To everyone who submitted to our open reading period this April, thank you so much for sending your poems to us. It was a real honor to read all of your work. We received over 750 submissions, from all over the U.S. and the world, and the Editorial Board took most of the summer and into the early…
You say sometimes you’ve nothing
save your hand in the glove and the glove
against the wind and you’re jabbing at the sky now
in the match of your life but the sky
never fights back and so you praise it.
–Brynn Saito
from the poem “Match”
published in Ninth Letter, Vol. 9 #1
by Charles Bukowski
I even hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and the water
is their tears.
I listen to the water
on nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines…
it matters little
very little love is not so bad
or very little life
what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this
I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.