Category: Poetry
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YOU BLACK BALD CHICKEN by MARS.
MARS. is a writer and cultural organizer born and raised in Detroit…
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WHAT ISN’T THE THING WE THINK IT IS by Peter Markus
Peter Markus’s most recent book is the collection of poems When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds (Wayne State University Press, 2021).
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TWO POEMS by Tommye Blount
Tommye Blount is the author of the chapbook What Are We Not For (Bull City Press). Fantasia for the Man in Blue (Four Way Books), Tommye’s debut full-length collection was finalist for the National Book Award…
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THE OCULARIST by Alise Alousi
Alise Alousi’s work has appeared most recently in Museum of Americana and is forthcoming in the anthology, We Call to the Eye & the Night (Persea)…
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THREE POEMS by Iman Mersal
A grave I’m about to dig As I return home with a dead bird in my hand, a little grave I’m about to dig waits for us in the backyard. No blood on the washed feathers, two outspread wings, and a dewdrop (some concentrate of spirit?) on its beak, as if it had flown…
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IN THE HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING by Majda Gama
My father came from a city of old rooftops sprawled across seven hills. Within these hills were tribal Gods carved into metamorphic rock. When he built us a home, that home was new & imported. Veined, marble tiles from Italy. Wood furniture from the hollows of North Carolina. He loved what was new, but filled…
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TWO POEMS by Helena Mesa
Bozza Imperfetta of Sight The tourists arrive. Dogs roam, smaller than the strays back home, then sleep, teats exposed, on warm stone roads. The tourists snap pictures; they snap pictures of each other snapping pictures; as expected, they snap pictures of cars—a 1950s Ferrari, a red taxi with Rubenesque curves. Strangers wave, pose: A…
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A STORY ENDING WITH AN OFFERING by Willie Lin
No one wanted to do it, no one wantedto look at a thing so large, helplessto die or live, not knowing what to ask for itself.To imagine an after. Even less to change it.Because they all imagined themselvesgentle—no hunter, no wolf among them—theywanted it to return to where the crease of woods began. The woman, she…
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GATE by Grayson Wolf
Before I’m born, I’m in no hurry to be born. So I arrive unhurried. A shape in the trees. Weighted, a fishing-line pinching the water’s surface. A voice like the moon, wordless …
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COME CORRECT by Erika Meitner & Traci Brimhall
If my lips are zipped—if I keep our delicious and contagious secret—if I am amnesiac or too hungover to remember your mouth on mine—if I forget the imprint of your body indelibly stamped—if I search for you, call for you, lover, stranger, alien—if I offer up gratitude to the air—if I rob you of…
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THE HOUR OF THE WOLF by David Roderick
Often one of my daughters howls me to her bed, and like a trained victim I tranceto their denned room to comfort a faceshaped by some dream or another—eyes pressed shut,lips in the nightlight the shade of a dried peach.Isn’t it absurd, an old prince like me, stirred by their delicate mouths? I nuzzle my head into…
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CONVERSATION WITH Adrian Matejka and Conor Bracken
Adrian, thanks for agreeing to talk about your latest book, Somebody Else Sold the World, with me. I’m really excited to talk about it, and the ways that it is contiguous with your larger poetic project, and how it also subverts or cuts new facets into it. One of the things that has always exhilarated me…