Category: Poetry

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

The sun falls out of heaven like a stone

One of Ovid’s gods is drunk,
and stalking the city in peg-leg pants,
velour shirt open to the loins,

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.

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

These creatures with breathing blue
necks. Arch and bristle. Forelock and star.

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.

[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

The teacher did not like the poem,

but seemed unable to say why, his face

seeping dismay or disgust.

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.

For they everted the irreversible,
Proved all that time my life went door slam
Door slam done an epic waste for the sake
Of argument.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.’

We should be glad our safety and security
are someone’s top priority, yet we
can’t help but hope for fresh announcements

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

i have walked with half a skull and i have walked
with a blanch shell. i have walked, legs
split hungry, and i have walked too old.

And charity is a spare that will spare us the night broken down.

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,

Before the weight
of our thing overtook us, we undressed.

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

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

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…

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.

On this walk
the bones of the beach

glow. They choose their light
from moon’s candle…

I as Leda loved you,

we had read the myth,

with indecorum…

In America, it is always
the car and the road, the gun
and the girl, the grasp beating the reach,
the inevitable death in a bank vault.

In gorges, gibbons howled and Li Po
drank the wine of wandering.
Forever drunk, I face rock-born moon, he sang

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

In the kitchen, the wolves

curl down between us

among the wooden legs of chairs

where the baby crawls

I ask her what changes when I turn off the light
and she says, Go ahead.
I ask what else and
she says, According to whom?

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.

I was a gerund,
filling the holes like water for lakes.

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.

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

tiara, Wonder Woman was invented…

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.

Among barnacles and agates
as tides leak up the beach
she picks through litter
to choose a new labyrinth…

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

clouds drift low to the earth, bleeding
along their underbellies

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

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…

Who sang

the first song?

What human throat

first set free a note

A nurse is a good person to be
with a vagabond heart,
you can love a stranger instantly

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

[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

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.

[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

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

I imagine it’s what breasts feel like
welling up, except this was in my ears
and the tiny roots of my hair,

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

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…

Hello internal assembly team.
I am un-singular today in this rash of faces.
I sense the careful in me trolling.
An itch welling at the crown.

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…

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…

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…

[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

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

This is the sound of the terror
of isms Of my rickshaw heart beating
yours

Her long, thin arms
warmed us when the North wind
wheezed, like an old man,

I sometimes go with him, & so does our friend James.
I joke it is like a “mind gym,” but not in the cultish, self-help sense of the phrase.

All evening my tongue

a manic magician in a submerged metal trunk
unknotting constraint.

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.

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.

[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

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

Wilmington, Delaware; Wilmington, Delaware.
Does any real mail
ever come from there?

An early blessing—
neither “the image of Industry
in winter,” nor “flashing seraph,”
but pure figure

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I’m tired, she says. We’re sleeping, he says.

Who knew a beginning could be totally quiet.

[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

[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

The stars shine tonight /
like lights in vinegar.

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

“To some, that’s just how God
initiated the universe : galaxies
tumbling out one by one, rolling…”

[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