"Ghost Dog" by Lindsay Ahl

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

the Poet: 

Lindsay Ahl’s chapbook, The Abyssians, was a finalist for the 2013 National Poetry Chapbook Award. Her poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, RHINO, Vellum, Drunken Boat, New Delta Review, and many others. Her fiction includes a novel, Desire, out with Coffee House Press, and stories in The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Fiction magazine, and others. She publishes Shadowgraph, an arts & culture journal.

the Poem: 

“You see that meadow over there?” An innocent enough question quickly takes on a life of its own. The hiker’s memory of the dog, long buried, brings a shade of her into the physical world. The dog is an echo of the question, “You see the meadow?” created as the memory of the dog and this place intertwine in both hikers’ minds. This is how memory propagates. One person’s direct experience becomes an echo in the mind of a person hearing of that experience. Both the echoing story and the original experience are real memories.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 60pt & 24pt Phosphorus Oxide 

Body: 14pt Roman Antique italic

These two typefaces represent different forms of decay: Phosphorus Oxide disappears from the inside out and Roman Antique dissolves inward from the outside. Neither maintains complete spatial integrity against the white of the paper, perfect for a poem about the thin places between memory and the present moment.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Where do you get your ideas?" by Michael Bazzett

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

the Poet: 

Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Oxford Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Poetry Northwest. He was the winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for his first full-length collection, You Must Remember This, (Milkweed Editions, 2014).

the Poem: 

The writing process can be mysterious—sometimes even to writers—so is it any surprise to find a tall tale filling in for a satisfying answer? It’s certainly more entertaining than the truth that lurks beneath the fanciful elements of this poem: creativity isn’t passive at all. There’s no muse to hand you something beautiful and fully realized. You’ve got to get out there, dodge the bad ideas and run the good ones down. And when you find them—the truly creative ideas—you won’t be sure what to make of them at first. Only then can you be still, or try to be still in the presence of something wild, something with the means to hurt you, something that will very likely mark you with its teeth.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 24pt Euphorigenic 

Body: 14pt Phosphorus Bromide

Without a satisfying explanation of their origins, ideas become fantastical creatures, surfacing from our subconscious like the Loch Ness Monster. The typeface for this poem had to capture that unbounded outlandishness while remaining legible through increasingly intense curvature. Phosphorus Bromide does just that, and Euphorigenic provides a complimentary whimsy. After all, the teeth aren’t real, but the idea of teeth.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

Get Ready for Edition 8!

Edition 8 Gets Born

on Friday, March 20
at the Tavern of Fine Arts
313 Belt Ave, StL 63112

Reading starts at 7pm


This Edition has poems from:

Lindsay Ahl  |  Michael Bazzett 

Polly Brown  |  Moriah Cohen

Preston Craig  |  Edward Dougherty

Jennifer Goldring  |  Heather Lang

Tom Montag  |  April Salzano


The Tavern will have a jazz duo (piano/voice) later in the evening for those who'd like to linger.

"Troubleshooting Your Advanced Degree" by Michael Jones

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

the Poet: 

Michael Jones teaches at Oakland High School in Oakland, CA. His work appears in Atlanta Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other places.

the Poem: 

The lexicon of the library-dwelling graduate student is perfect for this poem. It serves simultaneously as an expression of frustration and a description of the source. What’s best, though, is the title: as if graduate study is a piece of equipment like a printer, where most problems can be solved by checking cables and restarting the power. Imagine being able to do that with the archived papers of a famous writer: restart to find all the misfiled pieces back in their proper place. Or to upgrade your brain’s software when a new piece of writing refuses to take shape. Alas, some things remain stubbornly analog. 

the Design: 

Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Perfect DOS VGA 437 by Zeh Fernando 

Body: 18pt Kubasta by Kai Kubasta

Everything old is new again, or more accurately, the humanities departments of any given university will have the most outdated technology on campus. Perfect DOS VGA and Kubasta both recreate the dot matrix printing you still might see on a bulletin board here and there. Who knows? Maybe the printers have been upgraded, but this notice, still true, hangs on.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"After After Sappho" by Maggie Colvett

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

the Poet: 

Maggie Colvett is an M.A. candidate at the University of Georgia. She served as 2014 editor of The Mockingbird, the arts and literature magazine of East Tennessee State University. A collection of her poems entitled The World by Memory and Conjecture was awarded ETSU’s Undergraduate Honors Thesis Prize in the Humanities for outstanding work in any area of the humanities. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cumberland River Review, and Still: The Journal. She lives in Athens, GA and Piney Flats, TN, where her family keeps many dozens of chickens.

the Poem: 

“All bicycles/ are your bicycle.” Isn’t that the essence of falling in love? Before, bicycles didn’t even register. Afterward, they are everywhere. And it’s that division, that mark in time that Maggie Colvett understands so well. All other events of life are re-ordered in relation to this one, seminal event and the everyday objects associated with it take on new significance. That’s true of encountering new ideas and writers, too. Images and turns of phrase take up residence in our minds and leave us “swirling in [their] wake.” It needn’t even be a whole poem. It could be a snippet of something from antiquity, something by Sappho, say, that renders all else capital A “After After.”

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 30pt Bordeaux Roman Bold

Body: 14pt Optima 

Sappho is ancient and mysterious – we have just fragments of her work – but she’s also very much alive because her concerns remain current. The typeface for the body of a poem that invokes her therefore had to be timeless but also a little mysterious. Optima provides a clean, modern silhouette but is it seriffed or sans? That depends on whom you ask. Bordeaux Roman provides a flourish to the ragged edge of a layout patterned after ripped notebook paper. The pair of lower case g’s in the poet’s name could be the wheels of a bicycle; those striking capital a’s could be the bicycle’s rider, spine leaning slightly forward on her long arms.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"she tames the small things that consume us" by Dan Sicoli

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

the Poet: 

Dan Sicoli, of Niagara Falls, NY, writes about hope and the fallout that comes from offering it up. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks from Pudding House Publications (Columbus, Ohio), Pagan Supper and the allegories. In addition to co-founding and co-editing the literary press and magazine Slipstream (www.slipstreampress.org), his work has appeared in numerous litmags, e-zines, anthologies, and poetry audio recordings including Chiron Review, ONTHEBUS, Quercus Review, Bop Dead City, Barbaric Yawp, Dog River Review, Bathtub Gin, 2River, Rock Salt Plum, Stirring, Up the Staircase, and Nerve Cowboy. He has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Currently, he can be found in local dives, saloons and barrelhouses banging on an old Gibson 335 as a rhythm guitarist with an area rock’n’roll band. In late summers, he oven dries home-grown plum tomatoes.

the Poem: 

Enchantment is still possible in the modern world. What else can explain this woman’s gift? How else to describe this poem’s effect? Not just on the bees and the speaker, but on the reader, too. Is it the idea of being tamed? That it might be possible for another person to calm the wild, buzzing chaos of our inner and outer lives? What a good feeling it is to be fed, to sit in a field knowing the bees won’t sting, to let someone else sort out the details that would consume our time and energy. As long as “no one has her measurement” she’ll stay a source of wonder.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 16pt Didot bold 

Body: 11pt American Typewriter

Bees are rounded creatures with curvaceous flight patterns. Their wings make little clouds around their bodies… so the typeface also needed to be rounded, but with the flourish of a serif to suggest the tendrils of plants the bees service. Didot fits the bill perfectly, as does American Typewriter, chosen for its throwback to a less electronic time. The nuts and bolts of beekeeping haven’t changed all that much – and you still have to develop a knack for it as you would an old typewriter with a sticky key or two.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"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