Evan Goldstein
The cracked window is a soundboard for the wind. You dream, as light pollution leaks
around blackout curtains, of a police siren over flat river water. To let us overhear
our nightmares. My stomach twists the oil in my gut. When the sun comes up

the birds begin. Men walk beside their fences marking sunlight’s progress
with wind-stripped shingles, talking as they go. A fence defines the land as parcel of land

within an allotment. Far end of the yard the dog snaps at small insects in the tree.
A piece of bailing wire far up the trunk where branches begin. When forced to consider
the language-made world, I remember your hand on my hand on your stomach.

The streetsweeper covers your breath as a car passes and slows to a stop at the end of
the block.
The driver talks back to the radio; a woman loads her suitcase into the trunk. Behind
the partition she thinks of touching the glass.

Your body curled around mine; a single contrail frayed into the sky above the glacial lake.
Other voices carried over clear, black water as white streaks burned and shattered
above us. We undressed under that thinning. Highway near still, and the snow melt

in the river, the floodlit bay. There is part of us chained to the concrete
floor beside the sea. Laughing gulls scatter after
the track of gunfire plays. The fence unfolds the sea

in pinholes where the wire frays the blue tarp.
When your dream shakes you, I touch your face and believe

I hear your breathing even out.
from the journal AFTERNOON VISITOR 
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I live in an old house with thin walls, on a street full of strange sounds. When I can’t sleep, I listen. I wrote this landscape as I was working on a collection involving writing outward, extending my consciousness from the personal into the social, and making my writing more permeable to the world around me. I really do have a cracked window (that the landlord refuses to fix), and I started with that image and followed it.

Evan Goldstein on "Landscape with Morning Coming On"
Color backlit headshot of Eloisa Amezcua
"An Interview with Eloisa Amezcua"

"I was captivated by the tension between Bobby and his career, Bobby and Valorie, Valorie and Bobby’s career—everywhere I turned throughout my research, the tension was present, it grew and grew and grew. In writing the poems that would become the collection, I wasn’t looking to explain or to provide answers, so much as I was hoping to invoke this tension through language and form."

via PEN AMERICA
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Cover of Sun Yung Shin's book, The Wet Hex
What Sparks Poetry:
Michael Kleber-Diggs on Sun Yung Shin's The Wet Hex

"Here’s what I didn’t even actually notice until I’d completed both laps through The Wet Hex—at a certain point I put my pencil down. I fell away from concern for craft and entered the poet’s world. For quite a while there, I forgot to think and felt my way through instead—guided by an expert, open."
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