She will be loved

It will be easier for me
if I say he can stay;
come onto my porch
smoke a cigarette
straight man from down the block.
I am vulnerable in
victoria secret sleep shorts
high, singing maroon 5,
loving for a moment
the sound of my own voice.

He brings up a recent crash
in front of our houses
a hit and run
the screech so loud
chandelier shatter
it had brought us all out
in a swarm. What man
has not made
disaster a pretense
for desire or looked
at a woman or the like
and not felt himself
near death.

When my lover comes out
they talk about science.
She is not sure whether
she is humoring him or me
whether she should run
interference and if it was
my voice she heard like
a siren luring
a ship to shore
to crash. We wait
and the ship passes.
I mean a man.
Just a man.
Hands in his pockets
humming a tune home.




On Beauty and Time
              for Austin

It was the year I drew sorrel trees
and feet.
It was the year I studied the shape
of the mouth.
Every so often Joy oozes out.
Strangers can smell it.
I believe I looked beautiful
when I bent
to smell the apples. I wanted
to be touched
and learned wanting. Learned
wanting when
it wasn’t pulling but gesturing.
You gestured to me.
Made beauty with your hands.
It was the year
I remembered the ears, nose, mouth.
Where no longer
had I to whisper body let me
be closer to you.




Schopenhauer’s Baby

but what about the baby
               in theory I do whatever it asks

chicken born before the hatching
of our egg            long drives along

the gulf with salt and hops
on our breath    i’ve never

liked the waves    pity
for a florida native not to adore

the crashing of a body’s lukewarm
pulse      when we kissed the castles

crushed themselves       you turned away
i pulled toward you like a kite

on a string           in theory not even
rubbers would prevent a baby

that would justify anything
we could do    

i live alone now                                 childless        
1263 miles away from the karst topography

of my survival          i read Schopenhauer’s metaphysics
throw the pages to the snow

when girls come to my apartment
we are quiet

the baby does not wake
it dreams pelagic dreams

does not know the word
drowning            it does not dream of us

​

Bio: Sierra Brown is a poet from the south currently residing in the north. She is a Zell Fellow at University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writer's Program. She does letterpress work with Wolverine Press and is currently working on a design project for the Prisoner's Creative Arts Program. You can find her work at Salamander and Blue Mesa Review.

H A R B O R


drunk / ruth / wine / sick / quickening / rage / lost & loss / blood / womb / ova / ova / rupture / spill / cock /
wreck / waltz / wedding shoes / grime / first husband’s silence  / second husband’s silence  / silent & their
silence  /  throat   /  burn in the throat   /  burn in the throat after the shriek  /   Xanax  /  anti-depressant  /
anti-psychotic  /  pill & its pills   /  bridge  /  knife  /  throat  / knife-to-throat  /  bar fight  / Jack  /  Cuervo  /
cheapest-you’ve-got / bound wrists / finger and its fingers / chokehold / upturned sofa / shock /  no and its
nos   /  cock & cock & cock & cock   /  welts   /  kicked dog   /  kicked dog & her whimper  /  morning after  /
still-alive morning after / flashback’s flashback / boy in the cave / boy on the flatbed  / boy in the mines  /
boy in the briar / boy in the club / boy on the train /  boy under the docks / boy in the dark  / boy made of
the dark   / boys who made it go dark /  gravel-tooth  / moon  / aftershock  /  divorce & divorces / friend’s
couch / friend’s floor / friend’s living room parsed off by a sheet / next apartment / next / next & the next
​/ shotgun / 9mm / .22 / Bowie / switch / razor / river / pillow & its blood / ambulance / psych ward / white
coat / sick / sick / slap  / knuckle  / bruise & its bruise  / mother who left  / mother who returns / mother’s
backhand  /  mother’s rum  /  mother’s vomit  / mother’s fridge stocked with Budweiser  /  mother’s sick /
mother’s survivals / mother’s drunk / years of drunk / years of drunks / body that harbors the sick / body
that harbors the survivals / survivals that etch the cells  / cells that cycle the sick  / cycle that harbors the
drunk / ruth / wine / sick / quickening / rage /

​


Sober


Muscle your way through 40 days.
Make a dress of limes, a bath of seltzer.

Crown yourself Queen of Sweat
& Dry Mouth. Forgive yourself

the crave, the petulance, the unholy
newness of rising early.

Forgive your thumbs their twitch,
your restless knees.

Make a lover of patience & ennui.
Fuck something sweet & break it in two.

Call it endurance. Tell yourself
                                                 you won.

​

​
In Lieu of a Poem, the Author Writes the Message She Would Put into a Bottle If She Had Access to
Both a Bottle and the Sea


Get free.

​

Bio: Jeanann Verlee is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow and the author of two books, Said the Manic to the Muse and Racing Hummingbirds, which was awarded a silver medal in the Independent Publisher Awards. Her third book, prey, was first runner-up for the 2016 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2018. She is a recipient of the Third Coast Poetry Prize and the Sandy Crimmins National Prize, and her work appears in Adroit, BOAAT, Rattle, and BuzzFeed Reader, among others. Verlee collects tattoos and kisses Rottweilers. She believes in you. Find her at jeanannverlee.com.

​Photo credit: Angelys Ocana

Joseph Brauer CC


Excavation

this sacred place is what the locals call the landfill what i used to call
a dump once covered with banana peels and coffee grounds
                like kelp and shell on the edge of the ocean. i covered it up
sometimes with a shovel               carried across my shoulder desperate
for the refuse to retreat so i could plant a few flowers before
my roots began to show.                                gray and decaying in dying light
lingering in the song of a mockingbird.
she is
                 above me this morning, her tail feathers flapping up
and down, flitting from branch                   to branch while she keeps an eye
out.  i’ve brought my tithes and candles, a plastic shovel
and bucket hoping they will be
                                                                  all i need.    
the harvest moon reaches me here on hands and knees         
appearing to pray before i break
the soil        
                 breach the no trespassing sign, and dig.
                                                                 my back is a table for my sins
                                 once erected to false gods promising
redemption, upholding stones of sorrow                 up around the shoulders hunched over this wounded
earth where
will my flowers grow?
i catch myself holding my breath, why do i do that why do i do                          that?
                                                 my plastic shovel breaks my heart isn’t in it
the soil is too rocky, enraged                      i rake at the earth             it’s been too long too much pain
                                  too much time lost to hope                        i bleed it out i bleed
i know what’s better
it’s time to let it
breathe.

​

Confession

The beauty of being
bat-shit insane
is that I don't get worked up
about things like weather--
the absence of bread in a snowstorm
doesn't really propel me
towards panic.  Or sticking
the car in a snow bank?  Eh.
Rock, reverse, repeat.  Here's
the thing: I'm the kind
of crazy who does everything
right.  You would want me
around in a disaster.  I'm a pro
at crowd negotiation, death-
bed vigils, bleeding hearts and
broken children.  I will bring
you booze and braid
your hair.  I secretly look
for the good everywhere
and often find the fragile.
If you are content, this
crazy wonders: are you
asking the right questions?
Sometimes the bravest
and most ridiculous thing
I do each day is stay
alive.  

​


Whatever These Ruins

I could drunk dial you
to tell you I am lonely
to tell you the love of my life
left years ago and I barely
remember tracing the soft
curve of her thigh
with thrumming
fingers. Could you tell
the truth from a lie?
If these are the gates
of hell, I will grab
their vined sides,
throw them wide. Open.
All thorns.

It’s what you asked for.
To see the cut,
now clouded crystal,
the moth-worn dress,
the cake covered in mold.
Miss Havisham
has stopped painting her face. O
won’t you come in?

Here, every kiss
is the same kiss,
contorted.

Abandoned bliss is
a faded portrait of your
face next to my face.

Always is as empty
as always--
but
the evening light
might transform us.

At the top
of the hill is a shadow
of something. Turn
away. Turn away.

​


Stay

The hardest poem to write begins
with something the Dalai Lama said:
“Until the last moment, anything is possible.”
This is the truth with which I often struggle.
This is the box I draw around myself to protect
myself from myself. I have never found
solace in scripture. I don’t know how to call a
truce with god. Sometimes my religion
is the woman I sit across from once a week
and with whom I plead so desperately for help.

I am learning:
Sometimes it is as simple as staying to watch the final credits roll.
Sometimes it is as simple as allowing someone to hold me when I would choose to run.
Sometimes it is as simple as letting the door slam in my head and not from my hand.
Sometimes it is as simple as letting memory forget.
Sometimes it is as simple as taking oneself down from the crucifix.

I have a young daughter. She places no limits
on possibility. She believes the day should go on until
she says stop. So when she rests her dewy head
in my lap under the great expanse
of a shimmering Iowa sky, and asks,
“Can we stay, can we stay until the end of the fireworks?”
there is only one answer:
“Until the last moment, Madeline,
Yes.




Always

The cicadas blaze
across the Queen Anne’s lace.
My feet grind the gravel.
I carry this stone
with white knuckles
because I told you
I wanted to die
and it was what
you had to give.

There is a couch.  There is
an office, but I don’t believe
in you, really, not in your hand
collapsed in mine, as I send
every last sentence I have
through your body like
a jackhammer. You name
yourself container and
call me little girl.

Running in the stricken light,
the sky splits apart. If only
I could fall into the tranquil
hour, to float as though
the weight of each footfall
sounded like breath.

I carry this stone-mother,
her softness,
her muted hue.  I let
her take me under.

​
​
BIO: Jen Rouse’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Poet Lore, Pretty Owl, The Tishman Review, The Inflectionist Review, Midwestern Gothic, Sinister Wisdom, the Plath Poetry Project, Occulum, Lavender Review, and elsewhere. She has work forthcoming in Up the Staircase's 10th anniversary issue and Sliver of Stone. She’s the 2017 winner of Gulf Stream’s summer poetry contest. Rouse’s chapbook, Acid and Tender, was published in 2016 by Headmistress Press. Find her at jen-rouse.com and on Twitter @jrouse.

My friend, the geologist

this is not science. this
is poetry. this placing
of the line
in sequence
as if the sequence
of the line
really made it
mean
anything. I mean
I would rather it were science. the this and the
this and the these of knowing
that such a thing happens
because some other thing has happened
and that
is why everything else happens. the knowledge
that once you know some basic rules
everything
can be extrapolated
to millions of miles outwards and that
can be extrapolated further. for instance
my friend aodhain
is a geologist
(that's
rock science, not rockets)
and he is teaching me to think
in terms of time
beyond life
and he explains to me
that chalk comes
from animals
crushed under the weight
of their life's own death
rain under water
like sugar
piled on a cake. drizzles come down
like snow
on a mountain
and the mountain
in spite of what we call it
is a mountain, not rocks. that the scape around the roadrunner
is dolomite
stacked in slabs
like a weddingcake. I say
that would make a good poem. the pursuit,
love and the pointless runaround,
surrounded by rock,
ringed
with dry weddings. he
doesn't say anything
so crass
as to tell me
it doesn't need to be a poem. it
is a thing that is.
that
is poetry. aodhain
knows more about everything
than I do. I write down poems
but I could
go back to college, beg
at the gates, ask them on my knees to let me learn about animals
or the way stars form among the crashing attraction of gases. there is a light
that forms
when things breathe out.
that
is science talking. that
is the way things are
whether we know it
or not. knowing
that,
or not knowing it,
that
is poetry.

​


I take the hand of night

I turn on the radio
move the dial around
to find something
without any words in it,
settle as usual
classical music,
and I open a bottle slowly
and enjoy the first pouring
into a glass
like lifeblood from my brother's heart
and I take again the hand of night.
A woman where I work
keeps talking about
how her mother is dying
slowly
of some wasting disease
and
scientists
are saying
the earth has thirty good
years left - rats are creeping up
out of the winecellars
fat and sated
with the blood of lost children
taken from their homes
and the crows are rejoicing
with a world
returning unto death
and all I can think of
when I am here at night
is that my goldfish are still in their tank
and that the buses are running
like salmon in the spring
to their boltholes.
I cannot help the world to cure itself
and that woman cannot
even help one person
who might as well be the world.
Nobody can help anyone
and most of us have already stopped trying.



​
Friday nights in the maintenance room

I tap at the computer
and the order goes through:
- replacement lightbulb on level 2
in the breast cancer ward
- back order til monday
because it's friday night
and the electricians are specialists
and dont have to be here
out drinking beers on patios
or fucking their wives in their bedrooms.
"Thank you for calling
that will be taken care of as soon as possible."
Tap in some more lines:
- non-urgent
- 7 day turn around
- fuck this job
and ashton
the other guy
is playing with a frisbee
tossing it across the room
and waiting for me to get off the phone.
He's married,
doesn't care about friday nights;
wise man to get married early
if he knew he'd end up here.
This is our friday night:
playing catch in a basement
while above us the whole town burns
with life and people drinking yellow beer
in blue light.
I hope a bus crashes
into every bar I would have been at.
I hope there's an outbreak of food poisoning
brought on by unclean glasses.
I hope I die down here
tapping the computer keyboard
for new chairs for fat nurses
while everyone else
dies up there.

​

Bio: DS Maolalai recently returned to Ireland after four years away, now spending his days working for a medical supply company and his nights drinking wine. His first collection, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden, was published in 2016 by the Encircle Press. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

New Year's Eve in Iowa with a Biker                                                                                    

My hands paw your worn leather jacket
and your Rasputin beard.
Since spying you at the Price Chopper
purchasing frozen samosas,
I've pledged to nuzzle your
razorburn-blotched neck
before you and your bored old lady
blast out of Urbandale
on your choppers through the mundane chill
of Merle Hay Road.

​


Postcolonial Paramour

Your wood-hued wolf eyes,
your sheltering shoulders of Empire,
your commanding tones subduing me,
discussing lava lamps over tikka masala.
We swayed to the rhythm of an oscillating fan,
licking lassi from lips,
while I pondered a prayer of thanks.

I listened to you with the gentleness of bumblebee fur;
you lay into your neuroses like fists upon pizza dough.
When you finished, I donned your clothes,
not caring that they didn't fit.

​


Freshman-Year Redux

The non-judgmental greenery behind
the greedy entrepreneur's
neo-Romanesque church
was a sanctuary for the philosophy student
who pronounced century-old suspense
by Stoker and LeFanu
with a tongue, lips and throat
that had tasted vegan cheese,
but never cock or clit.

In an intellectual ghetto,
where minds pounce on calculus and Kant
just as leopards leap at gazelles,
Christian craved carnality.
He questioned his queerness in quadrangles
and traced names of non-existent lovers
in sloppy Serbian Cyrillic letters
on a dusty library window.
The university still stands;
the dust is still scoring sneezes.
Maybe he'll return in triumph
if he ever got laid.

​


I Live in a Hotel 

I live in a hotel
that's slumming it as a motel.
It resounds with the rap-tap-tap of housekeeping
and the splashes of a swanky swimming pool,
just like in Beverly Hills.
The current incarnation
of Roger Miller's King of the Road, I've inhabited hotels
in Chicago and Seattle and Des Moines and
Lexington and Birmingham and Houston and Portland and
Pasadena.

I'm proud to have overcome lease-slavery, and, if
companionship is craved,
the personnel are perpetually peppy.
On Thanksgiving and Christmas,
I make the most of movie marathons and
pesto pizzas from places that play up to
the freaks of the festival season,
pleased not to be plagued by the peskiness of family disputes.
I can enter the New Year peeking into the communal garbage can and
considering whether the condom wrappers,
crushed Coors cans and empty packs of Camels
belonged to the same unseen, unknown neighbors.

And when I can no longer ignore my itchy feet or the aggregation of
ghostly vibes bequeathed by quondam guests, I grab my suitcase and
go toward the greener pastures of
another hotel.  

​

      Photography: Zosha Warpeha


             Shlomo Franklin is a rare breed of songwriter, poet and traveler, mystic wanderer, more interested in where the story leads than what the telling of it might bring him. Like Whitman, he is uniquely American, but in a broken hearted sort of way, he doesn't have many illusions about this country, and likewise, where our old American bard saw a little girl holding a doll with a missing eye on the side of the road, he saw also that that child would go to bed hungry at night and mourned in the pit of his soul such a sorry state of being. Seems like the poet got there first in terms of telling tales of the forgotten, downtrodden, trampled upon, Franklin kinda has his eye on this too. He might be young but he's paying attention, listening, learning, and finding a few hard  fought truths of his own to throw out  there into the world. Folk music is his trade but stories and poems are hammering away in his heart all night too. He's more Dave Van Ronk than Dylan, something wiry and unsettled, yet kind and quiet at times, interested in other people's stories and what they might add to his own. After all, those who rise to the top can hardly hear anyone else's story but their own. Blessed are those who land somewhere in between. Currently on tour and set to play his last show tonight in Texas before heading back up North to New Jersey, the South has left him a little unconvinced of its beauty, "all you see for the next seven hundred square miles are dollar stores, gas stations, sex shops, and taco trucks. I don’t love any of it. There’s no romance around these parts" he writes in Flat Earth. A place of bulletproof wind and straight faced mechanics, this place "makes you anxiously lay awake hopelessly awaiting some sort of doom or salvation." "So good morning to you; good day, good god, and goodbye." Brings to mind Buddy Miller's "A Showman's Life", "a smoky  bar and a fever chase of a tiny star... Nobody told me about this part, they told me all about the pretty girls and the wine and the money and the good times, no mention of all the wear and tear on a heart." Franklin knows there are those nights when a room is packed with friends and strangers who are all ears and heart, and the nights of an almost empty room, loud drunken, sloppy talk of people too busy tryin' to find a partner for the night to give much of a damn about the music. So why do we do it? Franklin asked me to say something about this. But I think the proof is in the words, the songs, and those rare, few and far between moments of transcendence which sometimes find us  when we've just about lost all faith in the path. Is it worth it? I think so.




Flat Earth 

There’s a certain kind of quiet that you only hear when you’re down south. Somewhere between the Bible Belt and the badlands.
Places where the swamps threaten your safety and the hurricanes wreck havoc on your household. 
There are no basements around these parts.
You can’t go below the earth. 
You only go below the ground once and that’s when you’re dead and gone. 
The earth is flat around here. 
I like it. 
This kind of silence makes the midnight feel less menacing and somewhat mediocre. 
If you walk across the boulevard past the traffic light, all you see for the next seven hundred square miles are dollar stores, gas stations, sex shops, and taco trucks.
I don’t love any of it. There’s no romance around these parts. Even the nighttime isn’t sexy. The alcohol will get you through a days work but that’s about it.
There’s no romance on a flat surface. You find love in the crevice of continuity. The inevitability of life makes you sit at the edge of your seat, makes you anxiously lay awake hopelessly awaiting some sort of doom or salvation. Both options are welcome upon the pine needled hills of New York. 
Here in Texas the world is flat and the breeze hums a flat tune. Seven palm trees in a deserted cul de sac and I don’t hear the bow of a single violin. There are no orchestras in ordinary America. Name one composer who hails from Houston, Texas. 
The bulletproof wind blows across the straight faced mechanics and my engine runs clean across the tracks. I sleep through my night without waking up once and in the morning I don't remember any of my dreams. 
So good morning to you; good day, good god, and goodbye. I’ll see you next time when I’m looking to take a week off and I’m too limp to go hunting and too tired to shoot pool. I’ll find you on the slopes of Nazareth in fishnet stockings and bow n’ arrow eyes. I’ll look through the windowpane of Greece and cum a thousand rivers over the skylights of Venice. I’ll pull you from the badlands, lead your horse to dry ice and sing to you the windmills of your mind, the Noel Harrison version. 

Clockwork On A Dime 

Leading someones handshake to a sheet of glass on a landscape image of a dreamlike mountain range 
I hail a cab and watch it pass
Sitting on the edge of a basket full of birthday heartbreak 

I surrender to the suffering of my screenplay acting every stanza out on center stage 
I’ve read all the author’s written before I’ve even turned the page 
A hundred visions within me that are never seen 
A pure heart is not always clean 

And I’ll show up with your sweater and my heart
I’ll give it all back make believe we weren't apart 
I’ll take it all away turn ‘round the wheels of time 
And we’ll go disappear into the night like clockwork on a dime 

And I detect a vague distance a burnt out breeze on  a boulder in the brush underneath the trees 
I crawl through time and space with a henna on my shoulder blade like a kid in a candy shop without a penny to his name 

When it’s 1am and I’m weeping to the quiet canary night 
And I’m losing time just sitting here
I hear the bark I dodge the bite 

Your fingers like stalactites pointing to the heavens 
I built up all the past upon pen and paper and the present  
I bid farewell to my reflection almost every single night 
I sing the song of slaughterhouses like butterflies in flight 

And I’ll show up with your sweater and my heart
I’ll give it all back make believe we weren't apart 
I’ll take it all away turn ‘round the wheels of time 
And we’ll go disappear into the night like clockwork on a dime 




​
The Red Rose Motel

It was winter and you were still living in the woods. I helped you stack firewood while you spoke about Native American feminism and I drank the last of those dreadful IPA’s. I listened with half an ear and heard Christmas songs in the other ear and a half. 
You’d talk for hours and I was just there to take it all in with an occasional “uh huh” and “yep, I’ve been there too”. 
You wore brown moccasins that were worn out and aged like an old pirate. Like a bad bottle of wine. Your father made them for you while you were still a little girl, you said. You had more energy than a black stallion and I always slept too much. Your country cottage and thin cot on the cherry wood floor made it impossible to wake before noon. 
You’d make coffee and talk to me about something your brother once said and I’d listen and watch the creases in your eyes form and reform with every passing syllable. 
You were ten years older than me but sometimes you seemed more like a lost adolescent. 
You’d kiss me at lightning speed and I’d cum within ten minutes. I never lasted long enough for you to cum through penetration unless you’d let me start off by eating you out for a half hour. I always liked your red pubes and thin thighs. You were as womanly as they came but not like the magazines. You’d moan like the blue moon breeze and I’d trace my tongue over your sagging tits with desire and delight. You were happy and I think I was too. We’d go for long drives to the hardware store across the Delaware river and the farmers market on Route 17. I never liked your choice of vegetables but a good cook can make any stinker taste sweet as apple pie. So I ate your asparagus and artichoke and quinoa and horseradish. We’d fuck in your antique kitchen cause you liked the cold counters and the way they brought a rush to your naked ass. I loved your body and intended to bring it all the pleasure I possibly could. We’d kiss by the fireplace and listen to bad show tunes and you’d talk about your father’s alcohol problem and your mother’s bad taste in men. You’d babble until the rooster crowed and I’d sleep until I was fifteen minutes late for work. 
My shift always ended before yours so I’d drive out and shovel your walkway, feed the hens, and put a pot of water on the stove to boil. We’d drink dandelion detox tea cause you said it was good for me and raw local honey cause we knew it was good for the soul. 
We didn’t do much but we did just enough. 
I loved you for a minute. I loved you with the kind of love that lasts a lifetime but never grows strong enough to make you want to stay longer than three months. 

I went to Virginia to do stage lighting for my cousin’s play and you didn’t call on my birthday. We drifted apart and I still think of you every once in a while. I’ve seen many and you have too but I’ll always miss you, never enough to come back but just enough to make me say that I love you and I hope you’re doing well. Maybe I’ll see you again soon in the not-so-distant future. 


​

Head over to www.shlomofranklin.com/ for more.
And buy some damn fine music over at shlomofranklin.bandcamp.com/

​

​Every Thing Is An Addiction
 
I am addicted to the way Björk sings I thought I could organize freedom in her song, to this thing she wants to do    how she pronounces organize in her Icelandic accent --

I am addicted to the memory of my father telling me It’s like a dream when I asked him if he missed that country he came from    how he seemed untroubled that his past felt unreal to him & by association maybe me --

I am addicted to the color green   how the ferns grow so thick yet orderly in that place --

I am addicted to that blue (sky blue) car ahead of me    how when it turns neatly into the dense forest preserve I decide to follow --

I am addicted to this feeling that the driver is someone I need to meet, who will see & touch me in the deep green leaves    how I could finally be real and so --

organized




The Suburb of My Broken Heart
 
Boxborough was the suburb
where my child heart was broken.
 
The woods were safe; the beasts lived
inside the pretty houses on Guggins Lane.   
 
Your crazy mother they threw at me. 
In Boxborough, everyone knew.
 
I used to go down to Guggins Brook,
collected stones I kept under my bed.
 
I armed myself, thin-boned girl, in
that suburb where I played in the woods
 
where I practiced my aim.

Number 10: Lilly Hiatt: Trinity Lane

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Lilly Hiatt is her father's daughter; like John she understands the hits a life can take, how hard it is to get back up from the floor and that judging others is never a good or fair choice, if you've been there then you understand what it's like for someone else who's life may be falling apart, as she sings in Trinity Lane, "I think my neighbors are selling drugs, I know how that goes, I ain't judging nothin''. In So Much You Don't Know, she sings to her lover, "there are places you have no idea that I have been, like that time my little angel got on heroin, and I thought my throat was closing every time I tried to sleep, there's just so much you don't know about me," a powerful song about the places we've been and wanting the ones we fall for to know about some of the pieces of hell we've seen, "who doesn't love a little mystery, I just want you to want to know about me."The Night David Bowie Died is the hit of the album, a rocking break up song that hits right up against the bone, "I realize that I screwed up" Hiatt sings.  Trinity Lane is definitely one of the most powerful records of 2017, like a 12 step meeting full of people who have been through some serious, life or death shit and come through the other side, and it serves as the antidote to an empty culture which holds Taylor Swift's music video release as the most anticipated and fawned over event this year.

Number 9: Annie Gallup: Lucy Remembers Her Father


Annie Gallup has long been one of America's best kept secrets, which is unfortunate, as she is one of the most poetic and profound voices in modern music. From her long solo career to her frequent collaborations with Peter Gallway in Hat Check Girl, Gallup, time and again, takes up Werner Herzog's challenge to filmmakers to make each movie as if they were working with the last strip of film in existence and applies it to music, each album crafted as if the last piece of music we'll ever hear. Lucy Remembers Her Father is a prime example of the primacy Gallup places on poetry. "When he planted this tree, it was just a twig and so was I, Willowy was his word for me, and so he chose a willow tree" she sings in the title song, "we were rich in colored pencils and brown paper bags, poor in long distance calls and cruises, we were rich in homegrown tomatoes and river rocks, poor in family feuds and excuses, we were rich in books and strangers on the porch steps, poor in political influence, we were rich in wood smoke dust bunnies, mouse traps, poor in pedigree and regrets." All in all a quiet and reflective album, but each record Gallup has made occupies that strange twilight hour between literature and music, Lucy Remembers Her Father is no exception. 

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Number 8: Catie Curtis: While We're Here
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Marking the end of the road for Catie Curtis, who announced her retirement from music and touring earlier this year, and leaves us with as good an album as any Curtis has made. A profoundly personal album, but all of her albums have been, she juggles despair and joy like few songwriters can, both being two sides of the coin of every life. We are never only our pain, we are also never just our best moments. It gets better, it gets bad and it gets better again. Curtis has always threaded through these spaces of hope and despair and aptly here regret. "Words are just words if you don't know this pain, a bird on a wire sings her song, I hear your song and I don't belong to this world." Curtis sings in Don't Belong to this World. Then there is the beautifully touching song written to her daughter, You are loved tackles this weird digital age we are in and how tough and unforgiving it can be on kids most of all. "You are fact and you are fiction, searching for the piece that's missing, still thinking you need some fixing up... You are loved, no matter what you do or what you've done, if you need someone to say it, come to me and I'll relay it." A beautiful album that takes the bruise in every fruit as a sign of our humanity and offers bitter sweet refuge from the storm. While We're Here life both hurts and sometimes doesn't, joy and sorrow live next door to each other, and this album, like her others, reminds us not to dwell too long in either room as if there were no where else we could go, there always is.

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​Number 7: Kate Fenner: Middle Voice


Kate Fenner is another all too well kept secret, Middle Voice straddles that magical line between Jazz and folk-pop, with songwriting that matches Joni Mitchell at every turn. Recorded quickly before an impending throat surgery, the album is deftly executed with precision and a timeless quality that Fenner has brewed up with every single release, a lost decade of female confessional pop that was more soul centered and poetic than what we are given by the mainstream standards of today. Pain, regret, loss, the mixed ingredients of every life play out seamlessly here. "The title, "Middle Voice" comes from a grammatical term (!), wherein the subject of a sentence is both the actor and the acted-upon, both agent and patient; it is meant to reflect the middle part of life--its equivocations, its ambivalence, its modest epiphanies." This album does just that, and sorely deserves to be heard.

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​Number 6: Sister Ray: Untitled


Sister Ray is a bit of an enigma, I don't know much about her except that this album, recorded live and mostly improvised, is one of the most haunting albums I've heard since Cat Power's Dear Sir. Like early Chan Marshall, there is a sense of total emergency at work here, this hour, this moment, right now, this is where it hurts. "Come in like a whisper, well I'm a disaster, come in now sideways, so I can't feel you", "I only use my hands for loving on a dirty floor" she sings in 5:44. The entire album is like a howl of pain, a bandage coming off a wound too early. It is visceral, it is scary, it is beautiful, it is oddly perfect in its imperfection. 

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Number 5: Jennifer Kimball; Avocet


Avocet marks Kimballs third release over a long and distinguished career which began with The Story in the mid 80's. As far as I'm concerned there can never be enough Jennifer Kimball music in the world, but perhaps its scarcity is precisely it's magic, that it doesn't come that often makes its arrival a thing to marvel at. Her sense of rhythm is a type of strange alchemy, there is purposeful dissonance that shores up the moment in each song where the harmony reaches an ungodly level of perfection, isn't this like life, we must feel completely out of joint in order to ever experience our wholeness. Build You A Barn is one of the most beautiful songs Kimball has penned. The whole album shines and is a testament to the fact that the best things in life you simply have to wait for.

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Number 4: Jeff Finlin; The Guru in the Girl
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If there were any justice in the world Finlin would be ranked among the best of the best, alongside Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams, Jeff Finlin doesn't make bad albums, ever. The Guru in The Girl is a masterful recording and Finlin's voice is an instrument unto itself, vocally he is the most believable man your ears will ever meet. Also, like Lilly Hiatt, he's been there and back,  and his music is an archive of survival, pain and perhaps most importantly hope. "Someday, these walls will all come down, on this shitty border town we carry in our hearts, someday, it just might be today, if we imagine it is so, and put it into play." Indeed. If you want music that goes well beyond the surface, start here.

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​Number 3: Kris Delmhorst; The Wild

I don't know if I can do justice to just how good this album is. Delmhorst is a powerhouse of a songwriter, she can both break your heart, kick your ass and shine a little light into rooms too long darkened by despair. Like Finlin, there is the believable voice, no faking or phoning it in, Delmhorst carves up pure, aching sincerity out of each and every song. On the The light in the Hall, she sings:

"Don't let me fall asleep, I know it gets dark and deep
Promise you'll keep a light on in the hall
You know me, my limit and my lie,
Grief and my greed, I know you know sometimes I need it all
To just go away"

The Wild is like that light left on,  the one we all need, the one that is sometime hard to name, that sometimes isn't even there at all. These  songs are a companion to all down and out hearts. "You can see that I'm tired, tired of dancing the delicate line." When you need to know someone else has felt it too, put this record on and let the hurt and howl wash over you.

The best description is on her website: "THE WILD comes to terms with what Greg Brown memorably called “All this terror and grace.” The stakes rise as we go along. Our babies arrive and disappear into children, friends die or get weird, our parents distill. We lose the path – to our story, our partner, to the muse – and must reckon the way back.

And The Wild, where has it gone?"

For right now, into a damn fine record.

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Number 2: Phoebe Bridgers: Stranger in the Alps

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With Stranger in the Alps, Phoebe Bridgers achieves what is nearly impossible in this day and age, a flawless, perfect and utterly honest debut album. Wise beyond her years, youth does not hinder Bridgers from understanding the truths that take many of us a lot longer to begin to grasp. That the world is much bigger than us, and we must humble ourselves at the altar of that immensity. In Funeral, Bridgers is asked to sing at a funeral for "a kid a year older than me," awash in narcissistic despair "Jesus Christ I'm so blue all the time" Bridgers reminds herself that someone's kid is dead; 

Last night I blacked out in my car
And I woke up in my Childhood bed
wishing I was someone else
feeling sorry for myself
when I remembered someone's kid is dead
and it's 4 am again
and I'm doing nothing again."

Humility. We need more of it, not just in music. Stranger in the Alps is proof that youth is no reason to be naive. We all have the opportunity to pay more attention in life, this album has its eyes and its heart wide open.

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​Number 1: Matthew Ryan; Hustle Up Starlings


Matthew Ryan is the embodiment of what it means to fall in love with music. We all have the iconic sounds that forever changed us, Ryan is a conduit of the universal notion that what hurts also makes you human. 

Ryan still sings of survival, and where light may have narrowed in the past, on Hustle up Starlings, it painfully, beautifully widens. A central message can be found from the opening track (I Just Died) Like an Aviator where Ryan sings, fully convicted by experience, "Don't die, don't disappear, I swear to God we need you here". Throughout the years Ryan's albums have always sought to reassure listeners that they are not the only ones who feel as if their lives are on fire, and if "the same thing that makes you live can bury you alive", it also means we can dig our way back above ground. "Don't let your heart go out like this," run till the numb shakes off, till you can feel the burn as an indication of stars and fresh air still ahead, of new beginnings even with the scars we bear.

                 "I think that the main lesson I've learned is that there's no arriving, there's only traveling. There's only going and looking and working, and learning to laugh at the more absurd parts of our lives. We're all tourists. And love really is everything", Ryan says, "it's the only engine of survival."

                "I've been simultaneously lucky and unlucky. But that's true for all of us I think. I have some scars from my travels, both in the soul and on the skin. I'm hungrier now than I've ever been, and I was starving when I started."

"Every little bit hurts when you're in the past." But here in the now we get a little distance between ourselves and what happened. This record is the distance between disaster and survival. It's also a love letter to music, and quite simply the best album of 2017.

Hustle up Starlings reminds us that "our guts are born in that fiery trench between hurt and hope," and the trenches are where we find out how strong we really were all along. The weapons of living don't always kill, they also clear a path, and if music is an indication of the kind of life one has lived, if it tells the story well and honestly, without filler or filter or comfort food, then success is better tallied in the number of lives saved by the work's creation than any industry standard. It is no truism, but a profound reminder, that some may never have heard anyone tell them before; "I swear to God we need you here."

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You arrive at home
You focus your eyes
You smile, move your arms and legs
You roll over
You grab your toys and put them in 
Your mouth
You scoot on your belly
You are getting new teeth
You crawl and sit
You pull yourself up to standing
Again and again
You take your first steps
You toddle and explore
You begin to say ‘no’ to assert
Yourself
You invent imaginary games
You can run and kick a ball
Your parents divorce
Your abuse starts
You’re told to skip a grade
You start drinking
You join the Navy
You go to war
You return home
You change
You’re shunned by peers
You don’t leave your house
Again and again
You write this line

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Bio: Kari Rhyan's previous work, Standby for Broadcast--a memoir on the dangers of canned patriotism, family loyalty, and discount retail--focused on her time as a Navy nurse in Afghanistan, and has received praise from Kirkus and Blue Ink, and are widely available online. www.krhyan.com