The Nation announces the winners of Discovery/The Nation, the Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize. Now in its thirty-first year, it is an annual contest for poets whose work has not been published previously in book form. The new winners are Stacie Cassarino, Eduardo C. Corral, Dave Lucas and Rita Mae Reese. This year’s judges are Glyn Maxwell, Elise Paschen and Liam Rector. As in the past, manuscripts are judged anonymously. Distinguished former winners of Discovery/The Nation include Susan Mitchell, Katha Pollitt, Mary Jo Salter, Sherod Santos, Arthur Smith, David St. John and Mark Irwin. This year’s Discovery/The Nation event, featuring readings by the four winners, is scheduled for 8:15 pm on Monday, May 16, at The Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue (92nd Street and Lexington Avenue) in New York City.   –Grace Schulman, poetry editor

Midwest Eclogue

The first day it feels like Fall I want to tell my secrets recklessly until there is nothing you don’t know that would make your heart change years from now. How foolish we are to believe we might outlive this distance. I don’t know the names for things in the prairie, where the expanse of light and the hissing of tall stalks makes me move slowly, like in another country before I must share it with anyone. In what do you believe? In September’s slight motion of particulars, in the weight of birds, in lust, propulsion, maps that lie. You should not have loved me. Now: goldenrod, prairie-clover, the ovate-leafted bluebell with its open throat, saying how did you expect to feel? The colonies of prairie-smoke and pods turning golden and papery, the grassy plains iterating patience, and things I cannot name. Begin with apples reddening. Begin with a woman touching the cities in your feet. Hartford, Anchorage, the Bronx. Did you ever see yourself as more than yourself? I walk into a part of afternoon that deepens inventing an endpoint for sadness. Everyone is gone. On the subject of deception, where do you stand? There’s a chill in the air and the flowers know, the goddamned flowers, their loosed color. Sometimes we are cruel and we mean it. We author the house with its threadbare linens, the false miniatures of people saying look at me. Will the landscape forgive you? Is it yours to describe? What is the sound inside your mouth? I’m surrounded by grasslands in every direction. The sound is a clamoring, because desire is never singular and we want it this way. We want it easy. I have already let go of summer. Here, the wind- dispersal of seed and story. Love, there are things I cannot name.

Stacie Cassarino

Beach Pea

Leave beauty to the rose and its lexicon of crimsons. O ruby petal and holy thorn– poets, you can have it.

You, beach pea, rooted in sand when all this land was lake, when this lake was Atlantic coast,

stranded when the glaciers calved and receded– leaving you and sea rocket, purple sand-grass and spurge.

What genuine science, what skill in your flowering: you conjure nitrogen from thin air and hold it,

hard as November wind, in your roots. Deep in the sterile loam, they spread and keep what water they can.

Hardscrabble, this scratch of beach offers nothing but swells of dry surf. Break and wash of waves

like the back and forth of xylem and phloem in your thin frame’s tiny musculature.

Pastel and crepe petal, flower of work and mettle, spread out, spread deep. Bow to no one, to no rose.

Dave Lucas

A History of Glass

When God closes a door, we break a window. Sorry I say to the landlord who replaces it. Sorry I say the next morning to the neighbor who

complains about the noise. An accident. She waits for more of an explanation. So I start at the beginning. The history of glass is a history

of accidents. Long ago and far away: a woman, a pot, a fire. Her lover surprises her from behind, kisses her until the pot glows, smoke rising like a choir.

She snatches it from the hearth & drops it on the floor covered in sand & ashes. (She is a good cook but not tidy.) Her lover

throws water on the whole mess: the sand hisses, her hand burns. She can hardly see the hard new miracle forming for the tears in her eyes, at her feet a new obsidian

spreads, clear & eddied. It will be 2000 years until a tradesman molds by hand the small green & blue glass animals (housed today on the second floor of a local

museum), & nearly 4000 before sheet glass in 1902. (Many accidents happen during this period.) One hundred years later the glass animals in the museum are visited by two

women: one marvels at their wholeness, except for an ear or a nose or a paw; one does not marvel. She says, “They survived because they’re small.” They stop for dinner,

mostly wine. They stumble home. Were there eyewitnesses at that late hour when they embraced & fell? Once inside there is a window of sheet glass & a bare

bulb burning out. In the darkness of the stairwell they sink, dark coats spreading around them. The wind rushes in. Remember the glass animals? They tell

a history of accidents too, accidents that are yet to happen.

Rita Mae Reese

Midnight Coffee: Rafael Rodriguez Rapún, 1936

O my arrow-eyed lover, sugar, radiant & icy, O my arrscattered around my heels, brings back the evening when the first shafts of moonlight brings back the evenipiercing a tall bedroom window were crumbled in your palms, then sprinkled across the floor like snow were crumbledwhose brilliance amplified as I extinguished the candles of the candelabra– as I extingLorca, an olive-scented breeze rustling the leaves of the lilac-stenciled wallpaper cooled the lengthening trail of sudor of the lilac-stenciled wallpaperolling down my torso Our bodies lit by the glare rising from the snow. Our bodies lit Your guitar on a chair, scoured by moonlight, a striped moon stamped in its interior… a stripYour presence still seduces my eye: magnolia blossoms withering a stripYour preseon a sill, the cuffs they tore from your sleeves. A silver kettle sings, steam rising, dissipating– A silver kettle sings, steam risiAndalusian ghost undressing.

Eduardo C. Corral