Poetry – Page 54 – Heavy Feather Review

Brad Rose: Two Poems

In Media Res Everything on this planet fails fails in the middle even death your life is death’s failure but it’s not too late you can rescue death you can go to death’s school, learn death’s lessons don’t worry study look, already you are between floors, a mezzanine you’re almost nothing inside you, there is…

Ryan Bollenbach: Two Poems

sometimes the word for tender isn’t tender there is a knife in the dishrack, sharp, facing the open kitchen. i take the blade in my palm. a hawk claws inside a river. i feel buzzing in the wetness of skin, a bright lamp near death. wrap a clean body in a blanket, tuck fibers into…

Two Poems by Kailey Alyssa

palisades i shed light like dampness to bloodmouth or cotton arches— that is to say, i like it when my belly stretches & holds in wind undone for the desert; how fingers hook edges of bra clasp how dicks harden under cotton bolded like a cliff but it’s too late— we roll back to standing…

“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…

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…

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