"Last Year Without" by Haley VanJeukelom

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Haley Van Heukelom is a recent graduate of the University of Northern Colorado. She is the 2013 winner of the Rosenberry Prize, UNC’s award for exceptional student writing. She also won first prize for creative non-fiction in Northern Colorado’s student literary awards. She has published several poems in publications including: Gravel magazine, Isthmus, Lingerpost, and the Four Ties Lit. Review. Haley currently lives and writes in Bend, Oregon.

the Poem: 

We tell ourselves “the possibilities are endless” so that we can cling to what we desire. Our hearts cry “tell me… tell me” we can dance on the roof in the moonlight. Tell me we’ll laugh and wake up happy together. Hope – for companionship, for love – lingers, creating an imagined landscape that can change as quickly as the words “I walked out the minute I knew.” What the poet understands and what makes this poem more than just a series of wishes: our hearts don’t let go of those possibilities so easily. We exchange one imagined landscape for another where the same people play new roles, in this case of longing and loss. In our hurt, we cannot conceive of a world without the beloved so we let the idea of them linger “that whole year.”

the Design: 

Title & Name: 24pt & 18pt Bodoni 

Body: 12pt Bodoni roman & italic

The lines borrowed from poet Richard Siken inspired the choice of Bodoni, the eponymous typeface of typographer Giambattista Bodoni whose advice on design guides much of what happens on Architrave’s pages. Beyond homage, Bodoni’s high contrast between thick and thin strokes echoes the way the poem addresses presence and absence. The title has been kerned to feel open, almost empty like a living room with only people and no couches.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Eternal Flame" by Bruce McRae

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the Poet: 

Pushcart-nominee Bruce McRae is a Canadian musician with over 800 publications, including Poetry.com and The North American Review. His first book, The So-Called Sonnets is available from the Silenced Press website or via Amazon books. To hear his music and view more poems visit his website: www.bpmcrae.com, or ‘TheBruceMcRaeChannel’ on YouTube.

the Poem: 

Every allusion used here is a cliché (the cigar, the Bluestockings, tunnels, etc.) and yet we still smile, happy to be ‘in on it’. It’s as if the poet has just nudged us while delivering an exaggerated wink. And while we might cringe to actually be so nudged, and as much as we might hate to admit it, in truth sex is everywhere in our daily public lives. We don’t talk about it as much as we should, even though “bells are going off all over town.” Or more precisely, we talk about it but don’t really change. We’ve only just entered “the FIRST of the long dark tunnels.”

the Design: 

Title & Name: 24pt Noir-et-Blanc bold 

Body: 14pt Champagne & Limousines bold

The typefaces needed to be a bridge between the Victorian and the modern, something sans serif but still with a self-conscious curve. Champagne & Limousines provides the curves, the o’s and a’s and even the bowls of the lower case g’s all resemble the mouth of the long dark tunnel at the poem’s end. Noir-et-Blanc curves, too, but with a little excess of ornament on the capitals. The kind of flourish a Bluestocking might pencil onto the world-renowned psycho-analyst’s name in her program.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Angel Bones" by Michael Hallock

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the Poet: 

Michael Hallock is a poet and songwriter living in Pittsburgh. “I’m from the magnolia south,” he says, “as you may surmise from ‘Angel Bones’ – but I’m equally at home up north. New flowers to grow and there’s some undeniable connection between snow and contemplation.” Hallock has several folk-rock CDs to his credit, the latest being “Up A Winding Stair” with his band High On Loretta. “Songwriting has wonderful virtues,” he says, “but poetry offers no hiding place, entirely focuses the mind and spirit. It’s harder and scarier. I can’t say why but I relish that challenge. I love the freedom of modern poetry, though I think I use it in an old way – to tell stories – or at least to suggest them, rather than going for strange arrangements of words for their own sake.” Hallock’s poetry has also appeared recently in The Tower Journal, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and is forthcoming in Angle Poetry.

the Poem: 

That dragon at the end of this poem is many things: the mother herself, indomitable, insisting on beauty even in an “unworthy” hotel; the disease that will kill her; and her son’s emotions which leave him barely able to count the beats of the waltz. What’s most dragon-like about this lady, though, is her complete lack of fear. Hallock’s portrait takes pains to show just how close to death, how “full of dust” she is but still, she insists she will be transformed. Here is the parent who rages against the dying of the light, who gives her disease no sway even as it consumes her. It’s tempting to think that such a death would be easier for the survivors to process and yet it doesn’t lessen her son’s struggle at all. Even as the dragon “folds itself into feathers” it keeps its teeth.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 18pt Gill Sans semi-bold italic 

Body: 12pt Gill Sans light

This is a heavy poem full light imagery. The typefaces therefore had to convey how a person can be both present in the world but also leaving it. They also must be able to hold deep emotion without contributing any of their own. Gill Sans’ thin, even strokes leave most of the page white, a light footprint. The title and poet’s name are the anchors, a thicker version of the same typeface.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Watermill Elegy" by Moriah Cohen

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 

Moriah Cohen’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations, Word Riot, and Narrative where she was runner-up in this year’s “30 Below” contest. She received her MFA from Rutgers University – Newark and currently teaches at Ramapo College.

the Poem: 

This poem is so tender. Those noisy kids down by the water don’t get told to keep quiet. Neither does the speaker’s younger self get a talking to about his or her behavior. Instead s/he lingers in the spell cast by those glowing cigarettes, remembering a similar night and its loss. It would be easy to stay in that moment, to make what’s elegized mere virginity, but Cohen doesn’t aim her mourning at “what [your hands] could never give back.” Instead her speaker focuses on the youthful ease that allows a person to casually do momentous things and then just as casually fall asleep. It’s the unencumbered mind that’s mourned here, an innocence more subtle than any physical experience.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 24pt Desdemona 

Body: 12pt Didot italic

What’s missing in this poem is most important, so the typeface for the title needed to signal as much. Desdemona’s curves make a beautiful outline of both presence and absence. They also compliment the curves of Didot italic, which manage to be both sweeping (the lower case f’s especially) and regular, like waves in the water downstream from a water mill.

online ISSN: 2651-3801