Detention Center

Marianna Ariel

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2f66′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] From Hunger Mountain Issue 24: Patterns, which you can purchase here. Designed by Marielena Andre. Marianna Ariel hunts for moments when poetry has surfaced as a force in collective bodies. She can be found in off hours jumping from rock… Continue reading Detention Center

Marianna Ariel

Enhanced Interrogation Techniques

Tom Sleigh

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] 1 Everything that’s happening isn’t me doing it, it’s what the cold’s doing, the music’s doing, it’s what gravity’s doing to the guy and if I can’t imagine what it’s like how much less can someone outside the whole situation… Continue reading Enhanced Interrogation Techniques

Tom Sleigh

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Hebron

Myronn Hardy

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] Green awnings have rusted. Time unstill     you are unstill walking on a street stilled.   Your mind holds the no longer market. You want to show me the market. You have crawled prison floors.   Your son has… Continue reading Hebron

Myronn Hardy

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Matthew Dickman

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] Wonderland Anton is marching with his new friends, their shaved heads like tongues of fire floating along 82nd Avenue, the cars at night honking at them like they were vets just home from the war. He is marching with an… Continue reading Two Poems

Matthew Dickman

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Mammy Two-Shoes, Rightful Owner of Tom, Addresses the Lady of the House

Patricia Smith

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] Mammy Two Shoes, a fictional character in MGM’s Tom and Jerry cartoons, was a corpulent, achingly stereotypical black woman, seen only from the knees down. I am double negative charm, carrying the syrupy burden of your love in my yawning… Continue reading Mammy Two-Shoes, Rightful Owner of Tom, Addresses the Lady of the House

Patricia Smith

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Fathering

Major Jackson

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] We enter without tears and huddle in the sidehills. The children’s cries are like spears in our chests, so we trade our silence for hammers. In our sleep, behemoths descend upon us which we cannot shake even when first light… Continue reading Fathering

Major Jackson

Published
Categorized as Poetry

The Songs We Know Not to Talk Over

Rosebud Ben-Oni

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] After a funeral, something wrestles from the wind, Flutters haphazardly close to your aching chest. Most likely it will fall to the cracked sidewalk. Stop walking. Consider it. You won’t understand What you are looking at, this sort of green… Continue reading The Songs We Know Not to Talk Over

Rosebud Ben-Oni

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Mike Wright

I stumble under sunny-thunder sky. The weather
simply does as it chooses, and we all might
learn some lesson there. I’ve been drinking.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Again

Tara Bray

The warbler’s folded in my tongue
like a lemon drop. What joy
it is to trap a festival inside,

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Jessica Goodfellow

In origami the mountain fold
folds down—constructing
an obstacle. The valley fold
folds up: receptacle.
The difference between
structure and stricture,
between paperweight
and wastepaper basket.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Three Poems

Nancy Eimers

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] I Am Reborn as a Shadow Frog eyes glimmer in water then douse themselves and shiny turtles topple off a log down to the water’s under-black when I step out skin    form    and sun hauled out of layers of… Continue reading Three Poems

Nancy Eimers

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Vasectomy

Carol Tyx

The teacher did not like the poem,

but seemed unable to say why, his face

seeping dismay or disgust.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Three Poems

William Olsen

Wherefore the marram grass settled the land there also sprang the children who are as the sand in the sea, and houses on stilts as good as gone.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Majda Talal Gama

I’ve seen you in souks that spill with people,

On streets that reek of three continents,

Found you filling cut-glass crystal with the scent

Of nine woods and the rose petals of three cities.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Michael J. Pagán

Unghost, the leftover residue across the surfaces of
the sea, after a receding
wave or a skimming of the hands. The present has no

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Frannie Lindsay

What else is she ever going to be
but one of the wind’s outgrown costumes
stuck in the swingset’s tangled chains

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Old Bull in the Road

Matt Yurdana

Some admire the old bull’s cracked horns and peeling hooves, the second skin of ancient

mud as wrecked and crumbling as this narrow road

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Gary Moore

I wanted the prize but the prize looked the other way
It was the other prize…

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Three Poems

Laura Budofsky Wisniewski

You can dress my naked genome up.
You can teach it art and poetry,
but it will pace the corners of the night
grunting, ‘Something else. There’s something else.’

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Companion

Annie Lighthart

The body keeps us ordinary. It says Sleep, and we must,
it says Eat, and we do.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Three Poems

Daneen Bergland

I imagined looking down at my fingers to find
they were feathers. I have been that useless.
I have felt the moon beating on our roof,

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Matthew Hotham

The miss(ed) anticipation of needs:
a hesitance to object—or,
readiness to complain.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

When Alpine

Lisa Furmanski

the eras are deep vaults, peeking and seeping beyond.
And the ridge line is the skyline is pure water.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

13 Black Birds Looking at Away

Jessica Melilli-Hand

The first three rosaries that ever were were black black
for grief for beauty for burnt mustard seeds and what the smoke released.
Some say the threads snapped when God and Lucifer played tug-of-war,
best two out of three. Some say God never was…

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Three Poems

Peter Cooley

There’s no way you can see all six at once.
Even walking around them, they’re too much again.
Today, as always, I fasten on just one.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Harold Whit Williams

Some evenings, it’s the Tejano thump from a Chevy
Tricked-out, all lowdown & shit, slow slinking up

Our dead tree street, reverberating the 120 bpm
Into our thin-walled fifties bungalow. Other times

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Kitchen Song

Emily Casey

In the kitchen, the wolves

curl down between us

among the wooden legs of chairs

where the baby crawls

Published
Categorized as Poetry

The Hole I Dug

Thomas March

She chose an inconvenient time to die
but chose the warmest place there was, away
from the mossy tree where we kept her chained
for safety, so she wouldn’t run away.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Edges

David Cooke

I don’t know where to start. Far before the moon pulled the tide
to your chin. Before your groin became a grotto. Before the brine
washed away the haloes your feet squeeze into the sand.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Falsifiability

Ravi Shankar

In post-Artemis posture, with red thigh-highs,
spangled bustier, lasso of truth and unbreakable

tiara, Wonder Woman was invented…

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Hearing Voices

Georganna Millman

When the thumb of summer presses down
and the creek dries up,
a subterranean babble rises from under bed-rocks,
lapping at the roof of a mouth.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Three Poems

Doug Ramspeck

Hard to tell the birds from their voices
in the darkening field where hemoglobin

clouds drift low to the earth, bleeding
along their underbellies

Published
Categorized as Poetry

My Matryoshkas

Shelley Girdner

Greedy doll, so greedy you swallowed
four more like you, each with a rosebud mouth
matching floral blouse and hair kerchief too.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Past Lives

Lisa Rosinsky

Well I was definitely a cat, in one of them,
and I think I might have also been the captive
of a pirate or a robber, someone swashbuckling…

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Paul Carroll

It has stared at us for thirty years,
the scar they drew when your heart
objected to the material world.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Reading the Flamingo’s Smile

Sandra Stone

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] Nimble and knobby, high-stepping it is how flamingos do it, courting adagio under the kliegs, pretending dark. Their smile Flora confirmed for herself after climbing into the pen before she was pulled from it (giddy, gleeful) at the zoo, conservatory… Continue reading Reading the Flamingo’s Smile

Sandra Stone

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

George Kalamaras

I make easy emptiness of all the washing.
There is a washer woman in my ear. A very large sky. Remove the bees.

It is your name, solid around me, like a scar.
I would forever be grateful if you would call me Japanese scroll.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Divination, Sky

Wendy Miles

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] A spool of smoke unwinds across the sky. Crow clack, cicada, bodies open to the sky. In 79 AD ash and roasting heat seal an envelope around Herculaneum; they look but find no sky. But the heart remains. See it… Continue reading Divination, Sky

Wendy Miles

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Trina Burke

Faded earth-toned photograph
at 45 RPMs preserves the speed of the roll-away
Davenport and infant me balanced on your knees…

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Ballpoints/Homecoming

W.M. Lobko

First week of school all my pens clench up.
Faulty by the boxful, snapped pencil points.
What few words there are are warped.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Sally Rosen Kindred

This was back when meaning was trapped
in pebbled covers the color of his suit.
This was back when meaning
was the engine up the drive…

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Michael David Madonick

My wife does not believe me, in fact
she has started to mock me, to register

in her discourse and demeanor a kind of
flippant disregard for my sincerity…

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Back Porch, Twilight

Murray Silverstein

Back porch, twilight, garden on its late-summer binge.
Striders all over the pond. My mother called them Jesus bugs.

They don’t, though, walk so much as land, dimple-&-drift
on water, give it—you can almost hear—a sideways thwack

Published
Categorized as Poetry

The Herd

David Starkey

What is it about my seaside town
ninety miles north of LA

a chattering of starlings, a labor of moles

that makes the washed-up celebrities
who have washed up here…

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Chris Featherman

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] These Gifts (Letter to Brooklyn During War) Dear Brian, You’re right: there’s nothing left in war but to believe in a woman with three names who gives me mandarins and to mourn our friends as kings but not kings and… Continue reading Two Poems

Chris Featherman

Published
Categorized as Poetry

The Bull

Ron Carlson

When they led me
into the China Shop
I didn’t mind,
though it was a bright place
and the wooden floor creaked.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Sure

Jean Esteve

The sun that succumbed to the mudflats
some time around four in midwinter
was blue as an owl and now its power
to rouse us is gone, gone, like the nuclear
end-of-the-world. I’m glad you were sure.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Phillip B. Williams

Built up only to collapse—your body over mine, into

mine, a hollow pentacle easily fallen into disrepair:

your tip still spilling as my body did drink.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

The Slug

Karen Holmberg

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] ………It glides by with the grand leisure of a whale in migration. Yet once it sees me ………it retires, melts a little ………………foreskin over . ………its face. The prompt eyes probe upward and re-bloom, dewed with humectants. I stroke its… Continue reading The Slug

Karen Holmberg

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Soul Food

Ginny MacKenzie

You pull into a diner and order your life
to change. On the road
you saw farmhouses
with stacks of frayed hay

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Trucker’s Lament

Casey Thayer

Loneliness needles him like a ghost limb
on Sunday nights, so he porch-sits.
He cracks the tab from a can of Bud,
scans the valley’s gallery of streetlights.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Pantala flavescens

Marie Gauthier

Day’s close—August’s ineluctable heat
avows rain, relief. Above the new-mown

meadow, an aria of wings:
the swarm strafes gold.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Descent

Frank Paino

Early December and the moon bloats with milky light.
Hyde Park sleeps, silvered in ice that wraps the naked elms—
all the lampposts and curved benches. Inside her, heaviness
like the thick silt and mud on the Serpentine’s bottom.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Burial

Jessica Ratigan

We walked down to the water together
the day his old friend just didn’t wake up.
I had no words to offer as we sat in the sand
watching the mother osprey hunt.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Definition

Kerrin McCadden

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] I once found a deer collapsed near a lake—sleek, immaculate, & unmoving except for its antlers, which swarmed with orange-&-black-speckled butterflies that obliterated the velvet beneath. Whatever word explains this, I don’t want to know it yet. —Matt Donovan The… Continue reading Definition

Kerrin McCadden

Orchid

Erika L. Sánchez

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] Woman’s destiny is to be wanton, like the bitch, the she-wolf; she must belong to all who claim her. — Marquis de Sade In Cicero the white prostitutes in front of the Cove Motel lean into cars— knotted hair, limp… Continue reading Orchid

Erika L. Sánchez

Published
Categorized as Poetry

“We came to visit…”

Gregory Orr

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] We came to visit, though You’d died that spring; Came to see, one more time, Your famous, dense garden In all its summer glory. Came to sit under the cedar That shadows the path And read your poems aloud And… Continue reading “We came to visit…”

Gregory Orr

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Killing the Rabbit

Amber Flora Thomas

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] You have to hit it on the head with a hammer, good and hard between the ears. You will think of hunger, as its tongue preens its wet nose and its legs buck air and its eyes roll back into… Continue reading Killing the Rabbit

Amber Flora Thomas

The Wound

Judith H. Montgomery

The Wound parks its load by an appalled sofa,
clambers awkward up the tea table’s shrinking
legs. Squats close by the sugar bowl, smack

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Dorianne Laux

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#8f2866′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] When I Can’t Sleep I listen to the boxcars coupling, the exhaled crush like air squeezed through a ragged metal hole or wind unwinding in an abandoned drainage pipe, like the one we used to hide in when we were… Continue reading Two Poems

Dorianne Laux

Published
Categorized as Poetry