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

from “The Squint”

But before
When it ferried souls on less than holy rivers
I crawled through the hatch & through the porthole
Saw the enormous mechanical octopus
& felt it score the soft metal underbelly:
Death, in the impossible depths beneath, & joy
& language marked in passing—but then
Another ship went by & I saw you
Looking through your respective lychnoscope

Later on, we arrived in America
& a long time went by of frozen cotton
& then we awoke one August in a box store parking lot
& around us dozens of men still slept in their trucks
& a woman rolled shopping carts in preparation to open
& there were no voids or bayous, nowhere to go
Where the reifications of civilization weren’t
Except inside, where air was frigid & penetrative
& among the aisles, there could be no lychnoscope

Serena Solin’s first book, A Barer Sky, is forthcoming from Winter Editions in Spring 2026. Previous chapbooks include Solar Inverter (Bottlecap) and The Stay Behind (Beautiful Days Press). Solin’s poems and essays have appeared in CutBank, Denver Quarterly, Dialogist, FENCE, Heavy Feather, Hobart Pulp, Little Mirror, Sixth Finch, Tyger Quarterly, Works & Days, and elsewhere. She is a member of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective and a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. She lives in Queens, NY.

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