This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility by Anna Laura Reeve (Belle Point Press 2023).

First Unbroken Sleep

After four and a half hours of unbroken sleep 
	I feel like a swan

The ‘trying to conceive’ web forum
recedes into the past, where every missed period
was a cause for dreams 
	and good lucks were baby dust! with 
					rotating star gifs.

Good luck wishes in the new mom groups 
	    are sleepy dust. 
	These women who parted Red Seas to look 
into small slate-gray eyes—
on their seventh day they want to sleep.

While for me, filament-thin sprays of milk arc 
   and lie on my daughter’s eyelids 
	     as I cajole her awake. 

	Seven weeks in the amusement park,
seven weeks sleeping in the operator’s booth
waking to my baby whining
in her sleep, 
			my shirt a wet hood
over two fawns’ faces.

Anna Laura Reeve is the author of Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility (Belle Point Press, 2023). Winner of the 2022 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, selected by American poet Jane Hirshfield, Reeve was also a finalist for the Greg Grummer Poetry Contest, the Ron Rash Award, the Heartwood Poetry Prize, and won the 2024 Emerging Writers Award from the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Salamander, Terrain.org, and others. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and lives with her daughter and husband near the Tennessee Overhill region, traditional land of the Eastern Cherokee.

Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.

This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from The Spring by Megan Weiler (JackLeg Press 2022).

II: Two Years Later
33

(excerpt)

“This is where Costanzo used to park the car when we came to look for mushrooms.” I express surprise that a car can go up this road at all, steep and rocky as it is. “Oh yes,” she says, “he used to drive up here or even further, sometimes into the woods as far as the cabin. He knew this road so well, maybe even better than the road to Vigliano. He often waited in the car for me while I went looking for mushrooms.”

I can tell that she is happier as soon as we’ve entered the woods. “Vigliano is good for convenience,” she says. “But this place is good per la persona.”

It quickly becomes clear that her casual remark about finding “a mushroom or two” was the greatest understatement. We’re not in the woods for five minutes, still far from reaching the cabin, when she suddenly climbs up an embankment and starts poking around in the leaves with the tip of her umbrella. Almost immediately – “Look at these gallinelle!” The word for chanterelles is “little hens.” I didn’t think she could be so happy about anything: she laughs with pure joy, encouraging me to pick the tiny yellow mushrooms as well. “There’s another patch. You get those.”

The first ones always come out under chestnut trees, she tells me. Only later do they come out under oak trees as well. “Who knows why?” But not just under any chestnut tree, only under certain ones. She speaks of mushrooms as “being born.” “Who knows why they are born in one spot and not another?”

Megan Weiler was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Konstanz, Germany. She returned to America after high school and studied English literature at Bryn Mawr College and Yale. She has held many different jobs while writing, from serving beer to the yodeling club in Altnau, Switzerland, to helping foreign nationals in Philadelphia with immigration procedures and applications for political asylum. Her first novel, The Night Bell, was published in 2001 by Picador UK. Her stories and excerpts have appeared in Mississippi Review, Nimrod, and Common Knowledge. She lives with her husband in Nashville.

Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.

This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from The Spring by Megan Weiler (JackLeg Press 2022).

content warning for war and violence

I: Summer 1996
12

(excerpt)

“We slept on the floor,” Silvana says, “crammed side by side, thirty to a room, with at most a blanket underneath for cushioning. We were on the second floor of a house; the ground floor was occupied by German soldiers. One night a bomb fell into the room next to the one where we were sleeping. Everything was filled with smoke. We couldn’t very well go down and join the Germans, so we climbed out the windows and slept in the chicken coop. We were away from home for forty-five days.

“And then there were the partisans and the Republicans, fighting each other. But they were both bad. I remember one day, my mother had just put bread in the oven, over at Casabassa where we were living, when two partisans came by with two Republicans whom they’d captured down by the Villa. They were bringing them up to the woods to shoot them. When they smelled the bread, they wanted some. They said they’d wait until it was done. So you see, the partisans were bad too, demanding food from us. If the Republicans had caught us giving it to them, they would have shot us all.

“Later, there were three of them coming back down from the woods. One of the Republicans switched sides and became a partisan.”

We are all silent for a moment.

“One time,” Costanzo says then, “my friends and I found a German who’d had the whole bottom of his face blown off.”

Silvana: “Did he die?”

“Porca miseria, yes he died! We covered him with a blanket.”

Megan Weiler was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Konstanz, Germany. She returned to America after high school and studied English literature at Bryn Mawr College and Yale. She has held many different jobs while writing, from serving beer to the yodeling club in Altnau, Switzerland, to helping foreign nationals in Philadelphia with immigration procedures and applications for political asylum. Her first novel, The Night Bell, was published in 2001 by Picador UK. Her stories and excerpts have appeared in Mississippi Review, Nimrod, and Common Knowledge. She lives with her husband in Nashville.

Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.

This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from The Spring by Megan Weiler (JackLeg Press 2022).

I: Summer 1996
9

(excerpt)

Silvana insisted that I come visit them again this evening.

After we’ve been talking for a while, she suddenly gets up and disappears into the back room. She never brings out refreshments right away. She waits for a certain amount of time, acting as if she had no intention of offering anything. It’s only after one has given up hope that she goes to fetch wine and water and a plate of irregularly cut strips of yellow cake. The cake is fresh and fragrant, still warm from the oven. I wonder if this way of presenting it, in haphazardly hacked pieces like leftovers, is a form of modesty, a way of saying, “Here is my cake—it’s nothing special.”

As always, I decline the wine, then agree to have just a drop in my water, “for color.” They smile their approval. I do everything to distinguish myself from the other foreigners, who are known to “drink a little.” Silvana dilutes hers as well, sipping with the concentration of a child tasting wine for the first time.

She must have baked the cake specially for me. I take a second piece and praise it extravagantly. It really is light and delicious.

Costanzo refuses it: “I don’t eat sweets.” He lights up a cigarette instead, with a defiant air.

Megan Weiler was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Konstanz, Germany. She returned to America after high school and studied English literature at Bryn Mawr College and Yale. She has held many different jobs while writing, from serving beer to the yodeling club in Altnau, Switzerland, to helping foreign nationals in Philadelphia with immigration procedures and applications for political asylum. Her first novel, The Night Bell, was published in 2001 by Picador UK. Her stories and excerpts have appeared in Mississippi Review, Nimrod, and Common Knowledge. She lives with her husband in Nashville.

Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.

This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from The Spring by Megan Weiler (JackLeg Press 2022).

I: Summer 1996
2

(excerpt)

I wake up with a start. The phone is ringing downstairs. I reach for my watch on the nightstand and see that it’s three o’clock. I’ve been asleep for two hours.

“There you are! How wonderful!” It’s Libby, calling from Castellina, a house farther up in the hills. I smile happily at the distinctive sound of her British accent. I suddenly feel less alone.

“We saw the shutters open on our way back from the Co-op. We hoped it might be you. How long has it been?”

The Parkers came to the Mugello at the same time as my family, but they live here year-round. When I was a teenager, Libby found me a summer job in Florence. We’ve been friends ever since. She doesn’t wait for me to answer her question.

“How long are you staying? You’ve got to come up and see the progress we’ve made on the house. Can you come tomorrow for tea? Richard got a whole package of bomboloni: you can help us eat them. The studio is almost finished!”

I tell her I have no water.

“Ask Renato. He’ll know what’s up, don’t worry. It’ll all be sorted out.” Talking to Libby reassures me. She is the kind of person who gives the impression that no difficulty is insurmountable if you just forge ahead and confront it straight-on.

Megan Weiler was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Konstanz, Germany. She returned to America after high school and studied English literature at Bryn Mawr College and Yale. She has held many different jobs while writing, from serving beer to the yodeling club in Altnau, Switzerland, to helping foreign nationals in Philadelphia with immigration procedures and applications for political asylum. Her first novel, The Night Bell, was published in 2001 by Picador UK. Her stories and excerpts have appeared in Mississippi Review, Nimrod, and Common Knowledge. She lives with her husband in Nashville.

Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.

This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from The Spring by Megan Weiler (JackLeg Press 2022).

I: Summer 1996
1

(excerpt)

I finish unloading the car, carry my suitcase and my satchel filled with books and notebooks upstairs. Sealed up in one of the steamer trunks I find clean sheets, pillows, and a blanket smelling of mothballs. I make up the bed in the largest bedroom, with its sloping roof beams that are like the ribbing of an enormous wing.

As a child, I had mixed feelings about this place. We used to come several times a year, driving down from Germany. I didn’t share my parents’ enthusiasm for working on the house, for stripping wood and painting and digging drainage ditches. I sometimes wished that we could have spent our vacations on a beach or in the mountains like other people.

But now an emotion fills me as I move through the rooms—like coming home. Or rather, it’s as though I’d never left; as if, throughout all the changes in my life, in some part of my brain I have always been here.

I go back down to the kitchen and make strong coffee using bottled water. I heat milk on the gas burner, frothing it with a whisk. I cut slices of bread from the big loaf I’ve bought and spread them with jam. I eat my meal outside on the terrace, a rectangle of lichen-covered stones facing west. In the stillness, I hear a mockingbird and a woodpecker on the hill above the house, and then a human cry somewhere in the distance below. Probably Renato shouting to his son Lorenzo, as they work together on a field.

Megan Weiler was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Konstanz, Germany. She returned to America after high school and studied English literature at Bryn Mawr College and Yale. She has held many different jobs while writing, from serving beer to the yodeling club in Altnau, Switzerland, to helping foreign nationals in Philadelphia with immigration procedures and applications for political asylum. Her first novel, The Night Bell, was published in 2001 by Picador UK. Her stories and excerpts have appeared in Mississippi Review, Nimrod, and Common Knowledge. She lives with her husband in Nashville.

Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.

This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Auguries & Divinations by Heather Treseler (Bauhan Publishing 2024).

The Lucie Odes

V.

At your table, a slow rotation suggesting
permanence. By day, the dining room
served as an atelier where I prodded

and patched sentences, anchored at dry
salvages. By night, the apartment turned
salon of scientists, poets, unlonely widows,

an Olympic gymnast, a wry phlebotomist,
a felon. After tiring days at the lab, you
alchemized a perfect evening, converting

ordinary time into occasion, the planned
luck of good company. Girlish, we hung
glass baubles from the chandelier, sat

Dr. Fischer's ashy cigar by the window,
leavened the politics with poems, long
workdays with wine. I laughed, there,

in spite of myself. Dared to kiss your
regal forehead. Served as line chef,
steering clear of your stovetop's merry

burble. When we were alone, flopped
in bed or driving through the city,
listening to Aida or La Sonnambula,

I felt cherished as a comrade, confidant,
chérie. In our evident brokenness, love's
tacit fabric wove between us, incarnate.

Heather Treseler is the author of Auguries & Divinations (Apreril 2024), which received the May Sarton Prize, and Parturition, which received the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook prize. Her poems appear in Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, and The American Scholar, and have received Narrative magazine’s annual poetry prize and the W. B. Yeats Prize. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and a professor of English at Worcester State University.

Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.

This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Auguries & Divinations by Heather Treseler (Bauhan Publishing 2024).

First Grief

Late to love, later still to marriage,
they assumed little, having foraged
for each other. So even as the signs

seemed clear and Sophia's courses
stopped, they knew the danger
in forecasts, whims of wind

and weather, and spoke little
of their gathered hope. So when
she slipped from the stalwart arm

of her beloved and fell hard against
the frozen face of Concord River,
she tried not to regard the basket

of blood as more than an accident.
A freak fall, a first loss demanding
of them more tenderness—and stern

reminder, in newlywed bliss,
of the dark currents that swell
and course beneath gray ice, how

a sudden crack in winter's river
devours as quick as any storied
tragedy. What had begun in

a sweet flood of four limbs,
pulsing blood, and a narrow
bed, swum as if black water.

Heather Treseler is the author of Auguries & Divinations (April 2024), which received the May Sarton Prize, and Parturition, which received the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook prize. Her poems appear in Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, and The American Scholar, and have received Narrative magazine’s annual poetry prize and the W. B. Yeats Prize. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and a professor of English at Worcester State University.

Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.

This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Auguries & Divinations by Heather Treseler (Bauhan Publishing 2024).

Haruspication

You call from San Mateo, where
the twin orange trees are still
wreathed in smoke, and the doe
in the yard appears to wheeze
as she grazes damp earth: your
unlikely perilous paradise of quakes
and fires, gold rush and farrago,
a shelf of shiny toys about to slide
from Nob Hill into glittering sea.

Yet you call with news bulletins
from dreams’ timely intuitions—
be careful around small dogs, wear blue
on Tuesday, add turmeric for ache,
avoid jeeps and spinach in car-wreck
and E. coli season, don’t trust
that “handsy” date. Your well-
schooled mind hasn’t stopped
being a radio tower of premonition:

belated notes from the wistful
dead, a portable Ouija board
and divining plate, spelling out
the witcheries of fate. I trust
in little else—in no one god
or given creed. No friend, wrote
Rossetti, like a sister. No prophet
either. Who better to forecast
the weather of wish or near

disaster than the first girl
to slip into my bed, murmuring
syllables with the lilt of speech.
You are an ancient nesting bird,
unsinged by fire or the salt
of oceans, you are a Roman
needing no knife for divination:
to account the delicate organs,
to palpate each telltale sign.

Heather Treseler is the author of Auguries & Divinations (April 2024), which received the May Sarton Prize, and Parturition, which received the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook prize. Her poems appear in Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, and The American Scholar, and have received Narrative magazine’s annual poetry prize and the W. B. Yeats Prize. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and a professor of English at Worcester State University.

Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.