Pushcart Nominations

And a Thanksgiving Note

It’s been an exciting few months since NRV launched on June 4, 2024. We have released a full summer issue and a Halloween mini-issue. Our winter issue is forthcoming in January. We have published thirteen reviews. We recently participated in an online reading with the excellent journal Think. We have steadily grown in readership and reach. The goal is to be a leading form-friendly literary journal and a good citizen on the poetry scene. We’re getting there.

None of this is possible without readers and submitting poets. As editor, I am very grateful indeed this Thanksgiving for all of you. I am also grateful for my advisory board—Boris Dralyuk, Claudia Gary, A.M. Juster, Amit Majmudar, Sally Thomas, and Marly Youmans. NVR would have never gotten off the ground without their advice, encouragement, and support. Carla Sarett and Ethan McGuire recently joined the masthead as contributing editors, so you can expect more of their insightful, lively prose in the months to come.

I want to thank in a special way those who have supported the journal financially. NVR is a frugal enterprise, but there are still expenses. Your generosity has covered those and has allowed the journal to start saving for some needed upgrades and exciting new ventures. Again, many thanks.

Thanksgiving is also a good time to announce NVR’s first Pushcart Prize nominations. Congratulations to the following six poets! (I have included the poems below the list.)

2024 Pushcart Nominations

Ned Balbo, “Millions of Monarchs” (Halloween 2024)

Carla Galdo, “Imminence” (Halloween 2024)

Katie Hartsock, “Tussive” (Summer 2024)

Amit Majmudar, “Prologue to an Unwritten Rewrite of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus” (Summer 2024)

Benjamin Myers, “The Pitcher’s Arm” (Summer 2024)

Darlene Young, “Sisters” (Summer 2024)

Ned Balbo, “Millions of Monarchs”

Millions of monarchs (clouds in late October
tumbling out of the north, the souls of the dead)
                        arrive for Día de los Muertos,
                                    hovering close,
            tangelo-orange, presaging change—

What power urges them homeward? A time they remember—
Deaths in procession, lit candles, the ghost masquerade,
            births etched in the ledgers of loss,
                                    blood for the Cross
            or a cause... Above, metallic and strange,

a rabble of wings fills the sky… Monarchs set free—
The fluttering soul, whose neighbors—strolling, skull-painted—
                       pass and ignore her; the wanderer,
                                  soldier, or father,
             regal or real, circling in rings—

Is it you we feel brushing our skin? Who will we be—
wounded, lighter than air, forgiven or sainted?       
                        The tumult of monarchs is here,
                                    the wingstorm, the brushfire     
             of memory: black-laced, ablaze in their blessings,
 
              in praise, they return…The clouds, closing in,
                        bear them along, and they burn.

Ned Balbo's six books include The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Prize), 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award), and The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Donald Justice Prize and the Poets’ Prize). He’s taught in Iowa State's MFA program in creative writing and environment and received grants from the NEA (translation), Maryland Arts Council, and Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. He is married to poet and essayist Jane Satterfield. For more, visit https://nedbalbo.com.

Carla Galdo, “Imminence”

The mums we salvaged from a pot last year
are blooming now, with orange and blood red
striated petals that all seem to jeer
how summer’s days are plummeting ahead
to fall. The geese fly over, picturesque
as arrows piercing through a canvas stretched
across the sky. The stores’ hay-baled burlesque
begins: piled pumpkins, scarecrows’ faces etched
with grins. False prophets, these, with sightless eyes,
who’ve never mourned the winnowing of wheat,
or watched a cornfield shrivel as it dries,
or pulled their ragged coats so buttons meet.
We rattle in the winds, avert our gaze,
and hurry through our waning round of days.

Carla Galdo has written essays and poetry for various groups and publications, including Well-Read Mom, Humanum, Dappled Things, and Modern Age. Carla earned an MTS from the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, and is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of St. Thomas-Houston. She and her husband live with their six children on a small hobby farm in Virginia.

Katie Hartsock, “Tussive”

When we cough, cough together in the night,
his hand finds mine and radiates like moss.
The nightlight radios another life,

flickering. Childhood is a construction site
and it will not hold without the nail that’s lost
when we cough, cough together in the night.

Does he want me to sing the Mary song? He might,
except my voice doesn’t sound like it usually does.
The nightlight radios a mother’s life.

Most villagers have quit for other shires—
the basement office, some realm beyond our raucous
cough, cough, coughing together in the night,
 
in the lonely chiaroscuro of flying kites
inside our chests, our hearths of sore throat fuzz.
The nightlight radios an ordered life,

but we are heroes crusted in carbonite,
or desert sheriffs testing our own laws.
When we cough, cough, together in the night,
the nightlight radios some other life.

Katie Hartsock's second poetry collection, Wolf Trees (Able Muse Press), was listed as one of Kirkus Review's Best Indie Books of 2023. Her work has recently appeared in Threepenny Review, Oxford Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, The New Criterion, Tupelo Quarterly, Image, and elsewhere. She teaches at Oakland University in Michigan.

Amit Majmudar, “Prologue to an Unwritten Rewrite of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus”

Our votes are votive, candles lit before
A bombed cathedral’s lonely, standing door,
No roof above it, and no pews behind,
Alive, aloft, but only in the mind,
Its mass of stone as ethereal as Mass,
As God, who colors all, the stain in glass.
Our faith was Liberty, the civic Goddess.
How quickly we’ve forgotten what she taught us,
Chapter and verse, the Pledge, the Constitution.
Our people—fickle, fissile—race to dissolution.
Our late Republic’s sole phylactery,
The ballot box, we stuff with TNT.
Silenced, the sacred music of the anthem.
Fertility and faith decline in tandem:
We are not who or what we used to be,
The atom-splitters, sheriffs of the sea,
The moonshot multitudes that Whitman wrote of....
Not that we never had a profit motive;
And NATO cannot paper over the mass grave
The North Atlantic used to be for black slaves.
Our greatness was so mingled with our evil,
Was it God who blessed us or the devil?
About our play this evening—it concerns
A Roman veteran whose country turns
On him. He runs for office, but he can’t
Lower himself to do the song and dance,
The public lies and private deals with factions
That got out the vote and swung elections back then,
Same as they do today. Disgusted with
The process, with the democratic myth,
He shakes with grand Shakespearean emotions,
Stalks off to join the just-defeated Volscians,
And leads a foreign army into Rome.
His second homecoming wrecks his own home.
Now I do not intend some double entendre
With our time; I’m not some coy Cassandra.
I’m just a hack who’s touching up a drama—
Delete that metaphor, insert that comma—
The standard modernizing of a play
That people rarely read or stage today.
And yet the play does deign to entertain us:
In this, it panders, unlike Coriolanus.
Citizens, please forgive me if you’re bored;
The duller bits are me, the best, the Bard....

Amit Majmudar’s latest book is The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, November 2024). More information about his novels and poetry collections can be found at www.amitmajmudar.com.

Benjamin Myers, “The Pitcher’s Arm”

To find the saplings lanky in the field,
awkwardly stretched toward flat, indifferent sun,
growing through anthills, sparse grass, and earth peeled
bare by high wind; to find the seedlings run
down by the mower blade and tossed aside,
the piles of brush, cut sycamore and oak,
heaped up against the summer’s waxing tide
of yellowed grass in air as furred as smoke;
is finding something out about almost,
not quite, and could have been: the pitcher’s arm
grown heavy in the minor leagues, the ghost
of young glory sent back to haunt the farm.
The world is crammed with what’s not there, not quite,
as saplings rise to die in gold-flecked light.

Benjamin Myers was the 2015-2016 poet laureate of Oklahoma and is the author of four books of poetry and three books of nonfiction. His work has appeared in Image, The Yale Review, Measure, and many other places. He has written essays for many prominent journals and magazines and is a contributing editor for Front Porch Republic. He teaches at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he also directs the Great Books Honors Program. Myers' most recent book is The Family Book of Martyrs.

Darlene Young, “Sisters”

Litter mates. Glitter mates. Mirror
of what you hate, what you adore
about yourself. Sleep together on the floor.
Giggles and snorts, kicks, forts
of chairs and furry blankets. Fury. Tangle.
Tussle and brush. Braid and wrangle, pulling hair;
it’s just not fair. One of you is picked.
Not it! On your mark, get set and go! Kicked
gameboards; slam and pout. Crossing the street
when the mean dog is out. I dare you.
A secret meeting place under the willows
against the fence. Sheets and pillows.
Toothbrushes, blood, things buried in mud. 
All-ee, All-ee in free! Quit looking at me.
Canned peaches, cold beaches. You
and not-you;
anyone but you.

So sick of that piano song! Scented
markers. Shotgun! Wishing she was anyone.
Wanting to be anyone. Else. Lure the cat
to your lap from hers, pointing out
how loud he purrs. Making cookies.
Making up. Stealing make-up. Just shut up.
Together, bang the pots on New Year’s.
Pretend that you don’t hear her tears. Her
bad boyfriend that you hate. And yours.
Get home late. Will you, won’t you? Tattle-tell.
Pounding on the bathroom door, shirt that’s wadded
on the floor. You,
not you.

Share a mattress in the tent,
trees and stars and what you meant.
The thrilling doorbell. That weird noise
she makes in her throat. You both finish
the movie quote. Belting songs in underwear,
saying that you love her hair. Midnight soda run,
car windows down—U2 blasting to the edge of town.
Knowing look, shared favorite book,
all the things
you’ll always keep.
Someday, you’ll rock her child to sleep.

Darlene Young is the author of three poetry collections (most recently, Count Me In from Signature Press, 2024). She teaches writing at Brigham Young University and has served as poetry editor for Dialogue and Segullah journals. Her work has been noted in Best American Essays and nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She lives in South Jordan, Utah. Find more about her at darlene-young.com and @darlylar.