Category: Poetry

Two Poems for Bad Survival by Jiji Lubis

Reluctant superhero eats brains for supper I sometimes butter them with diesel / and fry them at one-hundred-eighty-degree heat / for three hundred sixty seconds. / Or boil them in freezing rose water, / pricking them till they become mushy / as I wait for the water to boil. // Of course they seek to…
Book Excerpt: Two Poems from What It Was Like to Be a Woman by Melinda Wilson

Melinda Wilson’s heroically tough and vulnerable book, What It Was Like to Be a Woman, relays this very information with grit and beauty. From childhood through to the present, Wilson’s poems illustrate that under patriarchy our bodies are never our own, and the struggle to keep what’s ours ours—mind and body—is one that spans a lifetime.…
Book Excerpt: Three from Tricia Middleton’s Novel-in-Verse Obsidian Situations

What is the obsidian situation? An act of mourning, committed in a mood of cocky abjection, against indifference and hollow repetition. The element is wet: fountains, sweat, vapours, wine, puddles, tears tears tears, soggy towels and the Seine flowing beneath. The form is layered, carefully folded, then crumpled and held together with an ancient ribbon.…
Poetry from the Future: “The Uncertainty Ballade” by Daniel Brennan

And of these rivers which curve as all rivers curve the way a scythe claims wheat there the gun’s warm tongue in your hands admire how these hands spread with worship like a greasy and over-thumbed takeout menu no this is not my native violence never the ease of inheritance the violets they are mid-bloom…
Side A Poetry: “It Might as Well Be” by Max Winter

It Might as Well Be Which is a stateIf the weather holdsAnd the wind arrives timelyIf it’s right it’s easyAs being hit by a carOr scooped from a litterHappiness for everybodyAnd a carbonated lime drinkWith a talking sailboatFinishing my sentencesAt moments you think for meLittle boatLittle squireI bequeath you everythingBut we’re not thereYet are weI…
Bad Survivalist Poem by Frances Mac: “What we lost”

was our car and supplies for a Girl Scoutsurvival—protein bars, extra underwear, a beliefin fossil fuels. It was not like the movies.You cannot whisper or roundhouse kickan entrance to test for danger. They don’t waituntil you’ve tiptoed inside to take a jugular.We scattered like buckshot when the firstscream sliced the air like a mandolin. You…
New Poetry: “To Infinity and Beyond” by Joel Anthony Harris

I have a running sore on my chest, a pockmarked full moon that waxes radiant in inconsolable bereavement. I bear it as a nursery swaddled in shade cloth to ditch the sun. It is my silent wound. My silent night. A silence etched into my being as a sinkhole without the finality of rocks or…
Poetry: Three Bad Survivors by Kristin Lueke

the idiot imagines the last year as her last on earth (at last) i watched my dog disintegrate, drank more water than god.thought about divorce but didn’t. get divorced i mean. imaginedwhat it would be like to move a sofa. i didn’t move a sofa.didn’t do a single puzzle i didn’t want to do. i…
Side A Poem: “To the First Twenty Years, Give or Take” by Anthony Robinson

To the First Twenty Years, Give or Take It was a childhood of chain link fences &a dozen kinds of rain an alluvial epochof brain & bone & polyhedral dicemuddy ditches & fir trees mailbox rows Dogs in single file. these words a surfeit of clinking changerender the past a cosmic vending machine primer gray…