When spring’s ghost joins me on the deck to watch Gilt city lights click on across the bay, Some downtown maid squeaks windows, wipes the splotch Between us. Here, this quiet view. Soft clay And pungent eucalyptus, thick with rain, Exude their essence. Summer’s gloom unwinds, A pane has shattered, and each rampant cane Of luscious juicy blackberries reminds My grief entwining August’s humid air. A wedge of geese pries open autumn, herds Fat purple clouds toward dusk above the glare Of distant offices. Your murdered words Of love on voicemail echo you were dead Before you put that bullet through your head.
*****
Beth Houston writes: “Regarding the sonnet: This is one poem I’d prefer to let the reader chew on without me explaining anything. It does have some tricky time aspects…”
She adds: “I have announced the submission period for the next anthology on the Rhizome Press website. Included are updated guidelines and new emails for submissions and general mail (no longer gmail). Folks will have plenty of time to submit. I just hope I don’t get an avalanche at the last minute. But better loads of poems than not getting them. I’m eager for people to let their poet friends know. I’d love to get LOTS of submissions.
Beth Houston(www.bethhouston.com) has taught writing (mostly creative writing) at ten universities and colleges in California and Florida and has worked as a writer and editor. She has published a couple hundred poems in dozens of literary journals. She writes free verse and formal poetry, mostly sonnets, and has published a novel, two nonfiction books, and six poetry books (out of print). She edits the Extreme formal poetry anthologies via one of her indie presses, Rhizome Press (www.rhizomepress.com).
a bored and haughty wife, now sidelined and abeyed, half-pivoting within a flood-tide of brocade, smiles at the black-skinned boy who bears her dress’s train. final tercet of the French sonnet “The Dogaressa” by José-Maria de Heredia (1842–1905)
Veneto, black-skinned boys, and trains: displaced by devastation, young Africans with pluck and brains revive that combination. They search these railcars for remains of others’ dislocation, like gleaners seeking fallen grains — a task of desperation.
Before each stop, the train brakes grind. We pause. We recommence. A boy appears, as if assigned. His scrutiny’s intense. He scans for objects left behind through lack of care or sense. (I guess. I’ve yet to see one find a bit of recompense.)
We stop. We go. The scene repeats, on every train we’ve taken. The boy surveys the floors and seats for anything forsaken, and — empty-handed still — retreats, his eagerness unshaken. I’ve seen his clones on city streets. What trades do they partake in?
Some hold out cups to beg, although we blind, deaf crowds move on. (They tug our heart- and purse-strings, so we play automaton.) Some boys this age get pimped, I know. Some pilfer things to pawn. The train brakes shriek. We stop. We go. Our boy’s come back. He’s gone.
He’s trapped in this recurrent dream. I feel I’m trapped here, too. The other passengers don’t seem to see him passing through, except a few who show extreme contempt (as I construe their narrowed eyes’ attentive gleam). That, too, is déjà vu.
“A zodiac of sorts,” I muse: The Wailing One. The Doors. The Kid who seeks what others lose. The Gaggle that ignores. The Watchdog ready to accuse young scapegoats it abhors. And I, the Poet, prone to use portentous metaphors.
Again, these constellations wheel. Again, I contemplate commuters’ faces, which reveal obliviousness or hate. Another horrifying squeal. Another hurried wait. Another search. How must he feel, this boy, about his fate?
Though circumstances brought him here, not slavers, is he free? He scrambles just to live, it’s clear, although he ought to be in school. He’ll be no engineer. No teacher. No M.D. Survival is his life’s career, decides society.
I think what lives my children lead. I think of things I’ve read. The long-dead voices that I heed. The headlines in my head. The decadence. The waste. The greed. The desperate. The dead. What choice was smooth-faced Ganymede presented with instead?
He rode to immortality, but did he have a say? Consent’s a triviality to gods, some might inveigh, and rape’s a technicality (defined the ancient way), and pederasts’ carnality had stricter rules of play.
I know. But circumstances tore that kid from loved ones’ care to Mount Olympus, where he bore the things that slave-boys bear. And bears them still, forevermore. No beard, no death, can spare young Ganymede, exploited for eternity up there.
No, no, he’s fortunate, insist some authors. He’s adored. Complimented. Cuddled. Kissed. Ambrosia’s his reward for having topped the favorites list of such a lofty lord. The death we mortals face, he missed. That shouldn’t be ignored.
A palace slave is nonetheless a slave, and can’t decline a burden, though it might oppress: a massive cup of wine; the heavy train of someone’s dress who thinks herself divine; the weight of knowing each caress means mainly “This is mine.”
The dogaressa eyes her toy. Her property. Her pet. Some see in him what might destroy stability — a threat. But I behold a human boy ensnared in power’s net. What games his owner might enjoy will fuck him up, I bet.
But maybe I misjudge her smile. I view it through the prism of factors I must reconcile, like French conservatism, a splash of Afrophobic bile, and anti-feminism. Perhaps she’s not a pedophile. (Forgive my skepticism.)
Perhaps she smiles because she’s kind (though labeled “bored” and “haughty”). Perhaps the lady’s too refined to have a thought that’s naughty. The dots connected in my mind to Ganymede are dotty, perhaps. To me, though, they’re combined. These points are not staccati:
Aquarius, the catamite within the Zodiac; a twisted queen who claims the right to toy with pawns; this black — and therefore foreign — youngster’s plight, forever circling back in search of luck. These trains unite on thought’s recursive track.
He’s African. He’s Syrian. He’s Phrygian. He’s Rom. He’s Asian. He’s Nigerian. He’s white, but can’t go home. His bedroom is empyrean: its roof is heaven’s dome. His cup’s part full, in theory. In it? Coins. It’s styrofoam.
He’s Ganymede, collectively, yet every clone’s unique. They all seem doomed to tragedy, but don’t mistake mystique and myth for how things have to be. Inertia’s prospect’s bleak, but railroad cars and history change course with friction’s shriek.
He’s made it to the Occident. (Let’s pause now to salute ourselves, and our enlightenment.) His homeland tried to shoot and starve him. He should be content he didn’t drown en route. He’s lucky! Don’t misrepresent the fact he’s destitute.
Some myths should really be revised. Some fictions should appall. When those who claim they’re civilized spew racist vitriol, and orphaned kids are demonized by oligarchs, we all should spot the pattern, unsurprised. The writing’s on the wall.
The doorway yawns. I stiffly rise on travel-swollen feet. At noon, I crossed the Bridge of Sighs; my daytrip’s now complete. The train goes on, with one surprise — a monetary treat for hopeful, homeless, hungry eyes — between one wall and seat.
*****
“In 2016, while an estimated 363,348 refugees and other migrants successfully crossed the Mediterranean to reach Europe, an additional 5,136 people who attempted that journey were either confirmed drowned or reported missing (Source) — still a record now, ten years later.
“New installments of that ongoing tragedy were generating some of ‘the headlines in my head’ (Stanza 9, Line 4) in the summer of 2016, when I accompanied my mother on a 10-day Mediterranean cruise. We arrived in Padua a few days early so we could adjust to jet lag, and from there we made day trips by train to Ravenna and Venice before our cruise began.
“During our day in Venice, I was startled by the profusion of Moretto- or Blackamoor-themed luxury items I kept coming across, all gold-adorned: Jewelry. Doorknobs. Lamps. Tables. Atlas-like figures supporting architectural features. On the 9pm train back to our hotel in Padua, I pondered this centuries-old fascination with Blackness among Venetians of great wealth. My mind had just wandered to the little Black boy at the end of Heredia’s sonnet “The Dogaressa” when, as if on cue, a very dark-skinned African immigrant of about ten years old arrived for the first of his many hurried inspections of our train car.
“For the decade it took me to finish and find a home for ‘Ganymede in Northeast Italy (Veneto),’ that child has kept returning to my thoughts. Perhaps now he will haunt others’ thoughts, too.
“I am very grateful to David Stephenson for publishing this long poem in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal and to my fellow workshoppers at Eratosphere for telling me what wasn’t working in two earlier drafts over the years.”
*****
Julie Steiner is the pseudonym of a recovering classicist in San Diego, California. Her original poetry and verse translations from Italian, Spanish, French, Latin, and Greek have appeared in many venues — most recently, Light, Lighten Up Online, Literary Matters, The New Verse News, and The Ekphrastic Review. For links to some of these poems, visit her Substack, Off-Piste on Mount Parnassus (offpisteonmountp.substack.com).
I am God– Without one friend, Alone in my purity World without end.
Below me young lovers Tread the sweet ground– But I am God– I cannot come down.
Spring! Life is love! Love is life only! Better to be human Than God–and lonely.
*****
Langston Hughes, key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, published his short poem ‘God’ in the October 1931 issue of Poetry. Despite the illustration I have chosen for his poem, Hughes was neither straight nor white… but I’m sure he would forgive my choice, as he was a very tolerant individual.
It’s fallen half apart, a derelict. The gatherings have sprung, the boards detached, The spine perished, folding maps cut out. The title page is splotched with ink and nicked At the edge, the author’s homely portrait scratched— A splash of beer, faint thumbmarks all about— Discarded once, but now it’s yours. It lives, Like you, diminished now by age and loss. And so, it brings the breeze, the autumn sun, The creaking door that with a push still gives The afternoon, the birds and clouds, grass, moss, The world still new, the journey not begun, The path curling from sight in the soft glow Of a fading day—and you, prepared to go.
*****
Ernest Hilbert writes: “I am a rare book dealer, so I spend my days surrounded by books. I love all kinds of books, and I have a particular affection for books no one seems to want but which are, nonetheless, worthwhile. There are, after all, far more books than there are readers. When a book is taken home, adopted, as it were, it finds a new life. Each book one acquires is, in its way, a hedge against the future, a small hope one might some day find the time to read it. When a book is read for the first time, however old it is, however many times it has been read before, it becomes a new book. The structure of the poem is designed to express this sense of renewal and hope, the litany of degradation and wear, the sense of hopelessness, one finds in the octave redeemed, after the volta, in the sestet.
“I intended to communicate that sense of excitement I still feel when I first open a book, but I likely also had in mind Benjamin Franklin’s mock epitaph, written when he was 22, which begins “The Body of B. Franklin Printer / Like the Cover of an old Book / Its Contents torn out . . .” Finally, I must admit that there are few places I find myself happier than at a promising friends of the library book sale.”
*****
‘Friends of the Library Sale’ was originally published in The Sonneteer.
Ernest Hilbert was born in 1970 in the city of Philadelphia and educated at Rutgers and Oxford Universities. He is the author of the poetry collections Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—Last One Out, and Storm Swimmer, winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize. He works as a rare book dealer in Philadelphia. Visit him at www.ernesthilbert.com
Oh no, Godot! So slow to show. Who knows how low two fools won’t go to hold off sorrow? How cold, how wrong to con or ghost hobos who long for comfort most. So go tomorrow.
*****
Susan McLean writes: “For its ‘Moon’ issue, Ecotone put out a call for submissions in the rarer French repeating forms and suggested that one way to evoke the moon was by using the word O or words in which a lot of o’s appeared. I wanted to write a rondelet using words whose only vowel was o, which made sense because the subject was the moon. Therefore, I made a list of as many words as I could think of that used no vowel but o, looking particularly for words that rhymed with one another. Luckily, that vowel can be used to represent many different sounds. I wrote a rondelet called “Solo” that later appeared in the journal. I had heard of Christian Bök’s Eunoia, a collection in which each poem uses a single vowel, and I later learned from Pedro Poitevin that it is called “univocalic verse.” I had many words left over from my search for o-words, one of which was “Godot.” I have always been a huge fan of drama, and I attended and read many plays in my youth, when Theatre of the Absurd was still in vogue. But some of my most boring and irritating theatre experiences were at plays by Samuel Beckett. I decided to write a poem that was my critique of the premise of Waiting for Godot. The poem first appeared in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.
Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa. https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean
Nothing new, but it feels like an end. An end that’s new. This end is now? No, I said new. But who could hear me through my mask? Don’t ask. Love wears a glove. I want to touch my friend. . This fear feels new. We’ve all forgotten how to live with it, to live it day by day. And each day begins anew, begins a new now we do not know, oh no, do not yet know.
*****
Rachel Hadas writes: Mid-March 2020, as I look back, did feel like both an end and a beginning. Any moment in time is that, of course, but one’s sense of discontinuity was certainly heightened then. A lot of familiar features of life just stopped, and an uncharted period began. The confusion of trying to wrap one’s mind around all this at once is echoed in the overlapping and echoing words “no, new, knew, know…”
“Ides of March MMXX” is collected in my 2022 volume “Pandemic Almanac,” a book in which, contrary to my usual practice, I append date and place of composition to each poem. In 2020 we were in Vermont from early April until late November; “Ides” was written before people who could began to leave New York City in large numbers.
My 2025 collection “Pastorals” groups together texts written in and about Vermont over a period of years, certainly including the years of Covid but also extending both before and after the pandemic (if indeed there is an after). I mention “Pastorals” because in one of its pieces (they’re all prose poems), “Blue Book,” which was written sometime later during the pandemic, I do something similar to the play in “Ides” on “no, know,” etc: “We were elsewhere; we travelled back and forth, here and there. Now mostly here. Now only here. Now here: nowhere.”
Rachel Hadas (born November 8, 1948) is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose (Paul Dry Books, 2021), and her most recent poetry collection is Ghost Guest (Ragged Sky Press, 2023). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
The UFOs check in, check out upon our senseless, bloody rout — the wars and strip mines, fire and drought.
Do aliens view with disdain the overspreading human stain? Our history’s heedless, speeding train?
Perhaps they’re laughing, laying odds on our demise, we tin-pot gods who live and die upon our frauds.
Why would they want to disembark? They’ll wait until the final spark, the whole world empty, clean and stark.
*****
Lisa Barnett writes: “This bleak little poem was inspired by an article suggesting that the scientific community now believes UFOs may be…real. I got to thinking about how disappointed aliens would be by the state of our world and the destructiveness of the human species. Originally written in rhymed couplets, the poem grew to four-line monorhyme stanzas, before being edited down to the present tercets.”
Lisa Barnett’s poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, Measure, New Verse Review, Snakeskin, and elsewhere. She is the author of two chapbooks: The Peacock Room (Somers Rocks Press) and Love Recidivus (Finishing Line Press). She lives in Haverford, Pennsylvania with her husband.
Replacing slate with bitumen, crumbling shiplap with new tongue-and-groove, we sweat the same as those other men who raised this crooked barn and who, we’d like to think, would still approve.
Like elders speaking in low tones to kids who ask about the recent dead, the ancient headers creak hoarse groans. In wind, the rafters strain as thunder grumbles closer overhead.
We marvel at the wonky wall wedged into the hill so horses, goats or cows could drift from pasture back to stall without the farmer’s prod— or we assume, shrugging at flails and ploughs.
Planks termites haven’t gnawed to sand retain old hammer dents and kerfs from saws. Who knows what those who toiled by hand would make of, or make with, our front-end loaders and our zoning laws.
As if anticipating us, they improvised the hipless gambrel’s slant and rigged the struts for each bowed truss so steep it shouldn’t stand (we’ve tried to realign them but we can’t).
We yank square iron nails from boards and trade farm implements for farm décor, clearing eaves of nesting birds to patch roof gaps in rain. Where no door’s hung for years, we hang a door.
Brian Brodeur writes: “I grew up around a lot of sawdust—my father built houses. The sounds, sights, smells, and tactile sensations of construction still attract me, especially the language of construction sites. Like writing in meter and rhyme, architectural restoration links present desires with past needs, establishing a line of communion between the living and dead. I tried to embody this notion in “Not Versed in Country Things”—explicitly in the poem’s title, which is a direct response to Frost’s “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” that famous barn burner.”
Brian Brodeur is the author of four poetry books, most recently Some Problems with Autobiography (2023), which won the 2022 New Criterion Poetry Prize. Recent poems and literary criticism appear in TheHopkins Review, The Hudson Review, and Pushcart Prize XLIX (2025). Brian teaches creative writing and American literature at Indiana University East. He lives with his wife and daughter in the Whitewater River Valley.
“Have you ever thought, Holmes, all we are Is one long tube around which are attached As very mixed a cluster of bizarre Accessories as ever were mis-matched To move about to gain the wherewithal To hunt and gather what it needs to eat From things that grow or swim or fly or crawl, And change them into matter to excrete?” “Certainly, dear Watson — that’s a trope That humankind has puzzled over, now, And through the eons we’ve had love and hope, And all philosophy’s no more than how, Through grasping and digesting, we can cope With nature’s discontents and discontentery. You’ve heard me say it, Watson — it’s alimentary.”
*****
Marcus Bales writes: The Human Alloy
I’ve heard a lot of other poets say “This poem took me many years to write,” And never understood, until today, What that was like, but now I think I might.
I heard the joke in second grade, or third, And didn’t get it. Nothing there for me Who’d never heard of Sherlock Holmes, absurd As classmates made my ignorance out to be.
I read the books and stories then of course And hated Holmes’s bullying and sneers At poor old Dr. Watson, so the source Of humor there eluded me for years.
Bit by bit, I finally came around To see superiority as fine And feel such arrogance was something sound. You never heard such sneers and snarks as mine.
There’s nothing I would not pretend to know Nothing I had no opinion on No lacerating length I would not go To show that all were ducks but I, a swan.
Until at length I came to read Ayn Rand Whose heroes do and say such nasty scat That even I could finally understand The breach of faith it is to be like that.
And flawed, addicted Holmes no longer seems The snarling height of genius on its throne Pursuing all the best of human dreams, But just another man almost alone.
And it’s by Watson’s decency we gauge Cooperation making common sense Without which Holmes’s self-destructive rage Would flail against the world without defense.
My view of Holmes and Watson rounds at last To my acceptance of the central hoax Of life: it’s only teamwork that can cast The human alloy. That and silly jokes.
*****
Not much is known about Marcus Bales, except he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, and his work has not appeared in Poetry or The New Yorker. His latest book is 51 Poems; reviews and information at http://tinyurl.com/jo8ek3r
She lives near Washington DC and teaches workshops on Sonnets, Villanelles, Natural Meter, Persona Poems, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) and privately, currently via Zoom. Also the author of Humor Me (2006) and several chapbooks, most recently Genetic Revisionism, Claudia is an advisory editor for New Verse Review, as well as a science writer, visual artist, and composer of tonal art songs and chamber music. Her article about setting poems to music can be found online at https://straightlabyrinth.info/conference.html. See also pw.org/content/claudia_gary.
Form in Formless Times 