Set

There is no stillness like a woman’s
As she sits in the salon, hands attending
Her, so many small and particular gestures,
The maneuvers of embroiderers, the filleting
Of sole, pale bones from whitefish. Breath
Moves her, like the teeth of the comb ratting
Hair. There is no flower that compares
To the color that was mixed for her in a bowl
Like an offering. It was a transaction;
She looks at herself in the mirror, the face
She has soured on. She’d like another,
To become accustomed to something new.
She will have asked to be teased, a wig made
Of what remains. She’ll pay for it handsomely.

*

Daisy Bassen is a practicing physician and poet. She graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Oberon, The Delmarva Review, The Sow’s Ear, and Tuck Magazine as well as multiple other journals. She was a semi-finalist for the 2016 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, a finalist for the 2018 Adelaide Literary Prize, a recent winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest, and was doubly nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.

Q&A
1. If you could learn the answer to one question about your future, what would you ask?

How soon will I vote for a woman president who’s elected—because I’d dearly like to have a sense of how long I’m going to have to wait!

2. What invention in your lifetime is actually “the best thing since sliced bread”?

Compostable compost bags are pretty awesome.

3. If you had to choose one—sight, smell, hearing, taste, or touch—what’s your favorite sense?

Sight—because I have the most power over how I use it.

Chihuly Over Venice

Loredana Balboni had heard the tromping
of paint-splattered shoes across her balcony, 
even glimpsed the eye-patched man more
than once, but never thought to mention him 
to her sister Letizia or suggest they invite
him to sip Prosecco from crystal flutes 
that, while dazzling under a glass chandelier 
at one of their seasonal feste, paled
in green grandeur to the glass this gap-toothed
man blew in his Pilchuck workshop
looking out on the quiet water of Puget Sound,
so unlike the rising canals of Venice
it's a wonder he ever found his way to La Biennale.

Or maybe she sent him away so she could
marvel at the sculpture entirely alone, lie
beneath it on her balcony by candlelight,
wake up and take her gondola into Canal Grande,
point to it with a grimace, pretending she had no
idea how it had landed, suspended above
her palazzo as though opera singers
had wailed out each tail-tipped sphere 
during a midnight performance of La Traviata
at Gran Teatro La Fenice, voices rising from ashes
as glass does, singing itself to life from a million 
grains of sand hiding inside each line
that the sculptor breathed out of fire. 

*

Lisa Masé (she/her) has been writing poetry since childhood in Italy. She teaches poetry workshops for Vermont’s Poem City events, co-facilitates a writing group, and has translated the poetry of writers from Italy, France, and the Dominican Republic. Her poems have been published by Open Journal of Arts and Letters, the Long Island Review, One, River and South, and Silver Needle Press among others.

NOTE
This piece is inspired by my Italian childhood spent wandering the streets of cities like Venice and Florence, dreaming of what may have occurred in the majestic palazzos I saw. As an adult, I had the opportunity to assist glass artist Dale Chihuly in his installation of chandeliers, which prompted me to write about the unlikely encounter between an artist and a renaissance noblewoman.

Q&A
1. If you could learn the answer to one question about your future, what would you ask?

I would like to know how climate change is going to affect the seasons in Vermont. If we are trending towards Pacific Northwest weather, I might move back to Italy!

2. What invention in your lifetime is actually “the best thing since sliced bread”?

The internet. Hands down.

3. If you had to choose one—sight, smell, hearing, taste, or touch—what’s your favorite sense?

Taste. Life is rich with sumptuous flavors. As a cook and culinary medicine educator, I always choose to live through my taste buds.

Insidious

*

Matt W. Miller is author of The Wounded for the Water (Salmon Poetry); Club Icarus (University of North Texas Press), selected by Major Jackson as the winner of the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize; and Cameo Diner: Poems (Loom). He has published poems and essays in Birmingham Poetry Review, Southwest Review, Harvard Review, Narrative, Crazyhorse, 32 Poems, Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, and other journals. He is winner of the Nimrod International Journal’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, River Styx’s Microfiction Prize, Iron Horse Review’s Trifecta Poetry Prize, and The Poetry by the Sea Conference’s Sonnet Crown Contest. The recipient of poetry fellowships from Stanford University and The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Miller teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy where he co-directs the Writers’ Workshop at Exeter. He lives with his family in coastal New Hampshire.

Note
This poem was borne out of an interview I read with Jordan Peele about his film Get Out where he talks about the insidious nature of white liberal racism and how the inability to see our own racism, to be almost self-righteous in thinking that we’re helping the cause, does as much damage as overt conscious racism. In his essay “A Mystifying Silence: Big and Black” poet Major Jackson takes on the lack of white poets really writing about race and racism and their role in it. He writes, “So earnest are we in the vision of poetry as the province of communal good that we fail to create ‘speakers’ in our poems who are contemptible and dishonorable.” In this poem I have tried to create a narrator who thinks he’s one of the good guys, an ally against hate. Yet all of that is destabilized when he is suddenly confronted with his own inherit biases and systems of profiling. He begins to question the reality he has created and clung to his whole life. I’m terrified I have not pulled this off well in the poem and that it may offend. But again, to pick up on Jackson’s essay, there is perhaps even more danger in being silent for the fear of being wrong.

Q&A
1. If you could learn the answer to one question about your future, what would you ask?

I actually have a weird aversion to knowing the future. The answers you get are too loaded with a context you can’t know.

2. What invention in your lifetime is actually “the best thing since sliced bread”?

The Ollie in skateboarding.

3. If you had to choose one—sight, smell, hearing, taste, or touch—what’s your favorite sense?

Smell. It’s the sense that triggers memory whether you want it to or not.

Obsolescence

License plates from vehicles long gone
hung in the garage on a rusted nail—
each year a different color, the oldest encased
in cobwebs, suggesting you never took them
down to sort through memories of whatever cars
and road trips they may evoke. Whatever carefree
conversations and long pealing laughs caught
between the plates. Whatever bachelor dreams.
Whatever life was before we came along.
Perhaps your keeping the plates wasn’t about
remembering but rather about declaring their
obsolescence, and that of the life you left,
like an old road left off a newly printed map,
like an old map crumpled beneath the seat.

*

Ted Morrissey is a novelist whose poetry has always been in the service of his prose, but in 2016 he began writing sonnets in apostrophe to his father, Vince, who passed away suddenly in 2013. Other sonnets in his “Laertes Sequence” have appeared or are forthcoming in the tiny journal, Bellevue Literary Review, Edify Fiction, and Haunted Waters Press's Splash! Literary Showcase. New fiction is forthcoming in North American Review. His most recent novel is Mrs Saville (2018).

NOTE
I've always considered myself primarily a writer of fiction, but a fiction writer who tries to write poetic prose. Oftentimes my fictional characters are poets, so I'll write poetry in their names, but also (I know) kind of hiding behind their personas. Then a few years ago, my father passed away—he was fine, then he was sick, then he was gone, five days start to finish. He was important to me, and I had trouble processing what happened. In 2016 it occurred to me that maybe I should try writing about him—but in my own name, not behind the guise of a fictional character. So I began writing a series of Petrarchan sonnets; in the first sonnet I wrote I alluded to figures from Homer's Odyssey, comparing my father to Laertes, so in my mind these became "the Laertes Sequence." Over the past three years, I've written them off and on. I have a list of potential topics—most of them things I remember from my childhood, like the old license plates hanging in the garage—and from time to time I take out my sonnet notebook and scribble one. I don't worry about line length or rhythm or wordplay in that first draft, but over the course of several days or weeks, I keep tinkering until I have a fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet that I'm pleased with. I still mainly write prose, but I enjoy writing sonnets like “Obsolescence,” and they have helped me cope with the loss of my father, whose absence I still sense regularly.

Q&A
1. If you could learn the answer to one question about your future, what would you ask?

Will my work be read and appreciated after I'm gone? I want my work to matter, to be meaningful to people.

2. What invention in your lifetime is actually “the best thing since sliced bread”?

I'm pretty old, so the invention of word processing was a game changer. I managed to make it through my bachelor's degree in English using a manual typewriter with a broken carriage return. I kept a hammer next to the typewriter because sometimes the carriage would jam and I literally would have to whack it with the hammer to free it loose and keep writing. True story.

3. If you had to choose one—sight, smell, hearing, taste, or touch—what’s your favorite sense?

It has to be sight. I can't imagine life without being able to see and read the printed word. I actually lost the sight in one eye last year, and thankfully through the wonders of modern surgical techniques the vision was restored—but the experience made me appreciate even more the wonder of sight.