BEST OF THE NET 2023; Essay in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2018;
(cited in BAE 2015, 2016, 2020, 2022); PUSHCART poetry finalist
By Amanda Rabaduex
This is a desert scene. Imagine the cactus fever green hunger strewn across sands but we are driving 80 so Sonoran streams out the window. Morning moon shining white atop blue. Let’s call it cerulean. Imagine the eagles echo over fricative land. This is no Blood Meridian, this is a road trip pastoral where the… Read more »
By Shauna M. Morgan
Sweet Samba Bellies touch in a full orbit, a navel and hip belt a Congo sphere a corner circle a Kikongo Semba, masemba from coast to coast and we move like two eager ocean waves lapping at each other conjuring up our old and new from Soyo to Bahia and ours is not… Read more »
By Lauren WB Vermette
After the Overturn of Roe v. Wade, June 24th, 2022 New York Harbor has shoved itself inside me. Swallowed Emma Lazarus’ bronze words in reverse: I lift my lamp beside the golden door!… ..The wretched refuse of your teeming shore… …glows world-wide welcome, her mild eyes command… …Mother of exiles, from her beacon hand… Tourists… Read more »
By Meghan Sterling
with his metal legs of the walker and skin hanging like ears, his breasts like ears, what if he had his body back the body he knew in his youth shooting hoops what if he had the body that made me in the back of the Volkswagen bus in a parking lot in Oregon or… Read more »
By Tramaine Suubi
on this 10th anniversary of your grandmothers’ deaths pack a suitcase, buy a one-way ticket to the motherland to the first place you called home leave the airport, pass the city, drive into the dusk open the door to the bungalow, breathe in the dust sit on the narrow bed, tenderly lay out your dresses… Read more »
By Samuel "Sami" Miranda
sometimes we forget that the connections for the batteries on our transistor radio corroded that the songs we wanted to listen to are in our heads that we remember them and sing as our feet travel a road not meant for the tires of trucks or cars just the soles of our shoes to visit… Read more »
By Ellen June Wright
some mornings, after prayer, my mind wanders down to the darkness of the lower decks, to women packed in like dry goods upon a shelf hardly room to stretch their legs, their arms. I feel them there in the discomfort of womanhood— moon phases passing through their bodies during the long ship’s journey or pregnancy… Read more »
By Juan Pablo Mobili
The day belonged to the patrols and informants posing as early morning roosters, but the night was ours, distorted guitars bursting through cheap speakers, we were hummingbirds barely out of our cages, fearing to be arrested for the unlicensed nectar in our beaks, aware we’d be almost safe if we kept our humming to a… Read more »
By Kalani Padilla
After M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Discourse on the Logic of Language” Creole is a daughtertongue, a cousintongue but there’s an armed warden on duty inside my mouth he swings at all my sentences. What emerges is a resuscitated corpse of a lan lan l/an/guage/anguish subordinate to a main clause as if to a Luna on a… Read more »
By Arvinder Kaur Johri
If I choose to be reborn, god build this world for me: Black and brown bodies cascading across the globe with black tresses and wild eyes. A riot of power that breaks white into red and red into deep red. Trees that shed leaves on our naked bodies and sun that folds into the hollows… Read more »
By Janlori Goldman
from the Hebrew: to return, ask forgiveness, make amends A word lies buried at the bottom of the bluestone well, obscured in gurgle and murk, holds a secret and likes it that way— once this word called someplace home but it grew up abandoned and feral, scissored its own hair, with no wink back at… Read more »
By Grant Chemidlin
Little moon, little hilltop of the throat, little bloom— orchids petalled white, night-breeze like a silk dress. The queen peacock is fast asleep. Holes in the grass where crickets should be, but there are fireflies, star-flecks, a red, teeming planet. Keep it far. Keep it quiet. Keep mouth closed so the sun never rises. Light,… Read more »
By Amanda Rabaduex
-after Kelli Russell Agodon in early morning’s quiet rays murmur through the window warm lines on my thighs my skin so in love with heat I’d kiss the sun if I could how can we hold what we can’t grasp? at night in the valley winter’s silence is shunned shadows rustle last year’s leaves an… Read more »
By Samuel "Sami" Miranda
We were prepared to endure. We were prepared to endure. But kids imprisoned without their parents? But kids imprisoned without their parents? We were kids without parents, imprisoned but prepared to endure. This is a suffocating desperation, This is a suffocating desperation, trying to live crowded. trying to live crowded. This is a trying desperation,… Read more »
By Enzo Silon Surin
There is no longing for the dead, no remorse or regret of not having lived a fuller life—the Dead Sea does not wish to be ocean or river, a frozen finch perched under a tree is no more alive than the leaves that contain it. We are aware of this but are creatures of ceremony… Read more »
By Mishal Imaan Syed
Every fourth week, the floodgates unbuckle and part the sea. Blood eddies in a river dance and I find myself suddenly wildened, fifty milliliters rising to the moon’s pull. I sorrow fully, releasing my soul to the dappled pelt of the night sky. I am not with the waves, but I want to be. In… Read more »
By Shauna M. Morgan
This deep ocean of melancholy waving through me, and all the doubts and suspicions snapping like little turtle neurons, flashing bulbs of insecurity and a truth I have come to slowly accept. These are the songs you hear from my body. You stretch and press your feet against my belly, the top of the fundus… Read more »
By Christine Jones
Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room Cynthia Bargar Lily Poetry Review Books 2022, 76 pages, $18.00 “You know we are miracles, don’t you? Don’t you?/Are we? Are we?” questions the speaker in the poem “After Infinitely Polar Bear at the Coolidge Corner Cinema.” Are we worthy? Are we capable? What is the meaning of our
By Mark Walsh
What Drifted Here By Barbara Siegel Carlson Cherry Grove Press $18.00 There is an arresting moment in the middle of Kristof Kieslowski’s 1994 film, The Double Life of Veronique, where Veronique lies on her bed in the late afternoon watching what she thinks is reflected light sent into her apartment by a neighbor boy from
By Robbie Gamble
Betsy Sholl’s tenth poetry collection, As If a Song Could Save You, winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry, is published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Robbie Gamble: I’m intrigued by the genesis of book titles, and your title, As If a Song Could Save You, draws me in because it encourages different readings.… Read more »
By Kathleen Aguero
All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes by Jennifer Martelli Harbor Editions Harbor Publishing, 2023 61 pages Jennifer Martelli knows things: hidden truths she reveals through repeated images and themes in her latest book, All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes. Many of these motifs have to do with violence perpetrated against women,
By Edward Gunawan
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Clarissa Adkins
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Daniel Lawless
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Zibiquah Denny
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Brittany Adames
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Christine Jones
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Jory Mickelson
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Sara Dallmayr
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Aïcha Martine Thiam
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Jennifer Leblanc
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By George Franklin
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Dara-lyn Shrager
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By David P. Miller
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Cammy Thomas
This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.
By Carol Hobbs
Her glassy muzzle beats back the salt squall to be here. She who in her time swallowed seal cub after seal cub, sets out from Iqaluit, sprints the Arctic platform from leeward ridge to longing, dividing sea from tundra. When pack-ice grows too thin, fishermen catch her like a ghost in the trawl. She rakes… Read more »
By Sarah Browning
While America is dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, we in Black America are dealing with the 1619 pandemic. – Benjamin Crump, attorney for the family of Dijon Kizzee (1991-2020), killed by LA County police deputies, CNN, 9/23/20 Dijon Kizzee loved anything on wheels – bike, go-kart, motorcycle Family calls him Mama’s boy, broken by… Read more »
By Rasheena Fountain
I heard that It rained outside again; not that type of storm that you hear, loudly: the red reigning showers, burning pines—ap—peals, skies, a loose sieve Our tempest, long-winded— hourglass shards twisting time into silent sand mounds: Nightshades’ severe temperament Illy-oozing dystopic ether Malleable breaths betrayed Brick-and-mortar dust Yellow buzzers’ sundown I can’t breathe, We… Read more »
By Gerard Robledo
The relationship between a photograph and reality is complicated …complicated at best. – Errol Morris Offered up for discussion are two photos preserving a moment: one real, the other slightly less. When photography edged away from alchemy into science. The infamous firsts of war, an arranged image: hand-sized cannonballs like elephant shit riddling the… Read more »
By Suphil Lee Park
But there’s room for joy in the dark future growing wings. She believes this with resistance to life fading. [Believe this.] The war’s been long upon her. Is here to last. Is here to outlive the time few mattered more than passion. [The fruitless act of planting a seed in an open wound that won’t… Read more »
By Kate Allore
Waganakising, Land of the Crooked Tree. Calm is your color. Chartreuse kernels perch atop blades of Little Bluestem, they pirouette. Ancestors sing out with color soaked hymns; paint my heart with sadness, yet calm. Spotted Fawn explores the pristine waters of Wycamp Creek — bearin witness to the memory of ebony cloaked strangers, white around… Read more »
By Partridge Boswell
verb; untangle or unravel something; confuse or complicate (a question or situation); noun: a tangle, cluster or knot Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down. —Toni Morrison Here, it’s day. There, another sleepless vigil of a fraying burqa. By the time these billowy clouds reach the Hindu Kush,… Read more »
By Mary Buchinger
It was a book of manners she handed me a closed book I failed to open a book I could hit her with No never would even think to do that so deep inside those many pages words chewed-up digested ʌð The way of teeth those curved rows that meet and grind mother and child… Read more »
By Jed Myers
Down through a forested gouge in the earth, we took the trail under tall firs and cedars toward our secret lookout. We wanted to take in the distances over our inland sea. Off that water an icy wind infiltrated our slice of woods—old conifers shifted, moaned like live sirens. Ferns thrived on those moss-curtained towers—countless… Read more »
By Donna Spruijt-Metz
—after Psalm 105 lines 28-33 Flower-thin darkness came down around you, genius of things that fit into things—my ghost child fit fish into water, blood into fish, pale into blue. Flower-thin darkness came down around you, crowding things into your hungry heart until you crowded yourself out. Frictioning leafless and wild, flower-thin darkness came down… Read more »
By Tamako Takamatsu
When the waters have finally receded, night falls. None of them are used to such darkness (……………Obsidian……………) so black they cannot see their hands before their tear-stained faces. None of them have ever been without human light, without electrons, miraculously harnessed, without the power of the universe to obliterate ancient shadows. (……………The extraordinary dedication of… Read more »
By Nissa Valdez
in fifth grade I realized salvation wasn’t for me I didn’t think I’d make the cut and what did it really mean to be saved from something I’m not sure what and Catholic school had taught me all it really could plus my dad was about to be ordained a deacon and I figured that… Read more »
By Quintin Collins
To measure humanity’s purpose in hunger and funerals, count divots in the bark of an oak tree. The voids collect raindrops, nestle the beetle and the worm. In the hollows that litter our peripheral vision, measure humanity as the depth of a stomach or the depth of a grave. I want to believe everything tossed… Read more »
By Quintin Collins
I try to reinvent you. A white gravestone in a field of white gravestones: I conjure this image instead of you. When you died, I was asked to write an elegy for the funeral. I didn’t know how to make you from the blank page, another cavity for the body you inhabited to fill. Even… Read more » Receive news, reviews, interviews, and more in your inbox! Plus be the first to hear about our latest issues, contests, and events.
What Drifted Here By Barbara Siegel Carlson
Five Questions for Betsy Sholl
All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes by Jennifer Martelli
Speaking of Love 谈情说爱
Cold Turnpikes
I’m Sorry I’ve Shut You Out &
Poem Against the Rich
War Torn History
Mangu
Wading
Self-Portrait of a Boy Pretending to Be a Boy
Renunciation of Death
I HAVE COME TO RESCUE YOU
Many Jagged Stones
The Angel and the Philosopher
Narrow Valley
The Bones
Burn My Fear
Polar Bear
Dijon Kizzee Loved Anything on Wheels
Not An “Other” Climate Poem
The Valley of the Shadow of Death (Photography, 1855)
There’s No Flower in War
Calm is Your Color
Ravel
Motheren
On the Day of a Distant Invasion
Ghost Triolet
Starlight
childhood punctuated
Terror Management Theory
Elegy as a Room for My Dead
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