NVR 2.3: A Sonnet Sampler

Majmudar, O'Donnell, Devine, Graves, Richardson, Goldberg, Wang, Rosenthal

Here’s one last look at NVR’s summer issue as the leaves turn and summer gives way to autumn.

Amit Majmudar, “The Only Holy War”

Oh what a glorious war we waged on time,
you in your peacock pleats and jasmine braid
and ankle bells portraying a warrior goddess,
me at my laptop redeploying rhyme
like roving arrows on a map of fate.
We fought our Passchendaele, entrenched in bodies,
my dugout deep in yours. We woke up, ate,
went on our morning walks, we made love, played
old board games, ditched our iPhones, stormed the beachhead,
kamikazed straight into the sun
while knowing we would likely never reach it,
while knowing no Great War was ever won,
each night, each decade together one more mission
prolonging this timeline, this lifegiving war of attrition.

Amit Majmudar’s recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), and the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025). More information about his novels and poetry collections can be found at www.amitmajmudar.com.

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Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, “The View From Childhood”

“Lucy the Elephant is a six-story elephant-shaped example
of novelty architecture, constructed of wood and clad in tin in 1882 by James Lafferty in Margate City, NJ, five miles south of Atlantic City.”
—Wikipedia

Lucy was huge. Towered above us
like some weird Victorian dream
of the exotic, set here by this
practical shore of rum runners
and whores, amblers and gamblers
out to make a buck however they can.
My cousins and I would climb the stairs and scream
with delight when we reached her eye, scan
the ground for our mothers who stood beneath,
her big gray legs, her platter-sized feet
dwarfing them. They were not small women,
but Lucy made them so. The world seemed
as if we could hold it in our hands,
their little lives below some foreign land. 

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, PhD, is a professor, poet, scholar, and writer at Fordham University, where she serves as Associate Director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her publications include two chapbooks and nine full-length collections of poems. Her book Holy Land (2022) won the Paraclete Press Poetry Prize. O’Donnell’s eleventh book of poems, Dear Dante, was published in Spring 2024. She is currently at work on the manuscripts of two new collections, one tentatively titled Body Songs, poems on embodiment, and The View from Childhood, poems about family, coming of age, and the place(s) we call home.

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M.I. Devine, “Everyone Says I look like Brad Pitt”

When I get down on my knees with my kids
And put up my dukes and scream real loud, “Hit
Me! Hit me! HIT ME!” just like Brad Pitt did 
In The Tree of Life, where he does what he can,
’50s made man, though one son doesn’t make it, 
And the other one turns into Sean Penn.
Nothing’s so fragile that we won’t break it,
 
And God, Penn looks awful, like, What film am I in?
You know that feeling? Jessica Chastain,
Meanwhile, Pitt’s wife, floats–floats–off of the ground.
Earth angel. Cars like boats just bob around.

You say life ends at death like that is it.
Everyone else says I look like Brad Pitt.

M.I. Devine is the author of Warhol's Mother's Pantry, winner of the Gournay prize. He is co-founder of the avant-pop project Famous Letter Writer, which releases DADAMAMA in 2025-2026. His poetry has appeared recently in Literary Matters and Nimrod International Journal, and a selection from a new memoir project will soon appear in Image. (www.midevine.com)

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Jesse Graves, “Two Stones”

                         When gods were young/This wind was old.
                                                           -Edward Thomas

Even in bright noontime, we never walked
beyond the ridgeline where the babies’ graves
were marked by two stones and a blue placard.
Pinewoods made rich understory, with caves,
fault lines, and fissures pock-marking the ground.
They were Johnson children, born with two years
between them and died before they found
their footing, fulfilling their parents’ fears.
No matter how mild the day in yard and field,
howling wind topped the ridge and shook tall trees.
My cousins and I kept eyes and ears peeled
for some movement that might cause us to freeze,
any sound that could signal a hushed weep,
or the cooing a baby makes before long sleep. 

Jesse Graves is the author of five poetry collections, including Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, and a collection of essays, Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place. His work received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

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Betzi Richardson, “Double Play”

for my father

Summer. I used to sit and keep my Dad
company. I read while he watched TV.
Baseball grew on me. Male bodies beautifully
muscled, but not too much; the steroid scandal had
blown over. I came to love the secret codes,
the touches, taps, studied glances – the flexes
and swings of the home run hitters, those apex
predators contrasting with the leaping, mountain goat
outfielders, flinging their bodies through air. 

Meanwhile, my Dad lingered. How many more
at bats will he have? Who or what’s keeping score?
Top of the ninth. I steal a glance at him warily.
Dozing. His white hair softly breaks in a wave
over his forehead. In sleep his face has gone opaque.

Betzi Richardson is a visual artist and poet, living in LA. She taught at Santa Monica College and has a Masters in English. Her poems have been published in her chapbook, This Desert Inclination, and in journals: Antioch Review, Slant, Artlife, Pinyon, Upstairs at Duroc, Transformation, Nantahala Review, and others.

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Midge Goldberg, “To the Young Woman in the Restroom at the Wedding”

So sweet of you to think that I’d been weeping
For joy over the vows the couple shared.
You’d sat in the row behind me, kindly keeping
An eye on me, enthralled with how I cared.

Beautiful girl, photographer’s ideal,
You touched me on the arm, leaned on the tile—
My emotional reactions “were so real,”
I’d helped you “feel them too.” And with a smile
 
Pasted on, I nodded, headed out.

          My daughter and her beau would not have wed
          Anyway. She talked of serious doubt—
          They weren’t “a perfect match,” as these vows said.
 
O bathroom confidante, please know I cried
That wedding day for a lovely man who died.

Midge Goldberg is the editor of Outer Space: 100 Poems, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Her third collection of poetry, To Be Opened After My Death, was published by Kelsay Books in 2021. Her book Snowman’s Code received the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award, and she received the 2016 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, the poet Robert W. Crawford.

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Laura Wang, “Sick Day’s Delirium”

in memory of Michael LaGory

I thought I saw you, late beloved friend,
come through the door and stride with artless grace
and certainty of welcome on your face
into the room where our joint students bend
with half-closed eyes over screens or problem sets.
You looked a dream: new-shaven, fitted smart
in crisp celestial blue, such that my heart
(always more gullible than my eyes) could yet
exult that yours did beat again. I sprang
up, running to embrace you—that’s the last
sensation I recall, because just then
the alarm I’d set an hour beforehand rang,
jolting me where I lay in febrile rest
with a new sick feeling, cure unknown to men.

Laura Wang is a high school English teacher in Honolulu, Hawaii, the city where she grew up. Some of her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Christian Century, The Windhover, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, and Bamboo Ridge. Originally trained as a medievalist, she has also published scholarship on Chaucer and on the fifteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson.

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David Rosenthal, “Chagall's Midsummer Night's Dream, 1939”

Titania wears eternity in white
as she receives her unexpected groom.
Her love will only last a spell, a night,
before her blue fan sweeps it like a broom
to fairy dust, and Bottom’s head returns
to its rough weaver’s homeliness. How strange
he seems more worthy as an ass – one learns
to be with whom one’s with, to rearrange
the elements of habit, drive, and mind
in line with love. He never was all boor
and brute, but all his tenderness resigned
itself to roles he felt unsuited for.
Now, fiddler behind and angel above
will ratify this temporary love.

David Rosenthal is a public school teacher in Berkeley, California. His poems and translations have appeared in Rattle, HAD, Rust & Moth, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cosmic Daffodil, Teachers & Writers Magazine, Measure, and many other journals. He has been a Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award Finalist and a Pushcart Prize Nominee. His collection, The Wild Geography of Misplaced Things, was published by White Violet Press (Kelsay Books).

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