Category: Poetry
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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…
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ALL SAID & DONE by C.S. Carrier
I propose an elegythe shape ofa cairn for my father. with 63 wooden objects,one for each year of his life One object is the cube.Some cubes made by laminating woodwith paper, fabric, tool dip,tobacco leaves, eagle feathers. Another object is the box.Some boxes made into bird houses,filled with neon fishing line.White cotton bolls.Some boxes made…
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BATAAN DEATH MARCH AS TAROT CARD: NINUNO NG RATTAN by Hari Alluri
After Jana Lynne Umipig Capitulo lullabye. I dreamscape mesmerized by ruination sky. Inordinate and restful like forgetfulness. At wreck. …
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SING, O BARREN ONE, WHO DID NOT BEAR A CHILD
—Isaiah, 54:1 Her hand sharp in the small of Hagar’s back, Sarai, that barrenpunster, pimped her handmaid to her husband, saying, “As I am barren please consort (bo-na, in Hebrew) with her” by literally saying,“I shall be built up (ibaneh) through her.” A barren women can still be clever,…
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FOUR POEMS by Rosalie Moffett
READ THE PAIRED INTERVIEW WITH ROSALIE MOFFETT IN SOUND MIND A jet drags its noise across my side of town, trawling for something. Its shadow, a small black insect, crawls across house after house. Up and up, over and over, a lithe little dark thought. I, too have had a weeviling-through, my sunny sensibility bedeviled by a pest. Up there, sky-high, do…
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SIX ECCLESIASTICAL LOVE SONGS by C. T. Salazar
heaven is a compound word the sun sunders us dazzling so you don’t have to wonder what wound …
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TWO POEMS by Keetje Kuipers
IN THE OUTDOOR SHOWER WITH MY PREGNANT WIFE The old frisbee from Burger Chef, once redbut faded now the pale pink of my wife’swidening aureoles, lies upturnedbeneath the saltwater drip of our saggingbeach towels. This world is full of objectssuccumbing to the gentle ebb of decay. But her body—loosening breasts and blue-veined thighs caughtin a…
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TWO POEMS by Jessica Johnson
UPDATE The boy builds a four-throated fishout of cardboard. The fish lips flap, blue-taped, from a body thatcarried bottles. See! He saysa large-mouth bass. I’d have smiled once (inwardly of course) at his fine imaginary, thought him unspoiled, amusing himselfwith the trash. Wasn’t I…
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I USED TO PRAY by Yuxi Lin
to any God that made mefeel ashamed. Girls are takers,Mama used to say. I took every lesson she gave me, learned to swim out of my body & abandon it. With incense I burned pagesuntil a perfect eye stared back. God drilled a hole to make us see. See? Mine is filthy. He, too, eyed me each day afterschool, …