POETRY

selected by guest poetry editor Faith Shearin, author of Lost Language

“Unpacking in the New House” by Marcia L. Hurlow

“Ireland Seen from a Porch Swing in Hickory, NC” by Paul Jones

“White Field” by David Mohan

“the old nocturne” by Rekha Valliappan

Faith Shearin is the author of Lost Language and six previous books of poetry: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award); The Empty House; Moving the Piano; Telling the Bees; Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize); and Darwin’s Daughter. She has received awards from Yaddo, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac more than thirty times and included several times in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated column, “American Life in Poetry.”

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Marcia L. Hurlow's first full-length collection of poetry, Anomie, won the Edges Prize. She also has five chapbooks. More than four hundred of her individual poems have appeared in literary magazines, including Poetry, Chicago Review, River Styx, Nimrod, Poetry Northwest, Stand, Cold Mountain, Zone 3 and The Journal, among others. In 2019 she received the Al Smith Fellowship for Poetry for the second time.  She is the co-editor of Kansas City Voices.

Ireland Seen from a Porch Swing in Hickory, NC

For Adrian Rice

Ireland is a country without porches.
What they call a porch is just an entry.
No one sits there watching for neighbors
walking by with their electric torches.
Their voices, soft as as blossoms, gently
fill humid summer nights with rumors. 

Over there, secrets are shared in the pubs.
From unsteady high stools, the stories, tinged
with irony, rise easily as smoke.
New worlds are created by old words spoken.
Even the weightiest tales take on wings,
if only whispered above the hubbub.

But here, the slow news is told by moonlight
in the lazy tease of an August night.
Too often tea, iced and sweet, is the drink
that greets the blink of stars through the dark haze
as our voices wander, each twang distinct,
in the dog-starred nights and the torpid days.

It's ghosts that bind us across our weathers,
that tie the lilt and slur of daily sagas
told inside and out, in bars and open air,
to some episodic common drama.
They appear here and there, vivid and stark,
in talk that reweaves their spells in the dark.

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Paul Jones. Born in Hickory, North Carolina. Poems in Poetry, Red Fez, Broadkill Review, 2River View, and anthologies including Best American Erotic Poems. Recently nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Web Awards. Chapbook, What the Welsh and Chinese Have in Common. Manuscript of poems crashed on the moon’s surface in 2019.

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David Mohan is a poet and short story writer based in Dublin. His poetry has been published in The Cincinnati Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Lake Effect, Agenda, Measure, Superstition Review, Stand, New World Writing, PANK and Dialogist. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and he has won the Cafe Writers' International Open Poetry Award and the Hennessy Writer of the Year award.

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Rekha Valliappan’s poems and prose-poems feature in a variety of literary and international journals including Ann Arbor Review, The Sandy River Review, Small Orange Poetry Journal, The Pangolin Review, Wellington Street Review, The London Reader, Red Fez, and other venues. A former university lecturer in English Literature and Law, her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Liquid Imagination.