This year’s issue of HSPR is a collection of small things – a changed logo, different paper, new fonts. But those small changes add up to a pretty big difference in the journal’s physical presence on the shelf. And the poems in this issue consider those things too – the way the small things, the things we almost could overlook, often drive art as much as larger considerations. This year’s magazine has poems about punctuation marks, poems about basement clutter, poems written in epigrams, poems about plants, poems about snippets of memory... Our 4x4 section this year continues the theme – Richard Kenney, Tobi Kassim, Jessica Fisher and Stephanie Burt all weigh in on the role of small things in both making poems and appreciating them. We hope this one small copy of a magazine will play an outsized role in your reading this year!
Contributors
Mikhail Aizenberg Tara Bray Stephanie Burt Mary Cisper KE Duffin Bobby Elliott Kerry James Evans Carla Sofia Ferreira Jessica Fisher Eamon Grennan J Kates Tobi Kassim Richard Kenney Kimberly Kemler
Jenna Le Sandra Lim Brian McDonald Robert McNamara Matt Prater Rachel Rinehart Natalie Shapero JR Solonche Maura Stanton Adam Tavel Anna Tomlinson Nikki Wallschlaeger Lesley Wheeler Jonathan Wike
Winter Birds by Mary Cisper
When winter birds scatter at shadows, cacophony delivers them again:
saltbush, the wind’s pickup lines.
The dead still aren’t talking: father speechless
unlike a machined hummingbird.
The drone when space is a bullet not a camera
calls wherever we go a postcard.
After our sister’s wedding my drunk brother takes my arm
blind as a broken wing.
Dear Talon, when a bird flies into the house
hold him.
Naxos by Sandra Lim
Nothing consummates an idyll like abandonment.
Zoom back. A marvel then, to be here with you. Nude like fruit, and motiveless.
The grey-leaved olive trees outside seem like young women: small, light, exciting.
I love you, I wish there was some more original way of saying it.
We drink our bitter coffees on the terrace. And the little dark stone of work that secures me, where is it?
Millions of hard stars flood the sky each night, gentle wording defending mystery.
My own timidity, pale as meal, will turn out to hold some ruthlessness, too.
I draw a line down the middle of my life— that’s my night now, that’s my day.
Each day the sea is blue, then amber, then burning red; it declares love, it takes it back.
Twilight by JR Solonche
Twilight, and the light follows the sound of a plane west. The sound fades away, and the light fades after it. It is pulled, unwilling to leave, and it turns while leaving. All there is to hear is the water and the birds.
But the sound of the water is not the voice of the water only. On the tongue of the water is also the voice of the culvert. And the sound of the birds is not the sound of the birds only. In the mouths of the birds is also the voice of the empty road.
