Category: Poetry

Side A Prose Poetry: “The Game of Life” by Ashley Neary Greenhouse

(After Timothy Donnelly) Mike Tyson threw his first punch when a bully killed his pet pigeon. In 1918, a messenger pigeon saved an entire battalion when she flew through gunfire. She was shot in the chest, blinded in one eye, and had a leg hanging from a tendon. But she kept flying, 25 miles in…
Two Haunted Passages Prose Poems by Naa Asheley Ashitey

Pelvic Floor Diary Entry #2 Yesterday, I learned the answer as to why I have a notable frustration [hate/resentment] that my mother praises God so much. Not because the concept or the existence of religion is wrong; that the idea of living a life to a moral code is so sacrilegious and foreign. I still…
Two Haunted Passages Poems by David Anson Lee

Inventory of Missing Persons, Filed Under Fluorescent Light There was no announcement.Only a chair that stayed emptylonger than politeness allows. We kept speaking around it:weather, prescriptions,the cost of small mercies;as if absence were a languagewe had agreed not to learn. Later, someone checked the hallway.The doors were closedin a way that suggested completion. A chart…
New Poetry by Gukhui Noh: “warbler”

I place my heart in the seat next to me on the intercity bus,and we run together without looking to the side, withoutasking how we are doing, early cosmos flowers sway bythe roadside, perhaps thinking this is how sides lean againsteach other as they collide. I read the rhythm of wiping across your thinning wrists,you…
New Poem for Haunted Passages: “The Birdcage” by Martine Bellen

Sighted people tend to react to darkness like birds when their cage is covered for the night. And with my cage concealed, I rested on a bed of nettles, Hansel as my dream. Or rather, I drowned in our mutual dream, having slipped into him while asleep, and when he awoke, I—Gretel—remained in deep slumber,…
Poetry from the Future: Three Terms of Service by Sean F. Munro

TERMS OF SERVICE: Grip Semiotics & Class Diagnostics Grip pressure reveals your buyological gender, thumb-to-text tension, page-turn velocity, forearm torque, and knuckle-crack frequency. Palm sweat salinity indicates probable voting patterns. Your grip signature is compared against 4.7 billion normalized datapoints; deviations trigger Ergonomic Compliance Audits. Suspected non-binary grips are flagged for Re-Education Modules administered via…
Barbara Henning: Three Prose Poems from Boys & Men

Dan When I was in Detroit recently, my sister and I stopped at a restaurant at the Ford mansion. When we sat down, I heard a deep voice say my name. I looked up from the menu, and it was you, the maître d’. Forty years earlier, we met in a bar in Hamtramck. The…
Poetry by Michael Ruby: “Tu Ti Spezzasti”

—Giuseppe Ungaretti the imminent forwardfinding this parkleaves the melting * limit false morefor all the lost songsarena of disobedience * long for hollow solesthrough solid orificesfull thought and icingregular polishhigher organ force * the force abides wholepillows the ringand alleviates a certain * listen to silverhostess bending low * filaments of iceregistrars of hopepongo of…
Ryan Bollenbach: A Memorial Excerpt from His Chapbook Letters from a Strange Land

I first got acquainted with Ryan through his submission to our print issue, Vol. 6, where he sent two poems called “sometimes the word for tender isn’t tender.” Fortunately I’ll always have these poems to connect me back to that person and, now, his chapbook, Letters from a Strange Land, which he recently published with Carrion…