John Engels’s poem, “At Night on the Lake, in The Eye of the Hunter,” appeared in NER 1.1 (1978):
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.
. . . 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.
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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because she has just finished telling the story of our escape
and needs to draw a comparison, return us safely to the present,
December 2015, we’re back at my sister’s childproofed house,
keeping warm by winter sun, central heating, and our sweatpants;
because some do: “Ghaith joyfully snapped selfies, the Aegean
glimmering in the background. He looked much like a tourist,”
suggests the reporter at large in the New Yorker article I read
about one refugee’s epic escape from Syria, and think of again
when my mother can’t make room in our story for more people;
because my mother never quite has the right words in English,
though to be fair, she said “travelers,” and seemed anxious after;
because she’s not callous, you must understand, just protective . . .
Hai-Dang Phan is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and author of a chapbook, Small Wars (Convulsive, 2016). Born in Vietnam, he grew up in Wisconsin and currently teaches at Grinnell College.
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