Category: Poetry

Side A Poem: “Preservations below the Moon” by Salvatore Difalco

Preservations below the Moon “We belong to the earth.”That’s the mushrooms talking.Someone else is sobbing in the shadows,hiding behind piano fingers. “I need to go home.”It ain’t happening, mate.You drove us into a treeand all the colors clashed. Let me tip you overand see if you can roll up again.It’s not winter yet.That explains the…
Side A Prose Poem by Jeffrey Hermann: “Someone’s Making Money Off My Old Problems, Someone Else Is Charging Me for New Ones”

When I call to make a fuss everyone claims to be a manager. Writing for a living is as easy as throwing up in the toilet. Every morning I flip the lid and wait. I once wrote an essay that needed no revisions. The theme was, c’mon, this life? Look harder. Try harder. My skeleton…
Joe Milazzo: Four Poems from Plain Language

Plain Language The path by which you entered is barred to you. Grazed by a low eye, scarps of oak bark lump in a lunar mantle. My frailty catches a dagger in the engineering of any leaf. My deficit narrative is an egg-hauling ant. Oleo has its boons but, meanwhile, few of them are molten.…
Side A Poem: “Levelland” by Kirk Keen

Levelland we impose stark beauty potluck of words to shut your mouth realign velocities our open mouths bless your heart pull up a chair here for your smart phone cotton hoe social media whatever let’s explode the sun everyday cash in on methodist hands warbling poetics of hearing nothing my first day i hold my…
New Translations by Kit Schluter: Three Poems by bruno darío

Great Expectations To encompass is to stroke the void, that subtle material.The heart fits into the physics of thingswhen we celebrate continuity between dimensions. Invasive imagery stalks my narration. Perception is an ally, and it lends structure;let’s try to unwrap experience and bring it sensitively out of focus,rendering it unclassifiable. Keep me company.You imagined it…
Poetry from the Future: Donna Stonecipher Translates New Work by Friederike Mayröcker, “14.6.14”

“Deinzendorf was a holy communion wafer that I placed every day on my sm. tongue, the bushes rustled in the morning breeze the branches of the cherry trees bloomed through the window the mulberry trees bled at my feet which were bare &c., the moon shone into the little room …….. was she going to…
The Future Has Poetry: Excerpts from Thresholds by Benjamin Renné

Come. Wander with me awhile among the ruins. —Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton which reminds me of a dream, our future: bills were due and I was adding up expenses on stone tablets rough chisel in one hand calculator in the other you had just come in carrying a bag of groceries, chalk full…
Side A Prose Poem: “Peonies” by Tiffany Troy

Peonies The chiaroscuro of my breasts hanging from my nightgown under the lamp light. His voice soothes as buds take root over my skin in droves. The buttons undone, I open the hem of the dress to my waist, as I take in the day’s sweat and decay. I detach parts of myself as he…
Side A Poem by YF Wang: “Love, There Is a Snake in Your Closet”

I think of you with tapeworms in my tummy, like Medusa had stuck her head through my vagina & at seventeen, Ella tells me she thinks she might be pregnant—“My mother is going to kill me”—she says over the bathroom sink, our skins tattooed by the mirror graffiti. A familiar tune rings out the Wellesley…