by Kathleen Clancy

Shakespeare! Over and over and over again he professes his love: longer than time, more solid than stone, immune to actual war and blight. What is love to him? What is he trying to prove? Alchemy? Love speaks? He hears the supernatural?

Maybe it’s just practice. He’ll always need to try out a line,

and I wouldn’t want him feeling insecure about his work. Playwriting isn’t the burliest office. At least I know his mind

is forceful. Still, the incessant rehearsing . . . Well, it’s pretty quirky don’t you think? It makes him suspect, like he needs convincing love is true. Love is true as this moment is true: He loves me, I pluck a petal from this daisy, a poem bears this printing —

something is lost, kept, and wounded simultaneously.

He’s right. It’s worth repeating: Love and words, magic, my mistress. If we never wed, it can’t be tragic.

by Kathleen Clancy

At the end of a summer’s day
gravity pushed me down
toward the earth. I bounced once,
landing on the sloping
pavement. I rolled along
a curb into a culvert
and stopped. For days
the sun had its way with me.
I melted slowly beneath it.
My arms unfurled
from the pit of me;
I reached and reached.

by James Rioux

Mostly, You’ll Find Me
     for Franz Wright

Forgive me this
silly little riddle:

of how the world keeps
giving me these bruised sunsets pooling

into night, the endless jokes with no lines
punching me awake —

and how I fall
asleep watching myself watching myself

etcetera, in the most unzen
of states.

Mostly, you’ll find me pumping gas
with the others.

And less and less often, with these words
that ratchet down

the distance,
convincing even the difficult

company of my thoughts
there’s this listener.