This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Teaching a Wild Thing by Kindra McDonald (Kelsay Books 2022).

Origins

1.

At the whaling museum in Newport: wandering through rooms of scrimshaw, carved bones of whales, teeth and tusk, ribs and cartilage illuminated by soft exhibit light. Glowing mermaids, billowing sails and lost fishermen, so many versions of the female form. Memory carved in solitude. I learn wale is the plank alongside a wooden ship that protects the hull from damage, it is also the ridge of fabric on my corduroy pants, the swooshing sound of my legs rubbing together.

2.

I teach my students in Beijing about mammals and birds: they are both warm-blooded, though birds lay eggs and mammals have live births. We work again and again on whale, how it is a mammal, not cold-blooded like fish that also live in the sea. They pronounce it “well” and we’ve just learned that a well is where you get water; when I say well done, both thumbs enthusiastically up, that is a different kind of well.

3.

The summer we all watched the one whale: how she carried her dead calf on her back for 17 days and more than 1,000 miles in a tour of grief while we all looked on in wonder, a solidarity of loss. After this year of thrashing, it is confirmed this whale is pregnant again. Researchers have tracked her pod by satellite. This seems a miracle. Every time I see our planet from space it makes me believe in a reverse Pangea, that the continents might slowly move toward each other the way a cello leans on the shoulder of a musician.

4.

In the church basements of my childhood: every funeral farewell lunch featured shining Jell-O salads. They glistened like stained glass, fruit suspended in molds of rings and braids, all jiggling companionably next to a jellied tuna salad in the shape of a whale.

5.

My students watch me cry on our video screen. Whale I say. Well done. Wail.

6.

I have spent a year of days slowly teaching a wild thing to eat from my hand, only to find it dead, matted fur, broken paw. I wail to the ground, to the clouds, to the sea. Well. Well. How wail is a high-pitched cry of pain—it’s what we do when we are mourning, a parade of grief we wake to each morning. We hold a wake for the dead, this language is impossible.

Kindra McDonald is the author of the collections Teaching a Wild Thing, Fossils and In the Meat Years. She was the recipient of the 2020 Haunted Waters Press Poetry Award. She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and is a poet-artist working and teaching in mixed-media and found poetry. She served as the Poetry Society of Virginia Southeastern region Vice President from 2019-2022. You can find her in the woods or at www.kindramcdonald.com.

Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.

This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from In the Cosmic Fugue by Jocelyn Heath (Kelsay Books 2022).

content warning for self-harm

Letter Home

See this? Like a cut raspberry smudged on my skin,
the long slow pull of a “slipped leg” against the sharp edge.
A tree branch on the way up, outside my dorm window:
hickory, flaking bark into cupped hands.
The long slow peel of a scab to the acrid green beneath.

I sat in that window. I sat in that tree.

All that term I sat and watched
the computer screen swirl top right to bottom left,
top left to bottom right, coming back always
to begin it again. And that’s what I couldn’t do—
get back to the rhythmic roll of days from hall to hall,
book to book, feigning a search for “the one.”
Safe because no disappointment would ever come.

It came to me on the branch of that tree:

first verse of a song I had no theory to write,
no chords to rise and resolve from the lyrics
I fought against singing.

Queer hushed the trees.
Queer hummed the wind.

And when that strange love spreads like fire
through the thicket of veins, boiling eye waters,
choking thought, singeing neurons black, then—
yes, then, you can understand the only way
to put it out was to cut it, vent it through open skin.

Is this what I tell you, now that the match is struck again?
Is this the truth that can jump a fire-cut?
Sit there and read, mother, read one last night in unknowing,
before the touch of my skin will scald you with understanding.

Jocelyn Heath is an Associate Professor in English at Norfolk State University. Her first poetry collection, In the Cosmic Fugue, came out in November 2022. Other creative writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, Flyway, and Fourth River. She is an Assistant Editor for Smartish Pace.

Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.

This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from In the Cosmic Fugue by Jocelyn Heath (Kelsay Books 2022).

Jupiter, Unyielding

Lunar muscles round out his arm,
his chest: god of the planet, whose
purple robe trails in stardust
on this glossed page—
my finger edging a thigh
that glides upward to what

I am told I should want.
Turn the page:
moons in a ragged waltz.
In close orbit, Ganymede,
his plump ice-cheeks
blushed with storm-red

rage at being taken—
as the boy of myth caught in air
and caged in lustful talons
to serve his red-eyed master.
Pushed to his knees.
Voice stopped up

by the god’s thickness, knowledge
pouring down his throat.
The tenderness after—
I don’t understand how
he can embrace the desire
that took him by force.

Jocelyn Heath is an Associate Professor in English at Norfolk State University. Her first poetry collection, In the Cosmic Fugue, came out in November 2022. Other creative writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, Flyway, and Fourth River. She is an Assistant Editor for Smartish Pace.

Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.

This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from In the Cosmic Fugue by Jocelyn Heath (Kelsay Books 2022).

Syzygy

              Uluru, Australia

We woke at three to catch the sunrise.
What mysteries sleep beneath this sand
as day phosphoresces at the horizon’s edge?
A late crescent and star align over the rock,

point to secrets of the desert sand.
What do I think I’ll find here?
When star and crescent align
over Uluru, when I can’t look away,

do I think that here I’ll find
some truth? Far from home, in the night sky
over Uluru? I can’t look away:
three bodies fixed in orbit’s stasis.

Far from home, in the night sky, truth
in constellations comes human-made
from bodies fixed in orbit. Is stasis
what we’re looking for—

our lives made clear like constellations?
I woke at three. I wait for sunrise
wondering what I’m looking for, or if I’ll find it
phosphorescing at the horizon’s edge.

Jocelyn Heath is an Associate Professor in English at Norfolk State University. Her first poetry collection, In the Cosmic Fugue, came out in November 2022. Other creative writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, Flyway, and Fourth River. She is an Assistant Editor for Smartish Pace.

Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.

This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from In the Cosmic Fugue by Jocelyn Heath (Kelsay Books 2022).

Neptune’s Pursuit

God of trident and thrusting current,
god whose wet muscles pin me to sand
and hold me down while you fill
every space of my body—

even your gentlest current drags us out,
leaves known shores unreachable.
Nude god behind a blue planet’s drape,
I would fight your saline kiss

and all that followed.
When you clutch a girl in your crests,
with few strokes can she pull her own way.
I do not float willingly.

I toe your edge, touch driftwood fingers,
let a boy swing me in his arms but not keep me.
His white is your foam.
His skin oozes clear salt.

When he moves to swell over me,
I have already swum away.

Jocelyn Heath is an Associate Professor in English at Norfolk State University. Her first poetry collection, In the Cosmic Fugue, came out in November 2022. Other creative writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, Flyway, and Fourth River. She is an Assistant Editor for Smartish Pace.

Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.

This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from In the Cosmic Fugue by Jocelyn Heath (Kelsay Books 2022).

Clippings

Up, up above, the ecstatic swirl of wasps.
Belly, thighs, hips, the spaces between.
I measure myself with fingers:
a hurt necessary as the gravel in my back.
Unfold the topography of a woman:

cleft of freckled breast,
cinch of silk at the waist—
photos glisten from sun silvering the hedge
where I hide. Through the summer,
the globed nest swells.

Jocelyn Heath is an Associate Professor in English at Norfolk State University. Her first poetry collection, In the Cosmic Fugue, came out in November 2022. Other creative writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, Flyway, and Fourth River. She is an Assistant Editor for Smartish Pace.

Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.

This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Burn by Sara Henning (Southern Illinois University Press 2024).

Burn

If middle age has a shape, it would be
the body singing, word by luscious word.
My body’s glory caught in my lungs.

If I could, I would uncry myself,
send my body back to my mother’s womb,
where my father once signed his name

in blood. I hung there, seam
of cells, fixed to my holy order—love’s
microscopic blaze so much like breathing.

My heart, still twined to my mother’s.
Her body, it held me like she hadn’t given up.
I long to be pulled from my mother

some August long ago and lie on her chest,
naked, cord uncut, hair matted to my skull.
I want to fill again the hollow in my mother

death will not take as its house. Teach me,
body, to unscar what is scarred. To cherish
the uncharitable. My breasts, whipped

philosophers. My eyes, a murder of crows.
My thighs are engines, leave traces of fire
as I rise up. Watch me rise up.

Sara Henning (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award. She’s a recipient of scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series.

Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.