Elizabeth Savage, featured in the Ocean State Review

William Morris, Wrapped in Brown Paper

It was not beauty that broke—surfaces
or lovely girlhood. Under the roff, between
walls, pasted closer to her, each layer
a rippling nearer—saving the world

from shoddy goods, a world overwhelmed
by greed & garbage. Economy—for an instance—
lightning flashing over the stairs, years
of colors, tones, salts—more intricate
for sorrow’s margin. She could see what she lacked.

For in Marriage

A little license, a little independence
needed to breathe—the perpetual sense
of swimming far out to sea—

Necessary declaratives, simplicity
“They are not lonely” “That is all” “Nothing—
in another page”—like measured, sharpened

stakes could hold the tent of sea, caught
& billowing—

Elizabeth Savage on “William Morris, Wrapped in Brown Paper” and “For in Marriage“:

“William Morris, Wrapped in Brown Paper” and “For in Marriage” are from a lectio divina of Mrs. Dalloway, my second favorite book ever. I hadn’t read Mrs. Dalloway in years, as if saving up for a special occasion or an emergency—I wanted to linger and live in it, so I read and reread 5 pages at a time until I found an entrance that brought a poem. When I was finished, I missed the book so much I read Michael Cunningham’s The Hours again—it had also been many years—another beautiful book and a testament to the way art ought to work, which is to make more art.

Elizabeth Savage is the poetry editor for Kestrel: A Journal of Literature & Art. Recent creative and critical work appear in Arts Fuse, Poetics Today, and Vox Populi. For more information, visit https://elizabethasavage.com/bio.  

Adam Tavel, featured in the Ocean State Review

I Oedipus on Fridays

I OEDIPUS on Fridays strip my anger off like mummy-wrap
and pitch it at the night, our dusty orchid wallpaper where
shadows are themselves the other half of us, in bed, inside my
head the two of us sending postcards, writing letters on my
wall, don’t forget to take your medicine is how every session ends,
I do, good morning America how are you, don’t you own me,
I’m your empty gun, my life that stank of beer flatlined beside
labor pains up close and personal, here hold a leg the nurses
said, so I did, it’s amazing what you’ll take when someone’s
shrieking in your face, cold facts splat, just like that, a noose of
Yuengling bottle caps clacked across a desk, watch me keep the
images that make your workshop wince, I earned them every
time I gave a classroom busywork so I could run and puke and
teach my sour tongue to sing, all kings dream of hanging things
that never breathe, the tic that counts the doormat leaves, that
chants fourteen fourteen fourteen, I strip it off and wake, another
mask to paint, like St. Peter as Giotto dreamed him, daggered
and unhinged, losing his mind in a midnight garden shrieking,
stand back, O Lord, I’m here to end their eyes.

I Oedipus, Darth Vader, and Jesus Christ

I OEDIPUS, Darth Vader, and Jesus Christ walk into a bar. We
make a clever premise in the ooze. Last week I overheard you
interrupt your creepy student to clarify that Christ was a title
and not a name, hence not a last name, three sentences into his
rant explaining his Jesus Theory. How you stood like a butler
when he shrugged, pouting into his Tom Selleck Reagan-era
mustache. You stay ten minutes after each class humoring him
in the hope that this strained minor kindness will keep you off
his list of people to kill, should some maddened sunbeam wake
him one morning and say, it’s trigger time, O avenging angel
of light. “Where’s Kanye?” Vader sighs, checking his watch.
“This is cluttered enough already,” Jesus says, sipping a V8 he
snuck in under his robe. Today you just smiled and nodded
blankly mid-lecture as this same weirdo told the tale of how he
began shaving in fifth grade. Most nights Vader slurps a fleet of
whiskies through a purple swirly straw before snapping his cape
and strangling random patrons with his mind. Jesus floats them
back, his favorite parlor trick. The bartender lets us get away
with murder. Her name is History. Once or twice a century she
slits her own throat. Your student didn’t hear you as he turned
to pitch his Shasta can of chaw-spit and lurch out. He didn’t
hear you say Christ, it’s Greek, like everything else, and means
anointed one.

I Oedipus admire

I OEDIPUS admire how Caspar David Friedrich dimming at
the end gave himself to autumn branches, that dark greening
he loved best, their drooping sawteeth hazed as if glimpsed by
a child carried through a hollow half-awake. By my end, no
hungers, no strength, I laid startled by flashes, first gazings at
the world that rushed back most real, sudden blossoms on a
sudden shoot. The snap of summer shirts in servants’ hands,
throaty burbles from unstopped decanters, or what of your dead
century, the one you’re always grieving because its madnesses
felt predictable and stalled, a mother’s floral perfume, perhaps,
or the shuffle of a night train, or petting a pony’s steaming nose
while held abstracted above the old coral, father’s stubbly cheek
pressed to yours and you bewildered by the frost that turned the
gate to sapphires. Most real, the animal is us turning. Animal
and real and wordless, beyond the fencerow, distant tangled
limbs, shadow-nests, sprinting breathless now, horse and father
fading, myths of a burned tribe, into that dark real greening,
something animal, you.

Adam Tavel’s sixth collection of poetry is Sum Ledger (Measure Press, 2023).

Karen McPherson, featured in the Ocean State Review

Gray Matter

In my mind, they lift it from the body
like a slippery baby, plop it
onto a steel tray, weigh &
measure & slice & prep for science and for
that week it is not my father’s
brain, just matter,
later returned to ashes,
wind.

I’m thinking how buried
in the folds of mine are keys to all
the puzzles of genetic replication and a family’s
story. Even as recollection slips
its gears and I’m left to contemplate this
threadless labyrinth, this questless path
of stone and thistle.

I’m singing the circular riddle
of consciousness: what is
bigger than it can ever be
small enough
to hold?

Karen McPherson on “Gray Matter“:

There’s something so compelling and curious and impossible—trying to get inside one’s own mind, to think around and about one’s own thinking. We donated my father’s body to science. I’m pondering the connection between brain and mind. Between matter and mattering. I’m trying to think my way through and past the loss. I keep singing in the threadless labyrinth.

Karen McPherson is a post-academic, elderqueer poet and literary translator from Oregon. Her poetry publications include Skein of Light (Airlie Press, 2014) and the chapbooks Sketching Elise (Finishing Line, 2012) and Long for This World (Seven Kitchens Press, 2024). Her published translations include Up Close (Ekstasis Editions, 2023), a poetry collection by Québec poet Louise Dupré. Her work has appeared in literary journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Chicago Quarterly, Atlanta Review, and The Women’s Review of Books. She is a former editor in the Airlie Press poetry collective.

Sandra Lim, featured in the new Ocean State Review

Ombra

Why do I suddenly think of you
on this late summer day?
I’m far from home,
and you’ve long since receded
into shadow. The flowers here are out in sheets,
and I show my slip like a lily
in kind. Did you just push your ship
into blue waters? How will I work
off my own discontent? It runs through the days
like the weather. Here are appetite and greed,
hoary brown bees feeding on the remnants of a meal.
These days are made of dark glass.
And the past? It’s deeper than the sea. The future
is a picture propped with its face to the wall.

Sandra Lim is the author of the poetry collections The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton, 2021); The
Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize selected by Louise
Glück; and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). She is a Distinguished University Professor
of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and lives in Cambridge, MA.