Category: Poetry

“Four Poems by a Middle-Aged Woman”: Laura Lee Washburn

After the Surgeon Cuts You or the bone snaps in eight places,the world recognizes youas the vessel for their trauma. Strangers say, Chasing the dog,my third toe snapped rightin half. Or Straight up! No break but seven stitches betweenthe smallest and next. I wasstabbed in the headby a guy in a white mask. Or, Doctor…
Three Micro-Poems by David Tomaloff

In Defense of Clouds the absence of caterpillar time— / weighted under a weightless sky, / the ibis eyeing a sore spot / where the rain stops & the crunch leaks in In Synonymous touch an ear to the scarab— / how the sense to wonder is a why // how the sense to count…
“Sa (funeral koans)”: Poetry by Yohnmean Yoh

1 Secretary of State Dean Acheson actually greeted the invasion with relief, as it justified massive military appropriations that were essential to carrying out the vision of American pre-eminence outlined in the top-secret National Security Council Report 68 of April 1950. —Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Korean War: Barbarism Unleashed” (2016) … rhetoric would not have…
“Field Journal,” a poem-hybrid by Phil Spotswood

the last scientist does not know where the others have gone. he searches the corners of the stone hearth for bacteria—to prove that there were breathers, once—that oxygen roiled. he rolls out dough to watch the yeast rise, for movement outside of himself. he breaks bread with his own two hands and says that this…
Two New Pieces by Vi Khi Nao

MY SKIN Because I dream of you as skin and door …I know you have been sublime beforeAs engorgedAs distorted as my view of the world If I could surrender your nameYour lipsYour invasionTowards more heroic hoursI would be asking you to slingYour kiss forward as if toKill what isn’t saliva, which isn’t the fiberglass…
Poetry for Bad Survivalist: “The Bars, the Anthem” by Imran Boe Khan

Down here, spider blue’s sour candy singsong plays out like confession. On my walk home, civilians cleanse into pulpits, brining compassion as they watch me hammer euphoria into gallows. Some reach for cash, others call the cops and when the sirens come, they rise like it’s the national anthem, I’m on one knee till the…
Poetry by Tamer Sa’id Mostafa: from triliteral roots

—after Craig Santos Perez [ra-ha-meem (womb):] i named my first star on a farmhouse roofin Kafr El Zayat flooding fennel seedinto the divots of a mortar an oud’s fifth stringdanced like a caudex [rahma (compassion):] the moon blued its dust to our voicesa mother tongue unadulterated a nasheedof desert roses surrendering to their stems…
Five Poems by Vanessa Saunders

Blame It on a Woman Blame it on a woman. She who argues not for the accuracy, but for the integrity of our Art. How I could not sleep. The slow systemic death of our garden. The sound of your voice. All of your belongings, just as you left them. Baby, I’ve found God. Are…
“Outside the door there is an animal writing my name in the blood of other animals”: William Lessard Interviews Adam Tedesco, Author of Mary Oliver

With the publication of Mary Oliver (Lithic Press, 2019), Adam Tedesco gives us a cycle of poems that places topics like addiction and recovery outside the expected psychological frame. A video artist as well as a poet, Tedesco brings a fluid sense of medium as well as outlook. The result is not Robert Lowell-style confessionalism…