Lawrence Raab’s poem, “While You Were Sleeping,” appeared in NER 1.2:
Pale curtains
crumpled to the floor
And the heavy rug
out of place.
Something
simple but ambiguous,
that would please you.
An interrupted
game of cards.
An open window.
NER Classics
John Engels | At Night on the Lake, in The Eye of the Hunter
John Engels’s poem, “At Night on the Lake, in The Eye of the Hunter,” appeared in NER 1.1:
That night,
drifting far out
in the dark center of the lake,
I watched the stars. Later,
I shone my torch
down into the eel grass
of the perch beds,
and saw the fish there,
stunned into thrills
and tremblings of fins.
Bruce Beasley
Sibboleth
. . . for several years my Lexicon was my only companion
—Emily Dickinson
cry out your shibboleth
into your homeland strangeness
—Paul Celan
Word-ridden, have
you been that way:
-riddled,
I mean, morphemes
begging to be multibegotten
at once, and, for once, always
alphabet-encysted:
are you like me like that, relieved
from sense, shot
through with it, shot through it, into it…
Bruce Beasley is the author of eight collections of poems, most recently Theophobia (2012) and All Soul Parts Returned (2017), both published by BOA Editions.
James McCorkle
History of Barbed Wire
Stockman’s ribbon wire, two strands with a third wire twisted in
and sheared, began the Devil’s fence in 1863, when Michael Kelly
first made it, to keep his wife’s garden from cattle and vermin,
a couplet of wires then patented by Joseph Glidden,
DeKalb, Illinois, 1874, the twisted wire began the division
of land, and the end of common-use and free movement
across the Great Plains of the last of the First Peoples. After the Civil War,
it came into use ending the primacy of cavalry that began with Darius,
and ended with the Russian–Japanese war, in 1902, the British
in South Africa used it to enclose their settlements against the Boers,
who were sent when captured to the first concentration camps
and by that time the Great Divide had been squared off, the ghosts had begun…
James McCorkle is the author of two collections of poetry, Evidences (Copper Canyon Press, 2003) and The Subtle Bodies (Etruscan Press, 2014), and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry from the Colonial Era to the Present (Greenwood, 2015). He co-directs the Africana Studies Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.
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