Category: Poetry

Two Poems by Rob Cook

My Bugs O daddy long legs in the orchids and wisteria, how you make my cock-cells swell! O caterpillar cubs folded in the fern petals, you are lovely as shoulders tied with ribbons and valentine nettles! That’s what she slipped into my ear when I told her my life was ruined by insects. “They said…
Two Poems by Jeremy Griffin

Pink Hibiscus You buried the hibiscus in the swath of untended earthwhere each summer morningthe mangy calicowho suns itself on the sidewalkshits and then kicks it overwith sand as if it’s even possibleto disguise what we leavebehind. You aerated the crumbled earthwith the shovel blade, churned itover on itself like the tracks of deadskin carved…
Three Poems by Phil Spotswood

growing up on TR84 You are shown a series of pictures by the visiting Earthmen: a blank crucifix, a doll with a missing eye, and a sunset bleeding in the ocean. The crucifix and the doll mean nothing to you, for they are products of a life sprung from the bones of an elephant graveyard.…
Three Poems by b.g. thomas

big black wall a black woman must not ever assume that a smile means anything other than/ she is being sized up by the other/ to see where she stands/ how strong she might be/ what her heart might be made of/ that’s only if the other is accepting that black people are indeed…
Three Poems by David Welper

Reversals When I was a kid, my sister helped me button my shirts. We’d stand in front of a full-length mirror and I’d try to figure it out. Try to figure out mirror images. That’s really what she was teaching me. To look at myself. “What you see in the mirror is kinda the reverse…
Five Poems by Wren Hanks

My Binder is a Thundershirt ™ I need something stiff to breathe against like He-Man’s armor. Like the anti-anxiety jacket I velcroed around shaking terriers when I was a dog walker. Back then I zipped my hoodie to my neck. I wore Doc Martens & got muscle-skinny, riding the subway in giant headphones and licking…
“it speak(s),” a poem by Bryan Byrdlong

1. my fellow Americans we all float here, in this milleu in this atmosphere. In DIS gravity be a wishing well a penny for your thoughts and desires to come true, the American dream, but lately I’ve heard talk of an American fear. And so, we are gathered…
Poetry: Erika Luckert’s “Sonnet in case of disaster”

Put as many books as possible between you and the blast put as many bricks as possible as many walls as books between you and the blast will be big enough to breach as many bricks as this building has, its walls lined with books and those books lined with line after line will you…
Four Poems by Rachel Ann Brickner

Harvest Frame Inside the picture I felt a little lovable like a little kid version of myself again—adored and adoring, doting and doted—and I thought how lovely it is to be a picture, to stand still amidst fixed elements—a flower just gone to seed, my lover’s hand forever in my grasp, the child growing inside…