Category: Poetry
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CASTRATO by Annie Kim
I want to be a boy, you tell the man who analyzes you. Free of desire. He nods, light flashing off his thin gold spectacles. No one called the singing boys castrati to their face. So evirato, meaning one unmanned, musico: one making music. Boys aren’t free of desire, of course— Though not by ordinary…
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VIOLINS: VIOLENCE by Annie Kim
Vitula. Viol. Violino. Violare. Violentus. Violentia. Origin and History of Violence, reads the header. You’ve visited this page 3 times.* * * Last night you dreamed again about your father— You had him by the wrists: above your head, the way you’d catch a snake, one hand beneath his flickering tongue, fighting hard to not…
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JELLYFISH by Shenandoah Sowash
All afternoon we’ve been coring apples with the conviction of inmates. A train sings somewhere close, steps off the tracks & lands in my palm. The apples spill like people out of taxis – red-faced & round. My hand is too small to hold you. Or the train. We’re fragile as jellyfish, as little boys…
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HERE, THE SPARROWS WERE, ALL ALONG by Chelsea Dingman
Every minute or so, a hallelujah dies in someone’s mouth. Every minute or so, a gunshot. A ceasefire. A tire shreds on the highway, & pieces flit like sparrows across the sky. Silly me. I thought we were here to live. The garden’s hallelujahs: tulips & rhododendrons, alive in the ground. We expect so much…
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TWO POEMS by Amorak Huey
FMK You can leave me and I will not kill you. That this needs to be said is insane but I am a man, and this is the world. Probably it should have been in our vows: in sickness and so forth, I will wash your coffee cups and do the laundry if you…
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TWO POEMS by Kara Kai Wang
HUNDRED FLOWERS CAMPAIGN 百花運動 A hundred flowers I lay here for you. A hundred I have counted. A hundred white rabbits roaming for a hundred years, a hundred years of moss I will grow for you. A hundred acres of grassland, on which a hundred of the wisest willows kneel in your honor. Radishes…
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CLIMATE-CONTROLLED by Marielle Prince
They’ve given me a window. Now I don’t need the umbrellas collapsed under the coat rack to tell me about the rain, and the jackets I’ve come to know on hangers leave on shoulders, bunch out on lunch breaks, file home at the end of the day. I stay. The janitor makes his last pass,…
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SUPERNOVA by Victoria McArtor
A star unhooks because when light and lonely both want you, one might not get his way. From the urge to trap the body into routine, I’ve named each of the white birds déjà vu. Stop flinching already.
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ROBIN’S EGG by Keith Leonard
This blue-green robin’s egg cracked, now, and left in the porch nest—impossibly light in my palm. Somehow the chick knew to press its beak against the egg’s surrounding walls. In darkness, it must have followed sound—the thunder clap, its mother’s song, the dog—each driving its first and final fissure of the shell. But how did…
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HARPER STEWART by Clemonce Heard
Whoever said black eyes don’t show up on black guys, need a knuckle mountain to the mouth. Everything with the exception of a beatdown stays in Vegas. Who in our crew of bachelors & back stabbers should’ve been held over the banister of our Bellagio suite? A groomsman doesn’t have to sleep with the bride…
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THEY THINK THEY KNOW AMELIA EARHART, by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
where she died—days after a photo suggested she lived, proved it as much as paper can prove anything, as much as a figure with her hair and approximate body, sitting on the dock, facing away from the camera, can look exactly like a lost dead girl. And far off right, a barge, floating almost out of frame, with…
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TWO POEMS by Ellen C. Bush
ASTIGMATISM It is my birthday ritual but every year I am surprised to see my optometrist still alive, seeing me. He must be past eighty, mustache and skin of a former smoker, stale breath. I must have so much time left. I’ve been returning to this chair since I was seven, but have yet…