Current
Issue
Volume 12.2
Editor’s note
—
We can’t seem to talk about spring without talking about the season as a metaphor for renewal—new blooms, spring cleaning, old dust out, new dust in. You’ll find the brave poets in this issue shedding skins, plucking the old petals and letting them fall. Not with the instinct to forget and bury the winters of the soul, but with clear-eyed responsibility for the new worlds/selves they usher in with their work. They dare to claim it.
These poems want touch. They miss it, they look forward to it, and are reaching out—to the past, to the future, to strangers and lovers, to me and to you, gentle reader. We at Bear Review are lucky to gather in the company of such generous, vivacious poets. We hope you stay a while too.
Best,
James King
Co-Editor
July Westhale
—
The end, or on the way to it
If only a neon sign and all signs
said The End, or on the way to it.
Rough-legged hawks play dominos
with jackrabbit bones at the bottom
of a dry basin, like a trough someone
forgot to wash clean. In the bugle blooms
of saguaros, great horned owls with prey
in their talons sit with the kind of quiet
that proceeds a storm. Is this what
the air felt like before all the great walls
were trumpeted down? Does this point
us true? Come owl, come junco,
come coyote, come shrew. Above
us, the moon shines statically,
blinking its one good eye.
July Westhale was born in the American Southwest. Their books include moon moon, Trailer Trash, Unmade Hearts, and Via Negativa, which Publishers Weekly called "stunning" in a starred review. Ocean Vuong chose Westhale as the 2018 University of Arizona Poetry Center Fellow. Along with Mathew Weitman and Felipe Acevedo Riquelme, they are a co-editor and translator for the Unsung Masters series collection Rolando Cárdenas: The Life and Work of a Chilean Master. Their poetry and translations have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry International, McSweeney’s, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. July is represented by Carolyn Forde at Transatlantic and lives in Tucson, where they are adapting their novel to film. julywesthale.co
