Issue 159 News Today

Arthur Solway’s poetry and essays have appeared in The Antioch Review, Barrow Street, BOMB, The London Magazine, Salmagundi, Southern Poetry Review, TriQuarterly and elsewhere. He was cited among the 2018 finalists for the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, finalist for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Award in 2019, and the 2020 finalist for Anhinga Press-Robert Dana Prize for Poetry. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, his critical reviews, profiles, and cultural essay...

How to rebuild me when I fall apartAfter Roger ReevesI want a spine a gun barrel throat. A voice with steel boots.I want to command a lover who leaves devours me.I want to rent my body to a soul brave to be naked in this body in the street.

Jughea d potted s hell  he ad precious po tted jug pot she rd  shard pitch   er   she ll woven s he l l            it was multipleand my head was a joke   my head was a joke?   my head became a small vessel and a precious metal was put in theres he l l    jughea d potted s hell  precious po tted   he ad   jug   shell  pot   po  tted   she rd shard pitch   er woven   she ll 

The night-locked dusk clicked shut.The cool air rose like a stone.At last, my voices echoed through the high,miraculous chamber. And the iconographycut me, breathlesssymmetry.This kingdomis fraught with the skeptical—the stem before the gold-bloomed leafwhose colorthe cathedral imitates.The dusky grove. The dragon andthe greyhound, caught in their infinite chasethrough the

Before bed, my smallyets ask if I’ll meet themat the signpost we create in sleep, & whenthey wake, they’ll ask do I remember.I take us to the cliffing place, dip our wasp-stung faces toward the wind. It licks us till we brine.We dream the world won’t end.Not till the glob we’ve wadded in our pocketsis stuck safe behind our ears. Till that gumballmachine, infection-pink, has

—a painting by the British artist J. M. W. Turner.

When Angela cornered Lucy in the girls’ locker room and said, “White girl!” there was a moment when Lucy wanted to tell her how she wasn’t white or black, only the perfect mix of both, which is what her father liked to say. Instead, she turned away as her mother had taught her. Her mother would say, “Don’t fight. Be better than those petty girls, baby.”One of the LaLas, either

The Café Delice menu was just big enough to hide Rosemary’s face if she ducked down. She had made sure to sit with her back to the window, so that the afternoon sun fell directly on her quarry: the late middle-aged couple sitting two tables in front of her.

There’s something in the woods behind the house. Laura can hear it through the open window underneath the patter of rain as she nurses the baby. The thud of paws against the ground. The rush of breath as it snuffles, searching for food. Third night in a row. Each night, the something hunts along the same path between the palm trees and the fence line near her bedroom window.

the greyhound, caught in their infinite chase through the shaded vaults— when we, too, rise I am mad with desire. For what? Today, I collapsed at the endless hem of His great robes— and prayed, but could only find myself repeating Let me do better, Let me be with You, Let me do better by You, and When I left, I saw those sallow panels of the West Window, finally, for their dim bone-whiteness, an angel descended and, one by one, kissed my many eyes.