While compiling this folio, I was particularly drawn to language which is, to borrow the late Louise Glück’s words, “very alive.” For me, linguistic aliveness bears witness to strange and idiosyncratic turns of phrase, lyrical introspection, and the sometimes elusive but always electrifying quality of seeing the poet’s mind unfold on the page. I was fascinated by these up-and-coming poets’ risks and playfulness, their vertical longing, their wry wisdom. “I moved the doctor’s hand to the problem / but the problem moved,” the speaker says in Julian Ansorge’s elliptical portrait of American desolation in “The Long Answer,” while Kyle Carrero Lopez’s intelligent, charged, and concise “Cover Up” challenges the custom of modest dressing in churches: “As if the son himself wasn’t tits out on the cross.”  Samira Abed’s hypnotic and sinuous run-on sentences in “The Way of Hussein” enact memories “the size of a horse,” conjoining a cousin and a child, violence, “a precocious human eye.” Many of these poems are suffused with the “unbearable light/of childhood afternoon” (Sofija Popovska), while others investigate, like Juliette Jeffers, “a trickling sort of love, / the bed of the stream, bright moss.” In Sara Elkamel’s fragmentary and essayistic inquiry of a dreamscape, admissions of desire, envy, and confusion surprise the speaker and reader alike. All poems in this constellation are confident; all poems are very alive; and, most of all, all of them teach me something about what it means to be alive in this moment.

— Aria Aber, Poetry Editor

Samira Abed

In the Way of Hussein

in memory the size of a horse
led to the unfinished porch
on the patio bucking out
smashing its breathing dish
of a face against nothing and
slobbering in rivulets on its reins

and the men had reeled
back at its rear still chuckling

the precautious human eye
whose pupil is wound by biology
to maintain a ring of white until the apex
until the vein pulsing pink in the lax edge of his wet membrane

on the front not the side
of the face to look forward with we
stand to the side in the night
as cardboard boxes atop each
other the wind rustles my nipples hard

bothering me the texture
of my nylon bra in my cotton shirt

against my skin and with my cousin
who acts as my son cajoling
me arms tight in a knot in the bend
near the road far from where the king sleeps
where his guards stand their posts
of the crinkled innard of my elbow
to reach my hand out and
touch the angry monster

JULIAN ANSORGE

The Long Answer

It was the era of shopping.
Staying on the line for the next available agent.
Devoured by winter light I was, in fact, alive.
I looked at a dog look at me.
God gave us breathing holes.
When arcade punching bags weren’t fun anymore
we took to human faces.
The man left the bar covered in blood.
Night undid itself.
I moved the doctor’s hand to the problem
but the problem moved.
I remembered a particular fog
from a particular summer.
There was never a door in the mountain.
I worshiped something invisible.

SOFIJA POPOVSKA

Some of the Things I Know About

on the edge of the woods
where the village trails off

a little church caving in
space congeals in the absence of water
immortality of couch grass
ancient cicada husk

unwashed graves
holding                a spot for

ancestral              future
dead

the house, sun-drenched and haunted
the world caves in around
overexposed boughs heavy with
black cherries            unbearable light
of childhood afternoon

two little girls watch a small yellow caterpillar
travel across the wisdom line
of a cogent palm

my first love:
big green shadow
     veins pouring down gently
        curious about the terrain of fingertips

city noise drowned in springwater
hurting between the knuckles like a small tooth
 in this atrium of waterlogged wood
i am alone with its hollow sound

i am small  over a diary page when i think
 what i don’t write disappears into time
what i write disappears into words
 i write pages of what i can spare

everything i love
will be found one day
like this pebble on this beach

New Poets Part Two is available here.