My Mother Asks Me to Put Myself in My Father’s Shoes I wrapped him in the ocean so the waves could help him sleep, roll over him like seashells, resting while the world crashed. We built him from a lake and his sister from the lilies— that one is an oasis now, koi fish flicking in her chest. She asks how babies are made, and I say the soggy parts, and she … [Read more...]
Poetry Archive
Two poems by Jim Richards
50 It’s a crowbar someone left on the side of the freeway after changing a flat tire at two a.m. No one knows how that bar worked its way to the middle of the lane where you are speeding, distracted by an old song. It’s a canoe someone dragged ashore well beyond the water, or maybe the water has receded; either way you cannot launch the boat alone where you want … [Read more...]
Two poems by Nicole Burney
Chamomile A boy I know died/ and I don’t know what to make of it/ he is my first/ frailty/ Storm clouds gather/ this is good/ I need balance inside and out/ I burn an omelette/ I remember his hands/ did he play piano?/ I never asked/ I do know/ he thought the Narnia books were better than Middle Earth/ and jerk chicken and Mountain Dew were nutritional supplements/ I … [Read more...]
3 poems by Vivian Wagner
Ada Lovelace Pays a Visit It’s all about ones and zeroes, she said, her eyes gleaming like a computer screen, her voice a comforting hum. Maybe someday you’ll understand what to do with them. I offered her a cup of tea, and we sat, thinking quietly over warm mugs, until she asked if I knew the code for a perfect sunrise. I didn’t, so we went for a walk to … [Read more...]
Four poems by Mark Terrill
PARABELLUM In July enough rain to get the stream flowing in the other direction; but sufficient sunlight to raise the heads of drooping flowers seen through windows unwashed in all these years, set in walls from which the paint is peeling off in palm-sized flakes. In August a metallic-blue-green dragonfly hovering above fallen rose petals. In September a … [Read more...]
Three poems by Linda E. Chown
More Than the Dying and the Wars and Our Words about Them To sit here on this roof with the Sierra Nevada mountains in my mouth and the Alhambra’s blossoming gardens up my nose and the tiled brown roofs sloping and arching below me – to sit here and be here smoking, alive, sizzling a bit in the sun. Newspapers say nothing about this. They want to make us … [Read more...]
no a/c in august: poems by Constance Shultz
waiting in the car outside the senior center hot on the arm by the window a breeze comes in stirs my hair dryer air & I can hear a/c drones little dogs squeaking a handtruck in a semi someone working in an echo place hot on my arm as it burns sweats as heat reflects off the cinderblock wall & someone thinks not … [Read more...]
A Variable. A Choice. by Gervanna Gravity Stephens
A Variable. A Choice. A thing shyly revealed should be holy obviously controlled by spirituality and politics not self, like--- a womb, virginity, marriage, the body. Imagine barcodes tattooed like Chinese letters on the inside of your lip alarms going off at--- I’m pregnant, I want you, I do, this isn’t me. But what is holy if not free, if not … [Read more...]
Two poems by Irène Mathieu
isthmus on our dates he’d take a pack of cookies, a roast chicken, and me down to the lakefront where stairs empty to saltwater, hand me a wing or two, and lick the rest from his knuckles, point a greasy finger down the coast. a quarter mile away on Pontchartrain’s lip, the isthmus, maw of foaming gulf. moon up, moon down : tide in, tide out Mexico yawning … [Read more...]
Juan Arabia: 5 poems translated by Katherine M. Hedeen
Juan Arabia (Buenos Aires, 1983) is a poet, translator, literary critic, and publisher. The poems included here belong to his collection Nature’s Dislodging [Desalojo de la naturaleza] (2017). Un colibrí en la bauhinia En la rama más baja de bauhinia descansa el negro azul color marino. El colibrí inadaptable...Púrpura, como el placer del límite, sediento como la … [Read more...]
Poems by Lucía Estrada, translated by Olivia Lott
The poems here come from Las Hijas del Espino [Daughters of the Hawthorn], winner of the 2006 Medellín Poetry Prize. Estrada’s poetic subject travels across centuries to highlight in each poem an often overlooked woman, from Eurydice to Sylvia Plath. These lyrical portraits question the virtual absence, underrepresentation, and gendered (mis)understandings of these figures from … [Read more...]
birthday by William Bortz
birthday have you once felt inspiration from something ceasing / once, I saw a bird collapse out of the blueness it was once kept in / it plummeted, in silence, and I thought how / nice it would be to find rest on this afternoon / I am mostly enthralled in newness / when I am chained to something / unmoving / I baked my mother a cake on her 57th birthday / because I … [Read more...]
3 poems by Cooper Wilhelm
Multimedia If I were an elephant all my paintings would be of oranges, flecks left in where white paper could peak out and mirror light on skin. And people would look at the paintings and say he is an elephant, fuck him, he doesn’t know what he is doing, this is all a mystery to him, but if you pretend some man you’ve heard of did these things, you’d see how … [Read more...]
2 poems by Noah LeBien
Becoming A Man I am donning a crown of ants from the sidewalk. I am putting an ear to the floor of the garage. Cohabitation. A sky-tar. Impress the girls because (you want to be one). Show them a. Pass on the. A masochistic Michael Jordan. The brush of a feather I can’t hear, is everything quiet? Muss a boy in the Art Institute. Max wins a trophy for settlement. The scope of … [Read more...]
Two poems by J.David
the cemetery that was ash It was the last day of summer / when the church cemetery became ashes / as it burned / schools of people gathered old men and women / curious mothers and children that night / the pastor / locked himself in the … [Read more...]
Three poems by Constance Schultz
when we move in February and it feels like spring and as a deer gang harass a neighbor’s garden at midnight she sneers can you talk about a dam every day can you feel it you feel the depth can it snag your thoughts unaware a view of a two lane highway granite walls stickman on top salmon boats in Rattlesnake Canyon parades of deer and deer and deer and … [Read more...]
Teresa K. Miller: poems from California Building
Notes: Nods to Elaine Bleakney’s For Another Writing Back, Irene Drennan’s “Totems Wait,” Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s “Alakanak Break-Up,” and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything. … [Read more...]
Two poems by Amee Nassrene Broumand
The War A lotus can’t become words—life bleeds out. Still I struggle to engrave the water’s face, the lotic Mess: Daylight speckles the orchard. I long to pin this dragonfly down & press her in a tome, but she defies all essay of inchworm & scissors to sass other worlds within the known. Define this to quell the itch. This: α) I ramble through … [Read more...]
for what the same ignites: poems by Linda E. Chown
For Alison Krause In her honor, she was killed at Kent State May 4, 1970 The girl who placed the stem in a gun Said I’m hit And all the world burst Into blood As the bullet burrowed And buried its cold metal Thrust in living lungs. And the world’s TVs centered The world’s eye on The rough shed minuet of death On a campus lawn. And later one said What … [Read more...]
Oral History of a Touch-Starved Maniac: 2 poems by Sage
Oral History of a Touch-Starved Maniac Can it be in Byzantium 547CE a king steps from his bath at the same moment I glance inside a Starbucks window and see my own reflection staring back like a wolf lean with desire for the pack to return? Why discount the limits of potentiality? Say the work song is enough to get through the day —do you need more proof than … [Read more...]
2 poems by Bola Opaleke
WORDS THAT MAKE US INTO BEASTS how now can the gods not protect us from the rotten words into which our bodies melt – the swollen forest of grief where only black sunshine rises. the butterflies mold their wings from the bruised green leaves it becomes mushrooms the shape of our ears, becomes a greasy heart hovering over the weird lyrics of the soul. we … [Read more...]
2 poems by Mateo Lara
Finally, my hands are glowing For all the transgender warriors’ lives lost in 2017 Chico, hear me out, 25 of my deities have vanished this year. Their colors stain my skin and I want them back. I’ll let you slither into my temple, If you give me the spell for resurrection. No, chico, you don’t understand, I am but one feather for their wings, God’s crying too. He … [Read more...]
3 poems by Alexis Quinlan
You’re alone in a room you have nothing for (and by) Vito Acconci When I started out as a poet didn’t want abstraction abstraction used by religion politics didn’t want any of that. The worst thing art and architecture do is abstraction I still think people should find things out themselves. Then the poems began. Cognition So that you, … [Read more...]
2 poems by Rikki Angelides
No Place I started a project for an isolated tree I know googled “unconventional girdle use” and looked at the girdle section on Amazon I showed that tree a video called “How to Perform a Citizen’s Arrest” and laced her up in a plus size bustier to establish myself as a sort of postmodern tree hugger She made me think about Utopia not as a place but a payment - … [Read more...]
Two poems by Trace DePass
attn: you who take us by force, a palindrome i thought about what i would say at your lightning which pierced me, how each he has to forgive him: for this. me running to forgive him; you, boy defaced by other man (to a man.) and might, perhaps, deface, again. i only wondered, only if you might , unmask me, only if i may: take some of your time your mother gave … [Read more...]
2 poems by Brook Bhagat
I Get Found, 1974 My beloved was born with a pebble in his hand, a red stone burning. He dropped it in the moment between the womb and the catching, the landing in hands, twisted down for just a blink and let it go. Still gleaming from the blanket of beyond, woven thick with invisible threads it melted a hole in that sea-green marble Rajasthani hospital … [Read more...]
2 poems by Zachary Lavoie
early october i have nightmares in the honeysuckle hour between sunrise and when you wakebruises from sleeping with my legs crossed tightly and my arms under my armpits i have been here before when the coils … [Read more...]
4 Poems by Larry Beckett
46 Kerouac’s walking in the memory snow, in a short story, over the lost diamond, dusk coming on, he’s got to hurry: after the lover’s sonnets, holy psalms; summers of indulgence, this winter of sacrifice. The low down sky; no choice, flakes fall, dome of the Pioneer Courthouse, drifted with mail; I meditate: —White pages, unique, like whorl or iris, unknowable, … [Read more...]
A poem by Mohammad Afandideh
we have made the weapons we have devoured the chests do not accuse the words maybe "war" wishes to be the name of a flower. … [Read more...]
Three new poems by Mark Young
A line from Woody Guthrie Real men now care about skincare. They perm their hair, have their eyebrows shaped. It's been going on for over a year, part of a major breakthrough in the global effort to ban conflict diamonds. Some say it's an effect caused by the sun, or by the Fed dropping rates in an attempt to kickstart its rocket program which is … [Read more...]
Two poems by Brittany Helmick
My Self-Care I’ve learned, is to keep my lavender growing. My daughter says she is scared to go to school. Says she is worried because the president hates Mexicans. I pulled the sage from my pocket and wrapped her fingers ‘round. She asks where the place is for little half-Mexican girls like her. I kiss her freckles and tell her it is here - in this poem & … [Read more...]
4 poems by Mark Terrill
Ode to the Obvious A road untraveled like a fever unmeasured, the distance vaporizing in the heat of the moment; the representations are no longer visible. The world takes on a hue. Sub-somewhere, sub-something, you’re down there where you belong. The last pacifier consumed, the smoke from the ruins coiling up into the darkening firmament, where a skein-like wedge … [Read more...]
3 poems by Matthew Woodman
Self-Portrait I’ve fashioned profession out of crow call and graphite, blind stubbing blunt instruments against a blank white sky. Ain’t how fall you far what gets you. It’s the lines you fence, the limb you didn’t lop in time to stop the beetles from taking their cut, the peach shriveled to a furry forgot-to-rot ladder high, conspiring despite the … [Read more...]
No Meaning: 4 poems by Michael Lehman
//// Names cut in aspen wiped out by a bear claw No meaning but this Big Woods A thousand years of stillness No thought but breath out at dawn in at sunset Mist along the creek The apex of the wedge squeals Ground ripples at the moment of freefall A world of branches bends as if to a last storm and changes to fine dust "I've seen a guy … [Read more...]
5 Poems by Jeff Bagato
Swimmers on 20th Street Swimmers on 20th weave thru traffic with long strokes, kicking up foam & high, lone spire, wet motion rising & collapsing at the same time, mute grills and eyes flashing bright in the dawn, steel carcass beginning to rot— Snorkeling under an expedition, oxygen bubbles belch against glass, pressing door closed, until … [Read more...]
Poems by Heidi Williamson
The weight of news ‘I had lost not only a place but the past that goes with it, the clues from which to construct a present self.’ Eavan Boland, Object Lessons Until I walked this road again, I would have sworn it was steeper. That the houses were set back more deeply behind walls. I thought there was more foliage, more cover. Perhaps the trees have grown, … [Read more...]
6 poems by Lucas Margarit, translated by Katherine M. Hedeen
piety 1 1 A signal emitted by birds at the coldest moment of night. There is no longer devotion to holy things. Representation outside the borders of a wall-less cemetery. Raised rebuilding of a star that wavers or disappears. Other waverings and weeds. Out in the open and desert. Song of praise. Cf. the immobility of the cold areas of the body. desert 1 1 … [Read more...]
3 poems by Kyle Harvey
The World Beyond the Poem for Neeli Cherkovski The pumpkins are almost big enough to carve to let rot on the front porch the death of it the candle wax & mold of it the candle wax of death I’ll figure it out but not right now how to carry it this sadness this rotting smile the stench of it inside the mask I’ll figure it out but … [Read more...]
3 Poems by Hawa Allan
Sounds Like Dawn To grieve is to grope inside a black box, and sense no edge until light bleeds through, at first dark red, then lighter still, slowly insinuating as if through the thin, sebaceous flesh of an eyelid. And now I can see why mourning sounds like dawn. Like the slow creep of watercolor soaking through thick paper, dawn also … [Read more...]
New Poems by Gary Cummiskey
A wave of the leg to Shams We’re cruising at 39 000 feet yet with the mountains so high I feel I could just put my hand out the window and touch the snow-capped peaks. I’m exhausted from this extra-long flight, but the hotel in Venice is still far away. We’re turning left into Turkey soon, just at Tabriz. Give my love to Shams. Barcelona He wakes … [Read more...]
