Category: Poetry

Five Strips from In Search of Basho, a haiku/comic mashup by Ross Findlay & Mark “Fittsy” Fittock

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. In Search of Basho is a haiku/comic mashup written by Ross Findlay and drawn by Mark ‘Fittsy’ Fittock. Both reside in Germany. The comic details the last year of the protagonist’s life as he goes on one final trip in search of the haiku master, Matsuo Basho.…
Six Poems by Peter Longofono

Seismic Enthusiast You can tell humans by their flocking. They call them clearings when they get there. You can tell it timberline. Become optional, an erosive classic intercedes. Nothing now qualifies your hermetic stare-down. You, plucking grissom out the ruly. They, triangulating your knock forest, sparse Switz, traipsing up to populate your zero. Wresting cheesewheels…
Three Hybrid Pieces: Marlin M. Jenkins

At Camp This Summer Hussein runs down the rocky hill behind the tennis court in flip flops (though he is not wearing socks with his flip flops as Mahmoud, his cousin, is—white ones with red lint clinging to the toes). Mahmoud: “Wallah I swear to God, Hussein, if you hit it out of bounds one…
Poetry Collaboration: “Archeology as Prayer” by Amy Ash & Callista Buchen

Let us breathe the dust that was once bone, how we taste the sweat, the steps. Wekneel before the altar of night, stars carved into pattern. It is one of those things, we say. You hear us sift through shadow and dust. We try to tell you what we need, what we want:artifact and ruin,…
Mary Flanagan: Five Poems

Enough You know what I want to have with you? A You Can Do No Wrong Love It might not be the same as We’ve Weathered Many StormsLove Or I’m Sick Can You Share My PainLove Or Why Did You Cheat On MeLove OrWe Lost The BabyLove Rather can we tune our radios To another…
Two Poems: Lauren Loftis

Old Issaquah mine entrance, once sealed, is slowly reopening1 Machine sludge and methane gas soaking into rock, cannot be what they mean when they say history is beneath us. The base of my hometown: timber, white rot splinter, a rain-swelled sponge in collapse. They say if you fall in there’s not an emergency crew in…
Justin Hamm: Three Prose Poems

Children in the Middle Ages Earlier that night, a middle-aged man dressed himself in a cape and green tights and shimmied up a tree to rescue his neighbor’s new kitten. We sat numbly over our steaming hamburger pie, watching first the climbing oil prices and then the live feed as our would-be hero lay in…
David Need: Four Poems from Goodnight Irene

March 12th 2011 Perhaps a ruined world & death offshore is we have to do, not related to a story that we cared, o, extinct birds & the red McD’s fried chicken box next to could be yellow dock or mallow leaves by a fence; outside this Atlantic is a city, slumped & death’s a…
Two Poems by MJ Santiago

daymares imagine if the sex were real imagine I am touching someone and they are casually mentioning their trip to Ireland with their parents, how they slept in a castle and it was beautiful and they want to go again next year and none of it makes me want to die imagine they are removing…