomas Lux		The Hunchback Farmhand The Moths Who Come in the Night to Drink Our Tears
Franz Wright		Four in the Morning Peach Tree Crumpled Up Note Blowing Away
Karl Krolow translated by Stuart Friebert		One Thing After Another
Marianne Boruch		Practice Saying Hands
Hildred Crill		They Built the Dance Museum
Sarah Wangler		Towhead in the Sonoran Desert
Ray Amorosi		Spandrel Maizie
Jean Valentine		The Rope That Pulls Them Where They Do Not Go
Dolan Morgan		from Mad Men Poems
Elton Glaser		After the Evening News
Marni Ludwig		Ferry Pill Box
Meredith Martin		Apology Seven Apology
Rebecca Givens Rolland		Custody
Kathleen Winter		Hardware
Beckian Fritz Goldberg		My Neighbor's Body
Vijay Seshadri		Mixed-Media Botanical Drawing Trailing Clouds of Glory
Chris Santiago		A Year in the Snow Country Twins in Contrary Motion
Beverley Bie Brahic		What's Here White Sheets
Philip Metres		Testimony (after Daniel Heyman)
Lia Purpura		Sudden
Bruce Beasley		Antithalamion
Angie Estes		Evening Pallino, Pallone
Kurt Olsson		De Kooning's Shirt
Kirun Kapur		Visiting Indira Gandhi's Palmist The American
Nancy Willard		The Path Not Taken

Poetry 2011: Four Review-Essays
David Young		The Bye-and-Bye Log (Charles Wright, Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems)
Pamela Alexander		A Zoo Story, and a Human One (Richard Grossman, The Animals)
David Walker		A Good Way to Fall (Kevin Prufer, In a Beautiful Country)
Martha Collins		Innovation in Form, Form as Innovation (Evie Shockley, the new black)

BLACK BRANCH

The first time
the suicide's ghost
breathes, a small bird
lifts uneasily
from a black branch.
One world at dawn.
By dusk, many more.
The unfinished
nest softened by
ripped bits
of old calendar.
For years, blue wind.
No other color.
Quietly now, death
unties its little boat
from the windowsill.

--Mekeel McBride

FOUR IN THE MORNING

Wind from the stars.
The world is uneasily happy--
everything will be forgotten.

The bird I've never seen
sang its brainless head off;
same voice, same hour, until

I woke and closed my eyes.
There it stood again:
wood's edge, and depression's

deepening
shade inviting me in
saying

no one is here.

No one was there
to be ashamed of me.

--Franz Wright

MIXED-MEDIA BOTANICAL DRAWING

Contorted blossoms, slack,
llascivious orchids,
the tulip's petal so saturated with purple
that it looks black,

the ah-weary-of-time sunflower
crazed by living like a weed
next to the railroad spur,
periwinkles, peonies--

why them? Why them instead of
nothing at all? Well, who cares, really?
Only the feeling they excite counts.
It might be love,

it might not. The grafted rose bleeds
clear liquid at the sutured places.
It's a face, just one face,
in the middle of all the faces.

--Vijay Seshadri