Category: Poetry

Artist Spotlight: Four Visual Poems by Sarah J. Sloat

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Sarah J. Sloat reminds us that even in our digital culture writing is about texture. Combining words, images, and erasure, her work exposures the landscape residing within every page. Sloat is a poetic detective that looks behind the whiteness. At her hand, the line of text moving…
“To Be in a Time of Extinction,” prose poetry by Violet Mitchell

—after Etel Adnan To find a list with macaws, to read of the eastern cougar, to try to imagine the sound of its growl, to set down the list and your diet cola, to check the time, to check the calendar, to find a pen, to write a grocery list, to forget detergent, to…
Bad Survivalist Poetry: “Self Portrait, Australia” by Annie Hulkower

You could bounce a quarter off the soles ofmy feet, thanks to a lengthy study in not wearingshoes, this keeps me moving across the outback.I smell like: hard muscles, desolation,am swift like a mammal. If you peeledthem back, you’d see somethingelse snaked through my plantar facea—it’s what keeps me moving. These days, it seems my…
Bad Survivalist Poetry: “A Suitable Piece of Real Estate (As You Like It)” by W.E. Pierce

By the pine gapin these woods is a green doorinto the code We find it onan early walk after coffee(imported unimportant)The air is cold but the door steamswarm to the touch though we don’t touchIt hums Someone runs the numberson this thing that hasn’t happened to us yet(the insects halve and halve and halve and halve…
“A Flag Unfit to Fly,” poetry by Tim Kahl

A Flag Unfit to Fly The flag stayed up way too long and no oneknew how to properly retire it. It had beenraised too quickly. The young men in cargo pantshad not seen the skit about flag etiquette.They faced the flag and held their breath,sensing a vague feeling within themselvesit should not hang in the…
Two Poems by Nina Knueven

I Knew I Was O Positive When the subcutaneous purple balloonslocked up, guardingmy perforated veins. Universalresponsibility doesn’t articulate from head to toe,but from the thoracic cavity itself—flushing and swooshingin hostile torrents. Needles glint and bags are gratifiedwith new feed—teethy eyesmoving like meat grinders.Visceral tissues pump & pumpto catch up—inflating, deflating,& I’m turned on, thinking of…
Three Poems by Matthew Broaddus

It’s Good to Be Ashurnaspiral II The dunes part. Enter oasis. I emerge from the desert on my immaculate Bactrian, sipping an adult beverage from one of those neon crazy straws and tipping my hat to no one in particular. My pride of lions, cast in copper radiance by the god Ninagal, tails me and…
Two Poems by Vincent Poturica

The Unknowable A small German boy splashes inpuddles of radioactive measuredcalmness. The puddles are not,in fact, radioactive or measured. But these adjectives seem the mostappropriate signifiers in depicting thespecies of calmness the German boyfeels while splashing after waking too early from a troubled dreamstarring clowns without eyes or mouthsbut only brilliant red noses much largerthan…
“A Growing Crisis,” a Presidential erasure by Tara Campbell

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Tara Campbell (taracampbell.com) is a fiction editor at Barrelhouse and an MFA candidate at American University. Prior publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, b(OINK), Booth, Spelk, Jellyfish Review, Strange Horizons, and Heavy Feather Review. Her debut novel, TreeVolution, was published in 2016, and her collection, Circe’s…