Category: Poetry
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THE NIGHT BEFORE THE NIGHT THAT SYLVIA PLATH LAYS HER HEAD IN THE OVEN by Hannah Matheson
Sometimes what kills me is serene as snowfall. Proliferating frozen, soft inundation, the ceaseless and so many ways of wanting to die. I can’t sleep for the 2 a.m. murmur of the plows, making their rounds for hours now, unseeing metal sweeping and salting. Rusted chrome in near collision, compelled by the Sisyphean labor of…
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TWO POEMS by Katie Condon
I’m a Kick-Ass Woman Ask anybody. This ass has never been kicked to the curb. I do the kicking. I’m a nasty-ass woman drinking chamomile tea at dusk. I know what I’ve got & it’s a throne for an ass. Grab it. Kiss it. Pop the pimple on that ass. See what happens when you…
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THREE POEMS by Dilruba Ahmed
THE CHILDREN How each one is taken with care from car to school doorstep, each one hand-in-hand with an adult. How the mothers and fathers kiss their foreheads, first pushing aside their bangs or smoothing a stray wisp. One parent straightens her daughter’s velvet headband; another wipes dried oatmeal from his son’s pink lips. …
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G-D POEM by Sass Brown
Oh the g-d in you. Thank you for what g-d you did today g-d as gold g-d as gone You believe there’s g-d out there somewhere among trash heaps that smell less these days …
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TWO POEMS by Carlina Duan
WHAT IF my lips weren’t chapped. the candles: unburned. what if they’d stayed like that all year: whole, slender sticks, separate & shy. what if the ants didn’t run in slow lines across the table, didn’t crush to dark soot beneath a stray thumb. if I hadn’t touched the cake: unghost the icing slipping through…
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LIFT THE MORATORIUM ON ANGELS by Kristin Robertson
in this poem one sec for Pearl Vision and an optometrist who looks exactly like an uncle who died two years ago. He’s saying quick puff of air and hot air balloon in the distance look through here see it see it now? and now? But this, this is the good part:…
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BLAKE GRIFFIN DUNKS OVER A CAR by Matthew Olzmann
with a full gospel choir crooning behind him, with twenty thousand spectators surging to their feet, with an arena of flashbulbs flashing its approval, and I’m spellbound, thinking it’s all so spectacular, until the broadcast team weighs in, and Charles Barkley says, “That wasn’t the greatest dunk,” and Marv Albert says, “But the presentation was…
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THREE POEMS by Christine Gosnay
Grand Teton A limber pine wave gives way to woodsmoke. I am deeply interrogated and I am not understood. The sun hits the logs and plays with their legs and shoulders, pushing away their modesty. The man who boxes my firewood has eyes three blue meters deep. His birthday has come with the snow in…
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“MY DADDIES HAVE VOICES LIKE BACHELORS, LIKE CASTIGATORS & CROONERS…” by Tiana Clark
Daughter, you make me shudder, make music of my bones, don’t you? Yes, like castanets. The best blood of my blood, soft blood, boiled blood of not knowing, bright blood is still in you now, blushing scarlet cells blossoming in your face, plasma rich as juicy figs, cut open & gleaming. Muscling that dark abyss,…
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TWO POEMS by Kendra DeColo
Ode to When the Music Video Doesn’t Match the Song After Ryan Burton and Noah Taitano What isn’t lovely about a group of men moshing to a slow song whose notes drip around their bodies like a halo of sweat the way I drive through suburbia blasting Beethoven’s 6th…
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TWO POEMS by Anne Barngrover
ELEGY FOR FALLEN PALMS –after Hurricane Irma I learn the facts about what we’ve lost: palm trees don’t form annual rings. You’d find their age in the Bible or Quran, old as Oil …
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AS THE FOG ROLLS IN, NIGHT FINDS ITS FOOTING by Luther Hughes
What’s that story about the blackbird visiting a man, or, more accurately, his depression? Making him recognize it, I mean. It was often like that with birds, reminding you of your flightlessness. It was like that, then more so, then only that. I’m doing as much as I can these days despite thinking about what…