Thank You Goodbye
Lisa Olstein
The way a stranded animal looks
back or circles above or reaches

a slow paw in your direction
after the terror of your carrying them

has not so much passed as is beginning to
ebb in the slipstream of their blue or green,

warm or cold blood and they can see
that what they maybe did or didn't know

to even hope for—tiniest beating wish
in the swish of the lungs—came

(as we say, not they) true or simply
that somehow by some grace they are

returned now to an element—air, water,
earth—they can recognize and though

they cannot possibly recognize you,
they recognize that you were there,

instrumental even, an instrument in this case
and the right, maybe righteous, fear

coursing through them now holds a glint
of gold like sunlight in a river of leaves—

this time a sloth, slowly, backward
from a newly gripped tree, this time

a sea turtle, cold stunned so we have to
search out the wave in its freeze-frame eyes.
from the book DREAM APARTMENT / Copper Canyon Press
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Through a very specific portal—a much-viewed video of a man carrying a sloth from a busy road to the safety of a tree, the sloth looking back and reaching toward him—I fell into a meditation on the kaleidoscopic ways sentience and circumstance intersect to create moments of encounter: the edges where they begin and end, how they linger, what can’t be translated but can be transmitted in them.

Lisa Olstein on "Thank You Goodbye"
Color cover image of Sarah Ghazal Ali's book, Theophanies
"Theophanies: Poems by Sarah Ghazal Ali"

"The poems  give an overwhelming impression of a reflective and refractive female self, the nature of the feminine displayed and explored, human and divine. Within the feminine, there is a fusion of earth and spirit. Creativity is a female force. The work focuses on the mother, the birthing, the child. The Christian and Muslim women give birth to miracles and suffer the pain and torn-ness that come with birth."

via MER LITERARY
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Cover image from The Missouri Review, Spring 2024
What Sparks Poetry:
Gilad Jaffe on Language as Form


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