Category: Poetry

Poetry: “Ouroboros” by Nancy Hightower

At fourteen, you see how the world is:the sky full of holes, your stepmother a wounded sparrow, prompting your father to hide all the guns. You’re the trigger, he whispers, slips you a pistol when you graduate college. At twenty-five, you receive an invitation to their hidden compound somewhere in the country, over the rainbow…
Two Poems by Alyse Bensel

Broken Sonnet I want to reach inside of him. I’m tiredof his lack of sleep, the need to build worldsin his head all night. He’s tried to burn allthe pictures I’ve kept. A silent bird makestrees hush.He always wants me sleeping.So I combed the moths out of my hair, wantingmy head to ring like a…
Three Poems by Lauren Bender

Misdirection Snow comes, heavy distraction. We snipe at each other in the mid-afternoon dark because there is no time for distractions. (i think?) no one is focused on a single wrong anymore or the wrong wrong. There is an itchy place for every injury we’ve built into our brain/keep building/keeplistening when we’re told we are…
Three Poems by Joshua Butts

Measley Ridge Road Moving with the weather is no optionfor those on Measley Ridge. No vessels are preppedfor when the Brazos sweeten. Shirley Hughes, send your laundry waterto the nearest stream. Ziplocs huddle the deathsof the holiest white poor with their ragged white meatand dry bushels requiring so many creamed sides.If this were Louisiana one…
Poetry: “Lone Wolf” by Jill M. Talbot

Lone Wolf Lone Wolf: dangerous andinadequate: see God: see proofof quantum mechanics: see Einstein:see WWIV: see roman candle: seeRenaissance: see writers: see Woolf: seeBook of Job: see impotent God: see existentialism: see internet meme: see joke: see punchline: see deadline: see autopsy. Lone wolf: pledgesallegiance to his own ego: see Freud: see flagpole: seeOedipus Complex:…
Three Poems by William Lessard

<en passant> the hammer i raised to my father’s skullholds open the bathroom window history is sometimes the breezethat enters through the daisy curtain in the moments before that momenti saw myself a flyinching a stippled surface joy was insect glorya moment rubbingeyelash legs in the history of survivor artthere is the theme of wishing…
Two Poems by Zach Mueller

Broke Bottles, Gold Models There’s no sign sayingchoke saltwaterdrowning, but that’show it happens—the absenceof a sign. The thingis what it is.Let’s be honest.You should gulp it like strangers eye-fuckinga bank teller.See how honestlyour throats reject quartzand feldspar as thoughwe abominateislandswith our lips. Don’t encourage.Don’t hang it up on a fishhook.These ghost crabsfear flashlightsbecause sunlight is…
“The Inner Eye Tattooed,” a poem by Marc Vincenz

(1) Looking in like a snail, my nose crawls against glass. How the view alters up close and the breath a mountainous fog against matter’s impermeable will. Isn’t this the color of pure silence— that rainbowed tint when night swallows reflections? (2) In the nothingness of the primordial, words written before words are known and…
Three Poems by Ace Boggess

Schoolteacher Elegy scanning the obituaries this morning I seemy junior high English teacher the one who ignored me while I slept or pretended to sleepwith head posed on arm pressed to the desk then introduced me to Hugo the French Shakespearewith Quasimodo’s bones cradling a rose in Esmeralda’s grave I was a child in hiding…