Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

BETWEEN

The words
there

but less
connected—

Sla…
Sleu…

Slee…
Sleep well

;

parts of
branches still in

the chain-link
after the tree

had been cut
after they grew

between
the openings.

Kevin McLellan is the author of: Sky. Pond. Mouth. (winner of the 2024 Granite State Poetry Prize selected by Alexandria Peary); in other words you/ (winner of the 2022 Hilary Tham Capital Collection selected by Timothy Liu); Ornitheology;Tributary; Round Trip, and the book objects, Hemispheres and [box] which reside in several special collections including the Blue Star Collection at Harvard University. Kevin also makes videos which have appeared in the Berlin Short Film Festival; Flickers’ Rhode Island Film Festival; the International Festival of Winter Cinema; the LGBTQ+ Los Angeles Film Festival (“Dick” won Best Short Form Short); Nature & Culture Film Festival; the Vancouver Queer Film Festival and others. Kevin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx