This spring I spent an extended amount of time home, and I expected this would make everything around me smaller, more drab. Instead, the small details of arranging objects or observing the yard from the same spot each morning became more beautiful than I can explain. Even so, within the field of the spaces we live, there’s a lot of room for introspection – not all of it good. The balancing of this co-existing expansion and collapse is a rich place for noticing the stories that are happening all around us.

Our Summer poems pay great attention to the world of the speaker whether it’s in the yard or home. All of these stories stayed with me past the first reading and each of them brings me back for another read. As Mary Oliver wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” These poems are devoted to the examined life.

In “Velocities of a Yard,” Ryan Harper opens the morning with: Peerless japonica, hater of lime/its bells were still this morning. From this silence the poem builds to noon with the sound of everything awakening: sparrows in allegro in the branches,/in soft swarm, the host endued.

In “Flecks” by James Miller, we find ourselves in a kitchen with turnip-shaped cookies, Gifts for the cast, your singers. There’s so much happening in this small poem that I hate to tell you more than this. What I can say, Miller uses every word to move us from detail to detail to an unexpected ending that expands the world of the poem from the kitchen to life beyond this moment.

Elizabeth Torres brings us two prose poems, “Beef Tallow” and “The Momfluencer Was an Economics Major, So She Knows the Power of Want.” The first begins: To make up for everything, I save bits of fat and render it. The first time I read that line I let out a heavy sigh. Similarly, the second poem leaves us also acknowledging the power of want: If you hold me here, witness my aloneness in my not-aloneness, what have I outsourced that diminishes me? Are you not going to pay, as I’m going to pay?

I hope you enjoy these selections as well as the rest of the Summer Issue. 

Angela M. Brommel 
Editor-in-Chief
Poetry Editor
The Citron Review