Category: Poetry
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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…
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LAMENT FOR SOME OTHER SAIGON by Sarah Audsley
My father taught me feet are something to care for, cradle. He never talks about anything else. I remind people my Dad’s age too much of hot, sticky, high green foliage flapping in their faces, or steam rising up from the rice paddies the platoons waded through all morning, crossing in the open, barrels loaded,…
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TO MY CHILD BEFORE SHE ARRIVES by Brian Simoneau
There is a man you will learn to call uncle. He will teach you the answer to many questions is land bridge. There will be truth in what he says. He will call you something other than your name no matter what your name is. No matter what your name is…
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THREE POEMS by Jessica Hincapie
ON THE ONE HAND, IN THE OTHER Sometimes when you are born from an abundance of love you, yourself, do not know the proper ways in which to love. Your house guests are always at odds with your house ghosts. The stairwell constantly littered with tin cans and lynched cats. Obvious death threats, but from…
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THREE POEMS by Alyssa Beckitt
ME TOO I’ve crawled in the deep grooves of man’s thumbprint – My crescent roll smile peaking up over their canyon begging to be devoured. Be nice Mama said, be welcoming – His hand up my skirt, he wore me like a secret trophy behind the glass case of his pupils. I scrape my remains…
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LAUGHTER IS CLOSE by David Rivard
Laughter is close, even if it’s just the schadenfreude of middle-school girls, their juicy, eye-rolling, malicious glee flying down the street (like a tiny pink slug in a pigeon’s beak), hotting up the air—why pretend you can’t hear? Laughter, the only eternity that’s real. Laughter and its toothy lift off, even when toxic. “Save me”…
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AMERICAN LOVE SONG: OMAHA NEBRASKA by Brionne Janae
~for Will Brown because you were beautiful and black with lips like pin cushions and just as soft because you were made to be pierced to be torn apart to be a mooring for desire and how else could I touch you could I unwrap your figure pull the meat from parchment how else could…
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TWO POEMS by Kerrin McCadden
HOMING The sky is at the feeder again. I mean the indigo bunting with no bearings for home. A man pulls into the driveway after work—crunching stones, hallooing up the stairs— wanting to know about my day. All the days are wranglers, I say. I am not able to cite my sources, but I make…
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TWO POEMS by Kyle Dargan
BEAUTY Miss Iraq, the first crowned in forty years of foreign meddling, means it when she wishes for world peace— her cousins’ deaths both tallied by sectarian violence in her war-quilted, war-torn nation. She is aware the pageantry— pinup smiles and stiff, cupped hands (their rotational gesture) —will not beckon peace. Salvation may have…