Charles Rafferty
POETRY
Trusting a poem is our first mistake. Living as if we had not heard it is the second.
In a forest, the best poets think of axe handles and violins.
Poetry is like the moon. It can only help you see if you’re in the dark already.
A good poet is like a vulture. He relies on the tongue to tell him what has value. He takes the roadkill of August and transforms it into flight.
A poem should have meaning the way the stars have meaning—not as something explainable, but as something irrefutable.
CHARLES RAFFERTY has a new collection of prose poems from BOA, A Cluster of Noisy Planets. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review.
ISSUE TWELVE features poetry by Samuel Amadon, Rennie Ament, Bruce Beasley, Brittany Cavallaro, Lidija Dimkovska, Denise Duhamel, Alexandria Hall, Rebecca Hazelton, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Kim Hyesoon, Gilad Jaffe, Michael Klein, Peter LaBerge, Nick Lantz, Eugenia Leigh, Robert Wood Lynn, Lisa Olstein, Eric Pankey, Tomaž Šalamun, Elizabeth Scanlon, Nathan Spoon, Sampson Starkweather, Peter Streckfus, Rodrigo Toscano, Stella Wong, and Felicia Zamora; fiction by Marie-Helene Bertino, Emily Neuberger, and Ed Taylor; nonfiction by Kate Colby, Krystal Languell, Kathryn Nuernberger, and J. M. Tyree; a film essay by Zack Finch; and Prageeta Sharma in conversation with Michael Dumanis.