Appeasement What you did wasn’t so bad so you told yourself as you stood in the garage, waiting for hope. Hope for appeasement by an ex-best friend but the rusting white chariot that slowed then accelerated was Tundra not Tacoma No, you’re right, it was terrible to live without love in small rooms with flawed creations, the trivial handiwork of a dream gone bad Do you know the grail is

Transfiguration Black ground eats the light of every heavenly expression in this ungratified November night. We watch the dissipation of vapor and mist, endearing darkness further to itself, betraying the tranquility of nocturnal harvest, the lunatic scraps of this moment fighting to keep their particular bearing. In this nearness, I measure the asymmetry of your features with my own, revealed by a sudden and gradual intrusion of amber, a different

Empty Parking Lot, 2:07 a.m. over that hill, past the mills, is the crooked house I escaped from. it wasn’t a great fall with the colors, mostly hunter green and rust with the rain. like it was too depressed to go ahead and shine like it usually does. now, it’s a sheet of white, the dying hidden. catch snowflakes on my tongue, a cold smoky taste. how winter feels on

The milk moment, the churning need- bubble echoes empty into “them.” The words that circle, your bird’s eye view is weak and needing. Only what you catch will live another day; so it’s spoken. The words you hear are reminders, a memory stream bright and beaming. What you say to yourself, how you picture what is thought and felt; all the word storms that plague and infect your life, all

Hidden Losses It never crossed my mind— what would happen after reaching, finally, that happiness. How it would feel giving up the open-ended beauty of indifference, my love of following the dark into the secret corners of people, cities —feelings that can only be scraped against by willing to give it all up at a moment’s notice— To be done finding love by pulling it out of the dirt by

Manumission …from the mud, spiraling double-helix intent upon apotheosis ersatz DNA, verisimilitude of countless generations separating us from first mover/primordial ooze copies of copies effigies of weltschmerz simulacra of daedalian dreams melted by sunrays burning as we venture too close or wake, blinking at the morn. What then? Can we escape the cave, turn from shadow to illumination, or should we find contentment in mud and echoes? Cigarette Flick Speeding

Breslin White’s poetry is matter-of-fact, yet the irony in “Whence” plays with this pragmatism. “With Mother,” the line, “Some of these shapes look suspicious” injects a contrary interpretation. And the poem “All Alert”? Readers, like the swans, are “placated with the transformation.”

It’s hard to match Samuel E. Cole’s lyricism. In “Instinct,” it’s the visualization of the child’s “heartbeat adrift/among the sounds of/cosmic collision”; the natural imagery as foreground in “Cherry Horses”; and the narrative of poverty wailing “multitude horrors” in “Epiglottis.”

Leigh Fisher shows how the art of poetic narration works in “Fairer Hands,” in which the poet tries “to scale a ladder that was never made to be climbed”; and in “Diploma for Daedalus,” where no labyrinth prevents her success “with this degree in hand.” In “Dotted or Solid” she learns “the goal/is obeying the road’s lines.”

Elizabeth Luchniski shows us how to see women as individuals in “12 Ways of Looking At a Woman,” just as she does two men who “share a laugh/Discuss the unknown” in “Skyless Sky.” And “A Poem Is” a poem “That you may need,/But only if/You can feel it.

Nostalgia has a significant influence on humanity, and the wistfulness in Maya Roe’s poetry is poignant. The three stanzas “In Land I Knew” illuminate the poet’s remembrances as if you the reader were experiencing the land itself; so too in “Tangles” and “1941/2017” as entrances to the inner heart of memory.

Take the alleged mundanity in “Trash-Burning”—“Out here it’s most weekends in the summer”; the personification of the “chair-back straight” tree in “Memory Tree”; and the Latin “vocat/aestus in umbra” in “National Bohemian Pastoral,” and you glimpse Mercer Bufter’s poetic philosophy.

E. Merrill Brouder’s poetry is not limited in style or meaning. See the poet professing his love on the Ferris wheel in “County Fair, Senior Year”; delivering an encomium to the natural world in “Hallelujah, Hallelujah”; and asking, “What will become/ of the MERRILL lot/now that everyone has left?” in Genealogy.

Unmistakable in Adam Que’s poetry is his down-to-earth perspective, as presented in the narrative of Reye’s syndrome in “The Leftovers”; the concrete image of “Chaco shredding the pollo” in “Tuesday”; and the rich irony between “real” nature and “a downloaded app” in “Simulation.”

Read Renoir Gaither’s poems out loud and catch the meaning collapsing into rhythmic meter, as in this tercet in “Morning Papers Waltz”: “Salutations to subway dreams and spearmint gum./Salutations to asphyxiating oil addition and asthmatic Raqqa streets./Salutations to corporate welfare recipients mewing at public troughs.” The same is true of “Envelope” and “Auction.”

Personification meets allegory in Luciana Erregue-Sacchi’s poem “My Apple”—“Eve,/Stands, unrepentant/Venus Pudica”; and metaphor meets personification in “Garden”—“my garden is a map of my brain/Cobalt, cadmium, coral, kidney shaped.” “Volcanoes In Antarctica?” Read the poem to see poetry as analysis.

There is a special resonance in Louis LoRe’s poems. In “Community College of Vermont, the Early Days,” you hear the girl think “with hopes of becoming.” In “When I Awake” you feel the fear as “he rises to his haunches” and escapes. And you realize the boy can no longer be innocent of the apocalypse of nuclear war in “Sunday Morning.”

A spiritual passion awakens in Ann Christine Tabaka’s poetry. The titles instruct: in “Cutting Through the Fog” the brume swallows the poet whole; in “Eternal Games” the story, like uroboros, eternally chases “its own tail”; and in “Brokenness” emptiness reaches out, “searching.”

An unambiguous pathos permeates Clara Burghelea’s poetry in, for example, this line: “I would have grown forgetful, had I stayed” in “My Own Key Slotted in Your Door.” Then, in “Survival” “love gave its sorrow a name/and drowned it.” And “how can I breathe breathless into the air of you?” in “On Life’s Meaningful Pauses.”

In each of Mart-Matteus Kampus’ poems visualization is key. In “Funabulism” a cat devours a mouse, “his red/whiskers/tightrope/walked/in the clear/morning air.” In “Click” the camera eye embraces all of what it sees—“sky,” shy moon,” “gentle summer.” And then there is “Chrysalis”—a feast of imagistic verse.

There is only the dance of poetic rhyme in O’Brien’s poetry, as embodied in the poem “Pegasus,” a moral tale unencumbered by abstraction or opaque allusions: “Rejoice and kick up/the dust/in your/every advance,” the poet commands.

There is a subdued presence in McAllister’s poetry, as if she is whispering in your ear: feel the sensuous in “Vertigo, NC”; see the fox emerge from the trees in “Wisp”; and in “To My Daughter” know “a temple in the mountain.”

When a poet uses figurative language like Soule in “Shipwrecked,” you feel the extended metaphor or conceit alive in the paradox that the men on board will perish, “becoming pearls, their skin coral.” Ditto “A Book Like Mine” and quicksand.

Translated from Russian, Blizniuk’s poetry is imbued with concrete images that place you within their parameters, and yet the abstract moves ever so closely to a Universe of billions where “someone has torn out a wire from the cable of the humanity.”