Category: Poetry

New Side A Poetry: “The Bird’s Heart Stilled by the Roar of the Inferno” by Nwodo Divine

The Bird’s Heart Stilled by the Roar of the Inferno*For Ikenna, whose father was killed in a Boko Haram terrorist attack. He used to call me his little eagle. He’d hoist me high on his shoulders. From that perch, I could see the line where the burnt sky met the thirsty land. He said an…
Side A Poem: “Wandering” by Peter Leight

Wandering (Sailing) It’s a small boata child among boatsit only takes a second to walkfrom the front of the boatto the back and backagain under slender stringsof smoke rising over the boatover the water spreadingash on the waterholding onto the ropesto keep them from flappingor lifting sheets of smokethat soften without accumulatingor dissolving while the…
New Prose Poetry: Excerpts from Girlfriend by Barbara Henning

When my longtime yoga teacher, Genny Kapuler, read what I had written about her, she said, “I feel honored to be one of the beads in your mala, one of your sisters.” I like to think of this book like that, as a poetic prose meditation on my friendships with girls and women. I started…
Poetry for Side A: “At My Grandmother’s Ninetieth Birthday, My Uncle Tells Me How He Came to Accept His Bipolar Diagnosis” by Amy Saul-Zerby

At My Grandmother’s Ninetieth Birthday, My Uncle Tells Me How He Came to Accept His Bipolar Diagnosis smiles and says he realizedthat it’s actually really simple: when he takes the pills, he’s fineand when he doesn’t, he’s not. If I had high blood pressure,I’d take medication for it, he says, and this isn’t any different.A…
Hybrid Piece from the Future: “Genetic Engineering Demonstration Gone Wrong” by Bethany Jarmul

No one believed umbrellas could be grown in fields, could open their faces to the firmament like foxgloves. But I raised the curtain and revealed—to gasps of delight—a wonderful waterproof leaf-canopy with sturdy vine-shaft and real root-handle. What luck! I held it over a child’s head just as the rain roused. The crowd cheered, applauded.…
“There Is News Along the Ohio River”: Four Hybrid Pieces from the Future by Beth Gilstrap

XVII. There is news along the Ohio river: a young man has tied his loosening jeans up with twine and huddles into his denim jacket, a bird peeking out of a nest, but the fabric may as well be a brittle photograph wet and dried a hundred times before he taped it over the crack in…
Side A: Two Poems by Arden Levine

To the Trade Through the driver’s side window comes sunto burn my thighs as I look for new fire out there:the many tongues of trees, that cardinal plumage,those things that turn over and over and over. Most people get about eighty autumns.But, when put that way, it seemsa scam, the rest held below the counter,the…
Side A English-to-English Poetry Translation: “The Morning of the Poem” by Matthew Klane

The Morning of the Poem Bonjour madame,I am the Marcel Proustof toast and jam,orange juice,honeydew melonoatmeal,The Irish kindcoffee and the news:I’d like to sharea pipe with Baudelaire,Youcould be mynineteenth-centurydandy dudeTyping pseudo-symbolismsomething meaning somethingdoesn’t mean a thingat all:I’ve searchedthe collected WilliamCarlos Williamsfor something calledthe Poison Line:a shortand seeminglySenseless:“Are you surewe shouldn’t justgo to church?”no siree,Bob!Who has…
Three Original Prose Poems by Michael Robins

On Solitude What can only be a perfect phrase, hurried on the back of a receipt, subsequently caught in the wind & flown forever away. Your eyes are not what they were, imperfect & especially in the morning before gravity once more proves us little. First to sit in the reglazed tub, its waters rise…