Category: Poetry

by Grace Wagner What they said: There may be some in this auditorium. There may be some here today that will be homosexual in the future. There are a lot of kids here. There may be some girls here that will turn lesbian. We don’t know. But it’s serious. Don’t kid yourselves about it. They […]

by Dena Igusti TODAY EVIDENCE // HOLDS ITSELF // REASON TO PROVE MY HURT // A SERPENT SHEDS ITSELF // OF AN OLD SKIN // FORGETS WHAT IS LEFT BEHIND // I WANT TO REMOVE // CELLS, DEAD, GENETIC THAT HANG // OFF MY BODY // HOLD TRACES OF WHAT // WAS DONE TO ME […]

by Haley Bell Keane On my way to work, a brown ibis walking in the grass.I almost pull over to ask about its feathering—do ibis havebrown plumage? A juvenile, maybe, or just some other bird—which birds look like ibis? Would itruin this poem if I knew? Would it be a different poem?Do I have the […]

by AC Dobell I want to steal them all,or own the rights to themlike an art collector. Pluck them one by oneoff the screens in Times Square,watch them disappearfrom the sides of highways. I will spare only “Farm Fresh Eggs”& the “Free Firewood” signsbecause I am feeling generous. I will leave up empty billboards& screens […]

by Ana Michalowsky Ten Practical Suggestions Skyline Cemetery, 2019 from Never the Same: Coming to Terms with the Death of a Parent by Donna Shuuman Get the Information You Need You may be surprised at the healing that can take place, not just for you, but for others who are keeping secrets or have held […]

by Rachel Stempel for my future dermatologist It’s Thursdayand it’s lateand you’ve lostyour right handto scienceand your left hand’slimp Your knucklesbulgeand starecockeyed You forget howyour playground politicsmade illegibleevery          good                     thingyou got your greasy                    […]

by Melody Serra Accessible File *Image: A New York Times clipping of “Patricia Lockwood’s First Novel Reaches for the Sublime, Online and Off” by Merve Emre, Feb. 16, 2021. Melody Serra’s passion is teaching and empowering others by sharing what she has learned. She helped launch an arts and crafts program at a children’s hospital […]

Don’t worry, I promised my mother,I’ll finish the room. She lay in the hospice bed,her chest spongy with cancer.She had me get the scrapof paper from her purse, her notes:the carpet, the table, the wicker, the paint.I stroked her skeletal hand.Then day turned its face away. Weeks later, I bought the paint, made the time.But […]

by Brent Ameneyro I walk past the half-finished cinderblock buildingthe not yet blooming Jacarandasand the police lights turning the laundromat bluein search of a floweror a church that could make me feellike the child licking tamarindotalking to himself I watch two volcanoes at sunseton the left a woman sleeps or dies of grief she glows every […]

by Brent Ameneyro She made the best red rice and frijoles.After the table was cleared,it was filled again with tamales—peel back the huskfind something steaming, damp,what some might call flesh-toned. After the table was cleared,something else appearedfrom the kitchen, and so it went like this all day.After the flan went cold,Mayté turned into a Crested […]

by Emma DePanise Goliath Frog Whistles to Their Lover My yellow underbelly bristles, the warmwater trickles—I’ll do the dishes every night, I promise. My elongated second toecan almost reach you. I didn’t kiss that dragonfly. This July night skysticky and wild as my tongue. I hear other kinds of frogs have the rightkinds of voices, […]

by Beth Suter Night-blooming jasminesuffuses the sleepless dark—           scent of the unseen, a shiver   in the belly, my forever-fishswimming a shoreless womb.           Though my son surfaced,   a tremor remains, his arrivalopened a door I can’t close—            the door of my […]

by Ash Good Accessible File Ash Good (they/them) is a queer, non-binary poet, designer & activist in Portland, Ore. They are cofounding editor at First Matter Press (501c3 nonprofit) & a reader for Frontier Poetry. Ash’s newest collection, us clumsy gods, is forthcoming from What Books Press in 2022. Poems recently appear in Voicemail Poems, Cathexis, Willawaw Journal & others. Diamante […]

by Jessica Kim Now watch me strangle the neck of the apricot tree,watch me grab a back of green onions and cage it in the rusty supermarket cart. Like the flight herefrom California, confined in the small body of an aircraft. The Korean peninsula devours my bodyand swallows. I wonder why I am so welcomed […]

by Grace Q. Song When you are finished, you may retrieve your memory and belongings.  In this poem the girl 1. ______ her uncle,  asks how do I love a body of law and who is the 2. ______ now.  Two desks across,  the boy sits  three 3. ______ short  of lunch. I am  the […]

by Wendy Thompson Taiwo Bury erase revitalize gut Burn the effigy sell the bones strip the copper pipes keep the edgy street art Who was it who once said, “Only the rich have shrines”? Old family homes purchased by preservation societies Grounds maintained by garden clubs But what about the homes of southern Black migrants? […]

by Daniel Edward Moore Daniel Edward Moore’s poems are forthcoming in Lullwater Review, The Meadow, Muddy River Poetry Review, The Chaffin Journal, The Chiron Review, Adelaide Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, The Bitter Oleander and Armstrong Literary Review. He is the author of Boys (Duck Lake Books) and Waxing the Dents (Brick Road Poetry […]

by Saba Keramati   Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. A graduate of University of Michigan and UC Davis, her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and appears or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Vagabond City Lit, and other publications. Kathryn […]

by Jonathan B. Aibel   Every summer Saturday my fatherworshipped, walked the roaring mower with its choir of bladesaway and back. As my brothers and I each in turn grew strongenough to yank the recoil, we were inducted into the mysteriesof prime and throttle, spilling gasoline, the sweet benzene smellmixing with newly manned sweat while […]

by Dani Putney   You walked in with a vodkacream soda, a concoctionyou gave me to sip.What do you think?as if you didn’t expect meto say it was strange yetappealing, as if my thoughtwasn’t manufactured to bea gear in your cerebral machinery.Tell me, old man, that we’re not the same. Maybe then I could believeI […]

by Tifara Brown I used to walk around my house with a sheet on my head, pretending to be Mary from the Bible. My soft curls matted on my head suddenly dragged the ground as I stepped around our moldy double-wide trailer into the role of the Madonna, the mother of God. I believed Mary […]

by Horacio Sierra For José Arreola, a welder who died on October 12, 2019, while constructing a hotel in New Orleans’s Central Business District. Down in New Orleans we take pride. That’s right. We take it. From the French, from the Spanish, from the British, from these great United States. Or from you. We’ll gladly […]

by Erin Rose Coffin Erin Rose Coffin holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from North Carolina State University. Her work has appeared in Raleigh Review, Arcturus, Angel City Review, and Punch Drunk Press. She is currently a writer-in-residence at Goodyear Arts, and she lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with her partner and her […]

by Jessica Dubey There is no easy way to kill the weeds, only neurotoxinsto clear the brambles and invasive species that interrupt my sleep. I dress for bed in star-spangled nightgown and matching spurs,ready to ride roughshod through the five plains of sleep. Side effects may include unraveling of thread count,sudden blackout shades, lavender-scented sleeplessness. […]

by John Hazard In this stiff booth, how can I soothe my sobbing mother, who insisted we come here—cheesecake for her,beer-battered shrimp for me.We’ve earned it, she said, the day after the end of my father’s long dying. In his hospice room, she slept four months on a cot. On the phone yesterday she told a one-year widow friend, “Your Dan was […]

by A. Molotkov A. Molotkov is an immigrant writer. His poetry collections are The Catalog of Broken Things, Application of Shadows and Synonyms for Silence; he has received various awards and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. His work appears in Prairie Schooner, The Triquarterly Review, Kenyon Review Online, Massachusetts Review among others. He co-edits The Inflectionist […]