the creation of a bavarian violin
the sapling axes the dirt birthing itself, cleaving the earth, needles reaching for paradise, light angling among Alps food for its fibers nestled among ancestors respirating its offering each ring will bring a step toward death in congregation, cueing the start of its incarnations the groan of a low tone presses through the stem hovers over the duff and it is good once infant, now husked in thick skin, witness to snow-covered sins, centuries of placentas, plagues, popes, pulvini done seeing Lenggries, fit for eternity the spruce is cocooned by hatchets, then paddled with grandparents, sprinkled pristine by the Isar, racked and baked in castles’ shadows eclosed as a vicar pitches bond ionically fizzing to a froth distilling the rill and it is good transformed by surgeons, stripped and squared: ribs from Jonah’s whale, nails in its hands, the truss a scutum against sky’s fire, raised to sanctify wine, jewelify light, jive with chimes, a sturdy curtain between priest and power (yearning to be heard) inhaling the humidity of daily benedictions a beat drums under pious peasant feet easy yet metered and it is good gravity pulls the cones toward Earth’s bones— pilots too tired to cry, eye to eye with the slain sapling in a hazy sky— but strobili don’t maim, don’t take with flames BOMBS break the cross of human/hell, compel the cacophonous drone stone throwing stone flooring the brooding boards a refrain rains down in phrases refracted from black, slurred by ash and it is good silence overtones moans: the wood radios in code I’m still whole the one whose ears hear butterflies sigh taps the sapling, snatches from ovens of freezing people—stashes and waits— for a creator to clamp, craft the waist of 8, thumb-plane, glue, tune the spruce a time-fired muse a clef is unwrenched from ensanguined trenches treble an elegant fence and it is good twisted pins, taut strings wood fitted under a chin bow raised as trained in insulated rooms, groomed by practice and lapses for a flash of magic, past sound sanded for now a crowd vowed to armistice the violinist grasps the kit pries a tithe from its pith an anachronistic gift: music, resurrected fermenting for centuries the sapling miraculously pours the best wine last and it is good
the many lives of a walnut
naked as a newborn in a nursery of thousands, now unrivaled cradled in claws, held between teeth patient to eat but first: sleep: burrowed in churnozem its colostrum (the long night a chrysalis) dream of being the forgotten 63%—the freeze releases the taproot to claim its country raise a limb that billets the squirrel that bore it stuck under its cousins split and sweating in plastic wrapping, aisle 8 with the baking stuff, the walnut waits to be taken, paid, remade whipped with butter and fluff fired, iced, sliced into equal pieces, teeth-squeezed with pretty paeans between pleased smiles and tittle- tattle, dissolved in the bitter black swill of goodwill HELP yell the child’s white eyes, clutch at air not there the nut a cocked flintlock not wanted, a dam facsimiled hands whack fast the Heimlich violent— PLEASE screams a mother— beige mush an ankh the walnut a banished Adam damned and trashed SAFE say the child’s wide owl eyes: alive chopped and dropped onto skyr, boulders over snow a bulwark in the half-life war against radicals the fractured walnut hoists a flag on groundhog day makes an oat-coated oath: brains stay sane guts walk tight ropes between mortal fear and hope as the forty-year-old scatter- hoards her earthly orbits
fertilitY
the jar had cracked en route oozing tomato juice through the fibers
into the sealed pantyliners
the soggy box bleeding on my rug
up to my elbows / plankton
swimming in veins, food for rage
filling the ocean of my waterless
tears / the stain on my shirt spits
on the skin that’s leapt
off my ribs and the zebras beneath
them flee / if only
it were a false alarm
but the lioness is there
in the shadow of my belly—
yellow and sinewy—
that roars with the spring of a single
impotent egg
it unsheathes its metal petals
to pierce my uterus—newly losing its use (but
secretly weaving the spines of stories
until pollen on panes screams to become
unseen)—
twisting, inflicting the constricting of labor
like the blade that emasculated the bell
pepper upside down in the kitchen inside
out so its seeds
spilled onto the floor / too many white
ants in slacks saturating the subway
distending / my dermis
is quitting / excavating itself into
an urchin: don’t touch
my quills can break paper / poke tin
straight into the skin of the tomato
half way between young and dead
I am born again another
animal: a whole human kingdom
how to love your family
the irony is that chiding the bigots for being bigots makes us bigots but admiring the wise for being wise doesn’t make us wise the irony is that dressing identically doesn’t make us twins but being a twin is donning the garb of sapiens—& splitting it like saint martin the irony is that wholeness is sold in loops of gold with the intention of monogamy but god is three so either he’s a phony or a family
from the editors
Across all four pieces, there is an unwavering focus on survival, transformation, and the violence inherent in the act of becoming. The poet is disciplined, sharp-edged, and suspicious of cheap resolution, using concrete, highly specific textures—ash, pitch, bone, tomato juice, and spruce—to weight its broader philosophical inquiries. Mueser’s poems construct an anatomy of endurance, tracking how the physical world and the human spirit suffer fracture only to reassemble into something durable, resonant, and new.
"the creation of a bavarian violin" charts a physical and spiritual transfiguration, tracing the arc of living timber from Alpine earth through the fires of wartime destruction into an instrument of resurrection. Its indented, recurring liturgical refrains—"and it is good"—anchor the narrative's heavy historical weight, creating a sacred pulse against the violence of falling bombs and human ruin. The language moves with precision, treating both the spruce's survival and its final, sanded resonance as an act of quiet, necessary grace.
With sharp, kinetic imagery, "the many lives of a walnut" maps the volatile trajectories of a single seed, shifting seamlessly from natural cycle to domestic threat and metabolic defense. It moves with a restless, muscular momentum, turning mundane encounters—a grocery aisle, a choking hazard, a health-conscious morning routine—into high-stakes confrontations with mortality. The poem grounds its meditation on survival in the raw, visceral mechanics of the body and the physical world.
"fertilitY" delivers a raw, uncompromising portrait of physical betrayal, capturing the sudden, violent rupture of expectation with visceral clarity. It is a fierce, unsparing reckoning with aging and loss, holding the line between physical disintegration and the stubborn, unspoken impulse to make art from the wreckage.
"how to love your family" uses tight, paradoxical logic to dissect the subtle hypocrisy and structural absurdities inherent in human intimacy. Its concise tercets move with an intellectual friction. By ending on the destabilizing geometry of the Trinity, it leaves the reader considering the fragmented nature of belonging
BM