Madeleine Cravens
I want to know how things will end. I've heard of the beginning,
how grains of pollen fell from the poplars. Then a little choral

music, cavalry, bright skirmish on the hillside, a thousand
years of this. Here is a flute and here is a steamship. Here is a gun

and your grandmother's ring. The devil has seven blue heads,
and when we draw him on the inside of the chapel, each one

tells a different lie. How many gods do you believe in?
How many good men? The story of the world can be told

in relation to umbrellas, invented in the seventh century
when we finally had enough rain. Don't look at the gun

directly. And don't remove the flute from its sheath of ice.
The end's already in motion, the end was starting this whole

time and today Brooklyn is a beautiful, devastating autumn.
Everyone I love is dancing in the plaza. A band plays below

the archway, we're drinking wine and rolling up our sleeves
to show the soft parts of our arms. When this ends I hope

it ends completely. How brave I feel, right now, watching
my old friends beside my father and imagining the end

as one imagines something certain, a birthday or a doctor's
visit. Not like last year when we watched the movie about

ruins—I ignored the crusted amphitheater and wanted
to touch you. It was February. You wore a long blue coat.
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I remember that I wrote the first draft of this poem on a stray legal pad: I think that’s why it fell into uniform couplets, because I was breaking the lines at the margins of the pad. Even though the poem contains a lot of disparate images, I ultimately see it as a love poem. It all funnels down to remembering someone’s coat.

Madeleine Cravens on "Object Permanence"
Hanif Abdurraqib watching the games in an informal photograph
"One of America's Most Celebrated Authors Distills the Joy, Pain and Miracle of Being a Wolves Fan"

"Basketball is a vessel of nostalgia, vulnerability and community for Abdurraqib. There aren't many Wolves fans in Ohio, but thanks to the internet he's part of the pack. A local book club of Timberwolves fans read 'On Basketball and Ascension.' Abdurraqib said he gave signed copies to the team."

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Cover of the issue of Harpy Hybrid REview in which Orchid Tierney's poem appeared
What Sparks Poetry:
Orchid Tierney on "a field guide to future flora"

"however distributed vegetal cognition is, plants are nonetheless remarkable sensing and sensate beings, who invite speculation as to who we—the weirdos of this world—are if we are not already communal thinkers. so: to look upon a plant with an appreciation that its own mind is radically different is a terse exercise in the acceptance of its unknowability."
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