Jayme Ringleb
Starfish between them
fatten on tube worms
trapped in the tide pool

rock gardens. Dressed
like a schoolboy, the one mopes
up to Devils Churn.

The other follows. The sea,
caught in the cave's throat,
throws our voices back to us,

so the one lowers his head
into the Churn, yells.
The other moves shoreward,

where, underfoot, razor clams
closed against him
fracture and crumb.

Anywhere he steps,
he is breaking some.
Fagged crows preen,

gobbling fleas.
An opened crab's hand
brings down gulls.

The one boy's hands
are rough as silt.
He signals we sit.

He touches the other's jaw
with his blue fingers.
Each believes he is a net

trapped in another
net's arms. A strand
of the one's unwashed hair

sticks in a hinge
of the other's spectacles.
I am here. I loosen it.

Sea monster on sea monster
drowning, rock pools break
the sea that thieves

wrecked shells away
as sediment.
All of us are soon gone.

The waves go out and out.
I am just another thing
that loves them.
from the book SO TALL IT ENDS IN HEAVEN / Tin House
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Cover of Solmaz Sharif's Book, Customs
"Embodied Placements": Solmaz Sharif's Customs

"Throughout Customs, Sharif excavates orientations of space and time, revealing a tense lucidity. Sharif, along with countless other Iranians, carries the impurities of history closely, as they continue to rule the life she leads today. These impurities lend themselves to elucidation—Sharif looks towards an impure syntactic structure, seeking truth within the contradictions of her form."

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Cover of Renee Gladman's Book, Plans for Sentences
What Sparks Poetry:
Heather Green on Renee Gladman's Plans for Sentences

"The pathos in these lines might bring up different associations for different readers. For me, there's pathos somehow 'leaking' from these sentences, calling to mind the ways we build or fail to build communities, shelters, and habitable spaces. Taken together, the text and images here dream and draft and gesture toward future creations, lines of many kinds that will create, inhabit, and alter future spaces."
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