Tag: Poetry

Haunted Passages: Three Poems by Suzette Bishop

Strawberry Moon Rises We’re living in a mud house,one main room with a sink,a small galley kitchen off the one room,a bathroom somewhere, presumably.It’s handy to have the extra sinkin the main room but also strange.We have a heavy kitchen table. I look for things we might renovate,casting my eyes around and aroundthe main room,…
Haunted Passages: Four Poems by Oleg Olizev

The Fire You Fed You, with your violent inclination,shattered my stove.Now my oven of love is broken,my cranberry juice blooms across the kitchen tiles,staining the grout like evidence.You called it passion.I call it wreckage. You stuffed rice pudding into the wound,as if its sweetness could cover your crimes.Instead of making love, you used me—your hands,…
Three Original Poems by Eleanor Levine

What the Legendary Do Abbie Hoffman says “rich kids do heroin”Springsteen plays pool with my brotherBob Dylan snores at an A.A. meetingToni Morrison is a postage stampLiz Smith disparages my researchGrandpa Munster makes sexist remarksChairman Mao doesn’t brush his teethStalin kisses you in the East VillageHitler taps me at the Exxon stationJohn Goodman argues in…
Poetry for Haunted Passages: “Solitude” by Grace Lynn

This poem pushes off from a riverbank,disturbing wild geese dozing in the current and is chased by a crowd of thrashing,hollering kids. They want to hold it in sight before it goes out into the tides,in its trail an incisioninto the water. The waves like twopages rising.I walk on planks that crackunder my bones but carry themto a path that…
Side A Poetry: “The Tick Before” by Nadia Kalman

The Tick Before Before you were a fat brown tickdarkening my doorstepYou were a sad girl in a braid, in a pictureLooking out the frame for someone who would helpBut no one came. Then you had me. Others might say you are being cruelBut mom, I doubt that even Others, even youcould have predicted what…
The Future Has Poetry: “Tuesdays”‘ by R.C. Blenis

The boot descends. The wet thudof sole on skin, the small suckof leather peeling from flesh;the metronome of Mondays.Air squeezed sideways through a mouththat used to make music. The wheeze,the wet whistle, the catch between blows,pressure pressing into softness, the bodybeaten to a beat, a blood-beat drumming downto this dumb thud, this pulp, this pulse.This.…
Three Poems of Bad Survivalism: Sebastian Hunter

The Vintner I saw a lot of miracles on my descent to the gardenInnumerable rodents in crotches of carmine redstained with halos and television antennaeStand close enough and you can pick up messages for the unemployed,calls from one desolate sibling to anotherAt the base of the alder lazes the young vintner,preoccupied with “filtration” and what…
Poetry from the Future: “salamander exfil” by Dennis Hinrichsen

slept in the hostilewoke in the hostile buffalo nickel on a hard rail glooming more and morethe gesture jackals behind every door midnight moonlight with too much metal in it when will it be cowboy again? lariats of oxygenand a straight shot wordwordwordnot this crawl space antler cowering I am myself as potent as a…
New Poetry by David M. Alper: “Press 3 to Listen Again”

You have one new message. It came in at sunsetwhen the sky was a smeared fruit color. Hello. Here I am—your first language,the one you planted in the school playground,the rusty swing set, the dusk train stop. I remember your lips sometimes.When they were learning, they forgot me.How teeth molded me like freshly baked bread…