Tag: Poetry

Joe Rupprecht: “dear nebula,” a poem for Bad Survivalist

1. swarms milk the sky’s geometry our imaginary cocoonsembrace dead pupassocketed with smallpearlescent eyes the dark spits a gnatfrom my whole floating panorama asmoths flapinterludes ofloving you the way they hurt meis on my mind all the time I was in their hands for playing witha show of forceenough to wantto leave myself and say…
Three Poems by Lisandra Perez

How to Be Happy Consider this: buy a straw hat (maybe two), toss a bag over your shoulder,and walk west where dusk settles on mountains that become line drawings.Move to Montana where sweat beams multiply as hands massage tomatoseeds into the dirt. Gently push the hair from your face. Consider a ponytail and walk west…
“Lessons Unlearned”: A Bad Survivalist Poem by Colby McAdams

It’s true, in order to stay relevantI try to learn one new skill every yearNaturally, I must forget one too. My memory, lacking resonance, picked-over and ebbing. I was a reader one spring, and a writer the next,Then suddenly I (blissfully) wasn’t either. I’m telling you, for years, ducking in and out of traffic,struggling towardsa…
Six Flavor Town USA Poems by Eddie Kim

Untitled(With Final Line from Roethke) An elegant and corpulent diner in Costco sweatsis dancing at this buffet—the way chopsticks can place piecesof amaebi in a mouth while pinching offtheir tails … The choir of heads keeps watch from a separate plate.The docking is smooth, decisive. Like a figure skater in practicehitting all the jumps. A…
Two Haunted Passages Poems by Adam Strauss

Stylus Harbinger of what’s to come and what’s coming pure shitty.Peerless ditty at the end of JuneWhen the swans are all out biting, when the sessions on PlatonicThought break out in hives we could have dusted.No-one ever trustedThe gramophone because it had a ticFor only playing the truth, and the truth like carapaces strewnAcross a…
“A Glinting Sliver That Can Cut Flesh”: A Collaborative Interview with Peter Ramos & Kim Chinquee

Kim Chinquee’s SNOWDOG and Peter Ramos’ Lord Baltimore are both due out on January 15, 2021, with Ravenna Press. Chinquee and Ramos are English Department colleagues at SUNY-Buffalo State. Chinquee is the author of seven collections, most recently SNOWDOG, due out in January 2021 with Ravenna Press. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and…
“Requiem: Fin Inn,” a Flavor Town USA poem by Avery Gregurich

for M.T. Let’s debate ovals, acoustics, the moral virtues ofcurveballs. We’ll do it loud, live, staggering atopthe trusses of the river bridge. We’ll poke our facesin front of the lights off the dam for effect. A sunfloweron the shore will serve as moderator. First we’ll finish thesefrog legs, but I’ll give you cheap smokes, sure,…
Bad Survivalist: “On Catfish,” a poem by Ryan Keeney

At nine, Dad taught me how to gut a catfish. Thick-skulled, even out of water they are survivors, known to flop and thrash for hours before succumbing to suffocation. If catfish could speak what kind of wretched pleas would drift from their cavernous mouths? The first step: nail the catfish to a board. The nail…
Three Haunted Passages Poems by Sheila Dong

fruit i adopt a cat from the shelter,then forget it in a box.the way it stareswhen i remember. the wayits head rolls off,a softened apple. noblood or rot.just another donation.on the night bus i feelsick so i get offtwo stops early to walkin the light-lack, touchingchainlink and weeds. thingsfall from branchesand roll toward me.the bus…