Poetry Archives - Solstice Literary Magazine

Dos Generaciones / Two Generations

By Samuel "Sami" Miranda

The jibaro builds his home on a mountainside the flamboyan adds its red to the view. The spaces between the slats allow the music of the pitirre’s call to enter the home and adds to the quiquiriqui of the rooster that struts his ownership of morning. The jibaro walks the mountain sees that it is

Desire

By Valerie Smith

the sunflower aches her long neck under duress of a blue roof’s eave her seed draws evening’s edge thin lines of black and white pinstripe yearn for unity. wine poured out burns closer to the stem’s sacrifice. roots, unmentionable. deep seeking. whole as the hovered sea carried in. currents pull color in bright directions. cool… Read more »

Agape

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 »

Sweet Samba

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 »

I Dream I Am The Statue Of Liberty

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 »

What If My Father Not My Father

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 »

swan songs

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 »

Don Hipolito

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 »

My Mind Wanders Down to the Darkness

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 »

Intimacy Among Young Men

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 »

[Creole is a daughtertongue, a cousintongue]

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 »

Black Tresses and Wild Eyes

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 »

Teshuvah

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 »

Gay Voice

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 »

“the secret is that the world loves you” waltz

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 »

Living Without Suffocating

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 »

There Are No Lessons for the Dead

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 »

ghazal to the moon

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 »

Bequest

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 »

Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room by Cynthia Bargar

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

What Drifted Here By Barbara Siegel Carlson

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

Five Questions for Betsy Sholl

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 »

All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes by Jennifer Martelli

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,