It’s been a crazy six months for me – but poetry helped. The editors of the NOTHEME XI issue of the online poetry journal Cordite, Emily Stewart and Eloise Grills say it better. They write that, ‘in this post-not-really pandemic juncture’ they remembered, most of all, ‘How much we need the work of poetry and its sublime, strange tenterhooks.’

Quoting the Bible by Luisa Muradyan

thinking about the light / from Seamus Heaney’s phone / when he texted his wife / don’t be afraid seconds before / he left his body behind. Don’t be afraid, / I tell my son as I / buckle his seatbelt, don’t be afraid / I place a green dinosaur mask on his face

Luisa Muradyan is the author of American Radiance (University of Nebraska Press) and was the Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts from 2016-2018. She was also the recipient of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the 2016 Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. Additionally, Muradyan is a member of the Cheburashka Collective, a group of women and non-binary writers from the former Soviet Union.

Skeete’s Bay, Barbados by John Robert Lee (for Wayne Redman, d. 1978)

The sea rose angrily. / It knew that freedom here was short. / It remembered other coasts / made ‘mod’ by small-eyed men in big cars. // And as before, it knew she’d vanish / the bare-legged girl; the children and their crabs / would leave, a ‘better’ world would banish / them to imitation-coconut trays.

John Robert Lee is a Saint Lucian writer is the author of elemental, (2008), Collected Poems 1975-2015, (2017), and Pierrot, (2020). Derek Walcott, Nobel Laureate 1992 said: ‘Robert Lee has been a scrupulous poet, that’s the biggest virtue that he has, and it’s not a common virtue in poets, to be scrupulous and modest in the best sense, not to over-extend the range of the truth of his emotions, not to go for the grandiose. He is a Christian poet obviously. You don’t get in the poetry anything that is, in a sense, preachy or self-advertising in terms of its morality. He is a fine poet.

I want to tell you what poverty gave me by Melissa Crowe

Maybe my mother holding / my hand while we, carless, walked through a near-dusk // blizzard from our place on one side of town / to her brother’s in low-income on the other, / so we were swallowed and swallowed as we moved / through undifferentiated space, not knowing // whether the ground beneath us was front yard / or sidewalk or street,

Melissa Crowe is the author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), editor of Beloit Poetry Journal, and coordinator of the MFA in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. 

Why This Haunted Middle and Door Hung with Haunted Girl Bones by Hoa Nguyen

I cleaned the pain but smell it on floorboards / of a Ford Fiesta / maybe need to burn effigies // powder puff   French cosmetics // and perfumes  the tortoiseshell hairbrush father // gave her in Saigon

Hoa Nguyen’s fifth book of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure was named a finalist for a Kingsley Tufts Award, National Book Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award and has garnered additional support from The Poetry Foundation, Library Journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Born in the Mekong Delta and raised and educated in the United States, Hoa lives in Tkaronto with her family.

Laika (1954-1957) by Adrian Sobol

Where are you supposed to go. / In the dark there is no knowing. / Once, a tiny satellite circled the earth carrying a dog. / There can be no word for a fear you cannot fathom. / An infinite future tires you out.

Adrian Sobol is a Polish immigrant / musician / poet. He is the author of The Life of the Party is Harder to Find Until You’re the Last One Around (Malarkey Books). He lives in Chicago.

Harm by Hillary Gravendyk

Bleakness along the spine of narrative. Harm flat as a swept floor. As a drawn planet. A bright story is requested. What will be touched?

Hillary Gravendyk (1979-2014) attended Tulane and the University of Washington and went on to get a doctorate in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008, her chapbook The Naturalist came out from Achiote Press and in 2010, her book Harm, published by Omnidawn, was a finalist for the California Writer’s Exchange Award. In 2009, she was hired to teach 20th Century poetry at Pomona College in Claremont, California and lived out most of her adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area and Claremont.

The Reversal by Leila Chatti

A man who tries very hard to love me convinces me / to leave, for the first time / in days, my bed—to go outside / to see the frozen lake. And, despite the grandeur of the vast white / field, and the novelty of boys walking across it / like novice deities, I am most interested / in the geese. Look at them / sleeping, I say, nodding

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and multiple chapbooks.

Not a salad by Sophie van Waardenberg

I couldn’t help her. And it keeps happening. I don’t know what else I can tell you. /
Every time I build my bed I lose my sense of self. It is like losing a needle in a stack /
of IKEA flatpack slats. Someday we will live in a better place,

Sophie van Waardenberg is a poet from Aotearoa New Zealand. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, where she served as an editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her work appears in RHINO, HAD, Starling, Best New Zealand Poems, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, does a potato have a heart?, was published in AUP New Poets 5.