Poetry (to me) is a means by which we achieve illumination, via exploration of deep recesses—via interrogation/ excavation & derangement of self. One arrives at knowing by forgetting what one knows—you enter the room a dog, in searching, & the room becomes a chew toy full of peanut butter, a backpack full of buzzards, or the whole image is a cloud of pomegranates in a child’s hand. It transmutes us into ourselves’—obliterates & maintains us into better ways of loving, of facing all what faces us.

I like absurdity. I like being absurd in poetry because the world we live in is batshit-madness, most often, & in poetry the stakes are low – there’s no life to be lost, only made. Its “use” is in defiance of “usefulness” (as the capitalist-ugly world of property & product would have you see it). To play with that by which we understand—language—sound/ body/ imagery—is to make possible every potential self what rests (or unrests) inside us.

This rambling is due (in part) to my finding a dear friend’s poem in the Fall 2012 issue of The Greensboro Review: “A Cloud of Decisions Translates” by Matt Hart.

Matt Hart is a poet with a thousand heads, & a heart what can crush your skull (though he’d never allow his real heart do something so brutal to your actual skull). He’s a poet of obsession—he & his poems are after something, chasing after, whatever it may be the poems have caught scent of, until everything corresponding is amplified to the nth degree.

The poem is made of so much ordinary—the weather, scrambled eggs at a diner—& it’s anything but. It’s a poem concerned: with art, with art making, with making amends & making decisions. A Cloud of Decisions Translates—& here, the cloud is the poem or it’s the speaker. The decisions are the moves what get made in the making, & the making is what translates the untranslatable (which is poetry).

We enter the poem on the line: We own the horizon, so draw it out

Already, my brain is awash in multitudes: owning the horizon is impossible, unless it’s a sentiment as in: we only have this day, here & now, as we come or go. & then the drawing: which is a means of mark making/ an artform, a coaxing forth, or a way to hold onto an experience just a little longer . . .

& off we go: cascading down the poem through images exactly as complicated as the first line—never once stopping on an ending punctuation—only pausing in visual caesura, to catch our breath a moment. The way the poem is enjambed reminds me of what it means to be human—every line of the piece is itself a complex creature, one that is changed by, & changes, what came before & what comes after (all at once).

You can’t see the incredible shape the cloud makes until you’ve gone through it, arriving on the other side newly shaped yourself, & all there’s left to do is look up at the night sky/ and wonder.

“A Cloud of Decisions Translates” by Matt Hart can be found in Issue 92 of The Greensboro Review.

Samuel Cormac is an MFA Candidate in Poetry at UNC Greensboro where they serve as a poetry editor for The Greensboro Review.

Sometimes the best thing in fiction, especially in its shorter forms, is simplicity. In Reid Wegner’s (very) short story “Testudo,” the premise is just that: simple. There is a tortoise, living in captivity, who suffers. There’s much to admire about this piece, but what I first noticed was its refreshingly basic formula, of an animal who suffers by the hands of its oblivious human antagonists. This is also a familiar formula—in reading it, one can’t help but think of Black Beauty or Watership Down, and of countless other stories one often encounters in childhood. And yet while “Testudo” is certainly a story that’s been told before, like all fiction’s been told before—it simultaneously stands apart, like all fiction will do if it’s any good.

One of the most obvious differences in “Testudo” is its unusual characterization of the tortoise, Nikolai. The story is written from his perspective, and while animals in fiction are often merited more intelligence than they realistically possess, Nikolai has a believable level of intelligence for a tortoise. Unlike Sewell’s Black Beauty or Adams’s Hazel, Wegner has written Nikolai to have a level of thinking that is not on par with a human’s thoughts. Nikolai is dumb, and he gets dumber as the story advances because his continued captivity. I like that “Testudo” then works to subvert the fairy-tale conception that tortoises are these reverenced, sage creatures. Nikolai is not well-respected by his owner, who forgets to change the lighting in his habitat to simulate day and night, thus subjecting him to “a bewildering string of days beneath an insomniac sun, or…an endless Scandinavian night” [84]. His owner’s forgetfulness, along with the fact that Nikolai is native to Afghanistan but was ousted to icy Russia, create a confusion in the tortoise that only worsens with his age. There is much longsuffering. He declines, scrabbling at the bottom of his plastic bin every day although it gets him nowhere; this makes for a dismal story.

Nikolai’s decline makes for another interesting dynamic in “Testudo.” While a tortoise’s shell is typically depicted as a helpful and unique asset, Nikolai slowly begins to see his shell as a mocking burden. In his sterile but safe captivity, where he doesn’t need his shell to protect him from predators, the shell begins to weigh on him. He’s always tired. He thinks about what sort of creature he might have been had he not been given such a colossal mass to shoulder. And then, of course, there’s the fact that the shell will outlive him—even though it’s inanimate.

While Nikolai’s decline is certainly tragic, what’s most tragic about this story (in a good way) is the ending. At the story’s close, after all of his struggles in captivity, Nikolai symbolically retreats back into his shell, where he says he’ll stay “for the rest of the season, or for the year, or, if need be, for the rest of his life” [90]. (As an aside, the ending is satisfyingly circular, since the story began with Nikolai’s cautious emergence from his shell.) In his final gesture, what once was an object of torment to Nikolai has again become his tool of self-protection—as it should be—only the self-protection’s now from his own artificial habitat and unfeeling human captor. So what I like about this final move—and the piece in summation—is that it’s a tragic tale about a protagonist who doesn’t realize that his story is a tragedy. Throughout, Nikolai lives ‘in the dark’ about the twisted darkness of his life, always expressing confusion but never resentment. This makes the tortoise’s final gesture ironic: As he retreats into his shell, Nikolai experiences a physical darkness and yet still doesn’t comprehend the larger darkness and tragedy of his own existence.

“Testudo” by Reid Wegner can be found in Issue 90 of The Greensboro Review.

Emma Boggs is a first-year MFA candidate in fiction at UNC Greensboro and an Editorial Assistant forThe Greensboro Review.

In the absence of in-person poetry readings, I’ve been seeking out surrogates for the sensation of really being there when a poem echoes around the room. I’ve favored chapbooks for their scope—transporting me for a few hours under a poet’s controlled intention. Zoom readings have provided some of the immediacy and kick of a real human voice (when the internet’s digital gremlins don’t degrade the reader into a kind of glitched-out android). Still, I haven’t found a way to feel like I’m sharing the experience with others, and in missing out on that, I’ve been missing out on one of my favorite experiences: that subtle hypnosis that takes over when a poem completely fills up a room and everybody in it.

I say, forget the mere suspension of disbelief. A really good reading suspends the listeners’ self-control, leading them where the poem wants to go, getting them lost for a while, leaving them someplace they’re not sure how they’ve arrived. It’s part of the magic of live readings, and occasionally a version of that effect manages to manifest on the printed page. Poets who make expert use of mantric language and lists or who lead readers down a slope of sly dissociation might just steal the reader’s very will.

Carine Topal’s “Pleasure Hotel” took over my entire sense of readerly direction in just this way. As the limited, repeating set of words in this poem made their paces through one deft transformation after another, I found myself far outside of my own head, seamlessly pulled wherever the poem wanted me. The poem’s imagery of smoke, rose, and moonless night shift with dreamlike logic from the concrete, “Smoke rose from the pleasure hotel” to the analogous, “burning hotel pleasure rose like smoke” to the surreal, “we face-to-face in the moonless pleasure hotel of smoke, yes, we rose and rose.”

The poem’s compelling imagery pulls a reader immediately into a minimalist but evocative scene. The rhythmic beat of the poem’s mantric language hypnotizes. All the while, the shifting semantics and syntax press intention and movement into that pulsing cadence without resorting to exposition. The cumulative effect is perfectly encapsulated in a prose-poem block that lets each sentence speak for itself while relying on juxtaposition to do the heavy lifting of propelling the reader from one frame of mind to the next.

Whether or not you’re trying to make up for missed readings, the entrancing drift of “Pleasure Hotel” provides a brief but haunting escape from the here and now. Give up a few minutes (and a bit of your self control) and let the poem take you where it will.

“Pleasure Hotel” can be found in Issue 84 of The Greensboro Review.

Michael Springer is a second-year MFA candidate in poetry at UNC Greensboro and Poetry Editor for The Greensboro Review.

While flipping randomly through an older edition of the Greensboro Review, I came across Marlowe Moore’s “Shark Fishers.” Its prose is what first caught my eye. Simplistic but beautiful—the mark of any skilled writer—the language here shines with its clear and clean conveyance, with its truthful rendering of the narrative at hand. Like any great tale will do, it swept me into its setting, into a place where a couple of drab houses line a drab North Carolinian beach on a drab day. I could nearly smell the saltwater. There are so many visceral images; I watched as a character “blew [cigarette] smoke out to the waiting sea oats,” as a car rolled up with “dead barracuda strapped with thick twine to the top . . . like Christmas trees” [93-94].

And yet what I liked even more about this story is what happens within it. At the heart of this tale are two women who are both belittled and suppressed by their male partners. Told in a third-person perspective that comes closest to Chavis’s point of view, we quickly learn that he constantly judges and berates his partner, Emmaline, for continuing to mourn the death of their young child. The other couple is an unnamed shark-fishing duo referred to as the “man” and “fisher-woman,” and here this man also condemns his partner for dwelling on her past, telling her abrasively that nobody wants to hear what she has to say. It becomes clear, too, that the women are also both traumatized: Emmaline over her deceased child, and the fisher-woman for reasons unknown. But it’s clear that the fisher-woman is dealing with her own vein of PTSD because as time progresses, she begins muttering to herself and pasting loose fish scales on her skin. And yet the men are both uncaring and insensitive to them; in fact, they appear to bond over this fact—after one says “Shut up” to the two women, the other echoes it. Moore does a great job with setting up the two problematic relationships, with swiftly swaying my concern and devotion to the two women, despite being told the events (almost) from Chavis’s point of view. And then, after establishing their very serious trials and tribulations, Moore mirrors the men’s bond by bringing the women together in a far more beautiful moment of connection and solidarity.

What I love most about this short story is that it reveals a turning point for the two women. While we don’t get to know what happens after the lovely moment in which they both literally and metaphorically hold one another—by embracing and sharing their painful stories—it’s clear that there has been a reprieve from their typical way of being in the world, if not a shift. And this story leaves you hoping for that shift, hoping the women will eventually choose to stand up for themselves, speak out about their traumas, and perhaps leave their cruel partners to reclaim their own agencies and freedoms.

That being said, as unlikeable and indifferent as the men are, Moore writes in such a way in which the men both still retain some semblance of their humanity. They are strangers but are kind to each other. They enjoy a moment of fishing together. And Chavis even holds Emmaline for a brief moment when she’s crying—until the other man tells him to “get up here and help me” reel in a shark. With the story being written closest to Chavis’s perspective, it serves the dual function of showing that the women are less heard in the world of this story, but also that Chavis isn’t a complete monster. Yes, the men in “Shark Fishers” are terrible, but they are not inhuman supervillains. And ultimately, the story is not about fostering a hatred for the two men, it’s about that pivotal moment of brightness and connection for the two women, about their potential unfettering. If anything, by the end I feel sorry for the two men in their cluelessness. They are living in a sad and “careless” world of their own; as Moore writes in her beautiful closing line, “Chavis and the man kept their backs to the sound of the women’s voices and watched the dark shadow circle in the careless sea amid the mutilated bodies of spot, mullet, and barracuda” [97]. I would highly recommend this short story to anybody looking for a quick but weighty read.

“Shark Fishers” can be found in the 35^th Anniversary Issue (Number 70) of The Greensboro Review.

Emma Boggs is a first-year MFA candidate in fiction at UNC Greensboro and an Editorial Assistant for The Greensboro Review.

“For part of one strange year we lived,” reads the opening line of Lois Beebe Hayna’s “Brief Eden.” The declaration, with its loaded qualifier, is intriguing. Perhaps I’m projecting too much of 2020 to this poem published in our Fall 2009 issue, but at the mention of such a year I can’t help but begin asking slightly anxious questions: strange how? why only part? what about that we—strange to whom?  Yet we’re left hanging on “lived,” and I find the enjambment (the second line continues “in a small house at the edge of a wood”) gently reassuring. The incomplete thought becomes almost an affirmation. We lived. Together, these effects bring us into the poem on a note of tension, walking a line between the anxiety of strange times and surety life’s larger cycles.

That tension runs through the entire poem in a way I find especially compelling from the vantage of this socially isolated year. Hayna’s verse often moved between the rhythms of human activity and those of the natural world. “Brief Eden”features a speaker transported to unfamiliar territory, where her human rhythms are interrupted:

“No neighbors, which suited us. Nobody

to ask questions. Except

for the one big question we went on

asking ourselves.”

In lieu of neighbors, birds arrive to fill the lines of Hayna’s verse with their own rhythms, “Myriads of birds,” “birds we’d never seen before,” “birds/ brilliant or dull, with sharp beaks/ or crossed bills.” The birds may alight on the feeder or pass without so much as a downward glance, but the poem’s speaker has the time and the room to watch each of these creatures move with an intention and destination she can only guess at as that “big question” continues to hang overhead.

The poem doesn’t wind up to anything as tidy as epiphany. The tension between disruption and the world’s persistent cycles does not resolve; no answer arrives to clear up the big question. But Hayna manages to provide a little hedged comfort to readers, all the same. She performs a little bit of temporal magic; “Brief Eden” takes us through the bulk of a slow and scrutinizing year in a mere twenty-two lines.  The quiet, meditative focus of the speaker brings us in close to the birds, seeing them the way one only sees them with drawn out and diligent attention. Yet, circling around those stretched moments of observation, a year makes its usual rotation in no time at all.

The effect is haunting, walking an uneasy line between sentiments of stop to smell the roses and this too shall pass. Hayna’s dynamic cadence reinforces the effect, passing between staccato impressions and legato summary like the long sentence leading us out of the poem and out of the strange year:

“By the time we’d watched them

wing north in spring, then make

an anxious autumn return,

we too had pulled it together and we too moved

into what seemed to be our lives.”

“Brief Eden” can be found in Issue 86 of The Greensboro Review.

Michael Springer is a second-year MFA candidate in poetry at UNC Greensboro and Poetry Editor for The Greensboro Review.