ALT I didn’t want to be myself for a while, or by myself—being me was lonely even when I pretended to be someone else. To lose myself I went for a walk through the snow. My fear of the future followed. Of late it felt close at hand, ready to stalk up behind me

ALT The Möbius Strip of Reality and Dream Amsterdam Review in conversation with Mircea Cartarescu "If the words don't shine with all their power, if you don't send 'most of your stars out,' as Salinger wrote, everything is in vain, because for a real writer literature is more than a profession and even more than an art: it is a religion."

ALT What Music Is Have you ever seen a Pomeranian goose? One comes to visit me every morning at the end of third shift. It's domesticated & the people next door to our medical facility let it wander. It waddles up to the walk as I leave work: honk honk do you have bread sir? Perhaps a fish or two? It's brown & white & big & a bit pushy. Pretty bird I tell it & it preens like an addled swan. I always wonder what the birds are saying. How do starlings sway in their murmuration across the sky? After do they tell each other,

ALT LATE QUARTETS The canyon walls’ striations Wrought by water, by wind, Reveal deviations In the parallel of lines. : : How to integrate the minutiae— The febrile marks, a torn web, A ragged rope bridge— when Each act of ritual distances?

ALT alight ​​​ i thought we were trees, shrieking, dense, millenial. but no, we were hands, we were ocean hands, blind, fleeing, ignorant. unknowing we swept seawater into speech, cleaving, the fugitive madness settles, grief a feathered mouth, a mother that stays, when we face pain she says, alight, child, alight, we are torn, born wanting. hollow as moon & sometimes the fragment is a continent that floats

ALT Scenes from the Lives of a Girl i The dead leaves clung to the young girl. They leapt from the earth to clothe her. The linden and the oak, elm and sycamore. Every time she arrived home she was met by her exasperated mother moaning about the leaves’ flaky deposits in her hallway, the baby slugs, the not completely dead aphids. “Why don’t you brush them off before you come home?” Her mother presumed electricity in some static form had a hand. She never witnessed the looks of astonishment that greeted her daughter all along the road as leaves swept themselves up to envelop her, astonishment too deep to rally an insult or catcall. Astonishment of a kind no emoji exists for.

ALT Market Forces When there was less, it was easier to tell a story about why there wasn’t enough. Inside the lion’s emptiness, the zebra’s; inside the zebra’s, the field’s; inside that, the sky’s. In the age of sieges, you could draw a circle around a city and, just like that, boost the cost of flour. And doors’ futures. In the age of abstractions, a market force can not be demoed in dominoes. Instead the tongues of our sneakers tell tales. In all of them, the capital of capital is a city impossible to besiege. It moves, after all, all the barons and pirates setting up shop over and over, halfway between a zeitgeist and the latest fad.

ALT Hemlock, 1956 ​A wooden door in front of everything. A door on my country. A door on the lake. My poems prefer wooden hunting dogs. If I say there is a door on my heart in the poem, then there is. Now I can open this door. The door is a short door though. I must kneel down to crawl in, drag my body through with my wooden elbows. I bump into my wooden mother who is also crawling in my heart. She smiles so large at me that her suffering lights up the tunnel. I can now see my

ALT H(over) Gray July day, humming-bird hovers beak-deep in a hank of late-blooming wisteria. Is it—are they— ever aware of failing, of being awkward, inept? Never. They’re nothing if not perfect.

ALT Amsterdam Review Fall 2026 Mircea Cartarescu, Katrina Naomi, Marion Rost, M. Anne Avera, Alina Stefanescu, Jen Jabaily-Blackburn, Daniel Carden Nemo, Gabriela Denise Frank, and many more...

ALT Will I Be Still the Hero Lately I see things fade to a dark shade till they wear through their own orbit. What strikes my eye is an altercation of fluency. Part concomitance of form. Part vacuum that sucks me in.

ALT The Politics of Abstraction ​​In the green room of the poem ​an artificial intelligence flexes its wings. Protesting, the surrealist logs out forever. There is always at least one memoirist at the space station without the proper joker card. The nonconformists stop all the clocks to gain access to restricted areas. You keep preparing for the superfiction party. Each page of the party is a quanta of data, a thing- in-itself. The afterparty is for reading science and fiction and science fiction. On the moon, a phone number is written in dust. Maybe it is your number.

ALT Real World Feeds All you who feed on the food of earth frog like a piece of dry leather creaking in the field snapping up flies hunter licking the pot of tiger bone stew tire a black tongue lapping a black cold road Get this ghost mama off a me What is it?

ALT Final Day Even in August, a chill. Boxes stacked on the painted pine floor. Sheets pulled over the wingbacks, the sofa. The door closed after letting in the last of the room’s good air. Years ago I burned here. Brought him into the near dark. Held his hands while he breathed in my hair, passed it between his lips.

ALT Rapture, or When It Happens - April 14, 1935, Black Sunday Virgil waits for the black blizzard to pass. No one tells him what to see or how long to wait. There’s just Virgil and the fiddle and the elbow where two roads meet along an empty horizon purpled out into darkness. First it’s a vague distance, a collection, the earth roiling out of itself. Then the devil is in the dust carrying what we’ve cast off—seeds, bits of skin, what would have been wheat in the land’s broken promise lifting like a cloud.

ALT from Antediluvian Sonnets ​All worked up to purchase nothingness What you don't know but now inhabit Detached from your name Detail the diagram, labeling the biology Of loss in everlasting diaristic acrobatics Comb, pillow, dust Read flourishing trace The hand in your pocket When did news become advice Bury invitations, plant ancestral Relics in plain blight You don't need to tell anyone Take the language from your body Revelry

ALT The Journey’s Formulas I A murmur of voices behind the plowman. He doesn’t look around. Empty fields. A murmur of voices behind the plowman. One by one the shadows break free and plunge into the summer sky abyss. II Four oxen pass beneath the sky. Nothing proud in them. And the dust thick as wool. The insects' pens scraping. A swarm of horses, gaunt as those in gray allegories of the plague. Nothing gentle in them. And the sun whirls.

ALT Deer ​​First, they were ducks nestling into the long grass. Then they were branches stuck upright in a circle. A shake of the head and they were a conclave of deer, conversing privately in the way deer do.

ALT After an Attack The sick boy. Locked in a vision with his tongue stiff as a horn. He sits with his back to the painting of the wheatfield. The bandage around his jaw resembles an embalming. His glasses are as thick as a diver's. And everything’s unanswered and jars as when the telephone rings in the dark. But the painting. A landscape of quiet, though the grain is a golden storm. Blueweed sky and drifting clouds. Below them in the yellow surge, a few white shirts sailing: harvesters— they cast no shadows. […]

ALT Amsterdam Review Best of the Net Nominations 2026 Poems Yes Yukon by Sara Barnett Fable: The Barn Owl, the Woodworm & the Rain ​by Anthony Caleshu Delicate Weapon by Patrick Cotter Winter Night by Susan Irvine Disconnect by Khadijah Queen Natural Selection by Klara Seddon Stories Less Than Hero by Roberto Ontiveros The Schnitzel by Eric Melbye Creative nonfiction Funeral Rites by Raul Zurita Works of art Monochrome Cinematic by Jason Bentsman #2 Monochrome Cinematic by Jason Bentsman #6