Category: Poetry

Poetry for Haunted Passages: “Doxology (Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Amen)” by Amanda Roth

My ghosts and I have it backwards—I do all the haunting and they want to be left alone. Can’t I have what I’ve been promised? Amen and amen and so forth? I just wanted the hem of your robe. If not, closure. My nerves never tangled into the sound of your voice. I could stay…
Haunted Passages: Two Poems by John Bradley

Premonition That a Head Will Take the Shape of a Spellbound Bird When a spell enters the mouth, three strands of sea-greensilk go flying over the ocean. It could be noted they smell like a pickle left on a plate before a blindfolded surgeon. Thrumming and humming, the silk strands melt abovethe White Sands Desert.…
Some Lines of Poetry from the Notebooks of bpNichol

Some Lines of Poetry gathers excerpts from bpNichol’s journals across the 1980s to give a unique perspective on craft, process, and a writer’s life. Featuring works in progress, insight into Nichol’s thinking, previously unpublished prose and lyric, visual, and sound poems, Some Lines of Poetry documents Nichol’s “apprenticeship to language” and his playful daily exploration of the limits…
Side A Poem: “Glow” by Never Angeline North

Glow “Gardening. No hope for the future.” —Franz Kafka, from his diaries In the second part of my life, I am living in a graveyard made of the first part of my life. In the first part of my life, I did things. In the second part of my life I do not. In between…
Five Poems by Bad Survivalist Elizabeth Zuba

On Water and Habitats Oceans are flowers. I am made fertile in the land of my affliction. Any terrestrial salamander halfway through being an egg will swim away and be aquatic forever if you crack it open and drop it in water, or at least that’s how it was the last time I tried it!…
Poetry for Bad Survivalist: “Three Weeks Post-op with a Lightning Bug” by Gary McDowell

Friends and family keep checking in. Keep her safe, they say. Keep her comfortable, they say. Tell her we love her, they say. And you too. Early this morning, maybe 6:30, I stand in the kitchen making her breakfast, the dogs at my side—they herd me, sun-up to sun-down, are never more than a body-length…
Poetry Excerpt: From Words in Danger of Falling Out of the Vocabulary by Eric Lindley & Joe Milazzo

Freightv.1. To inscribe, write or otherwise make marks that are to be read (more properly, read back) in non-linear fashion. To write a text that is both an Eulerian trail and a magic square.2. To mumble from the heart.3. To tabernacle under the umbels. To retire to the weeds to mildew the saccharine and honey…
Poetry from the Future: “Today Is New and Plastic” by Steve Roberts

I tuck my bubblegum under my tongueso I can drink water from my plastic cup.I need to feel both the sour tangand the deep, wet relief of being hydratedboth at once; I cannot wait for oneor the other. I put on my suit of “I don’t remember.”My suit of “The past is just a form…
Side A Poem: “Soup of the Day” by Sarah Peecher

Soup of the Day Suddenly, you find your crisp mid-April self digging through the closet for anything lightweight enough that’s not wrinkled but your summer wardrobe is an old friend you’re just warming up to and nothing seems to match the same way Saturday will be eighty degrees and sunny and Sunday will be thirty-five…