After #920 by Petah Coyne
By Rebecca Seiferle
On days that suffer,
my true stature is about two and a half feet tall,
genre: Poetry
Reading our clothes,
By Rebecca Seiferle
the aggressive man
with the looks of an uncertain skinhead, asked
Patience
By Ross Gay
Call it sloth; call it sleaze;
call it bummery if you please;
I’ll call it patience;
from Totally
By Jenny Boully
The music maker is heavy. The music maker is so heavy and you have to carry it.
You have to keep it strapped to yourself forever.
Love Alone
By Laura McCullough
Who knows god as well as lovers in the park? Everyone
listens. Everyone whispers. Even the rabbi pulls his beard.
My Revenant
By Laura McCullough
After the storm, in an old hotel, I opened
the closet door only to find it was not a closet,
Ringing
By Nancy Mitchell
From the breadbasket passed for years
around your table, your wife asked us each
The Hanging Tree
By Rae Paris
Run away, or Stolen, one very likely new Virginia-born, imported from Gambia, Mundingo or Ibo country,
Blue Grass
(with Homage to Louis Zukofsky)
By Leonard Kress
The whole neighbourhood aghast—to find the tour
bus of Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys
Line Shackles 5
By Brigitte Byrd
If she sits on a green chair,
black camel on red background
pillow stitched with sun & moon
Line Shackles 2
By Brigitte Byrd
There is a hand at the end of the knife, a small hand. It is my hand.
Yard Sale, St. Patrick’s Day
By David Ebenbach
It starts out dream-like, setting up the card tables
as the sun burns the sidewalks dry, as summer comes
In Spite of His Dangling Pronoun
By Lyn Lifshin
He was really her favorite
student, dark and just
back from the army with…
Faith, Hope, Charity
By Mark Pawlak
Street corner morning,
sidewalk littered:
plastic soda bottles, candy wrappers, aluminum cans—
Good Day Sir or Madam
By Ellen Steinbaum
Mrs. Caro Hu says Hello, I know I have never met you, but my mind instincts me to do this. I believe everything happens for a reason. People change so you can learn to let go. Things go wrong so you can appreciate them when they’re right. I am a dying woman who has decided… Read more »
Smoke
By Lynne Knight
Alexander VI kept hemp fires burning
to remind himself that everything is ephemeral
Questions, 1969
By Wendy Mnookin
Huge and unembarrassed, my friend floated like a Buddha in the small pool. I drank iced tea, graded chlorine-splashed papers on The Mayor of Casterbridge. When she had her baby on a bed covered with a shower curtain, I did what I was told, sealed the placenta in a plastic bag, stashed it in the… Read more »
Unopened Whiskey and Wine
By Marc Tretin
A charcoal shadow accompanies my husband down the stairs.
He is to steady the ladder so I can change the bulb that’s set
Talking with Mr. Murray in Bruegger’s Bagel Shop
By George Drew
Discussing death is not high on our list,
not after a year of not talking at all,
Poker with Mr. Murray After His Stroke
By George Drew
Shuffling and cutting the deck, he fumbles, his fingers laggards, each follow-through a synaptic aberration, his hit you? more like hoodoo, his I raise like whoosh, his call like auk, consonants not being negotiable, vowels as soft as snowflakes. Despite the drool worming its way down the right side of his chin and the upper… Read more »
Poem for Jake
By George Drew
1972–2012 Irony the enemy unto death of truth, history his unflinching gaze, the lyrical frontal assault his arsenal: not the bird, not the song of the bird, but the beak, talons, feathers and wings of the bird. And wouldn’t you know, today I heard of his passing, today with my head buried in the slender… Read more »
The Y Chromosome
By Jeff Friedman
When my friend calls from the West Coast,
he tells me about his blurred sexuality,
How Empires Fall
By Jeff Friedman
It begins with something small: a virus hitches a ride on a copter or a few germs fling themselves into the eyes of the nurse tending the prince who drank too deeply from the fouled water of the pond; or a flea bites a rat who scurries into the hold where his brothers and sisters… Read more »
Statement of My Creative Interests
By Dawn Potter
Death, by which I mean the sudden death
of snuff bottles and weeping willow trees,
The Boys
By Margot Wizansky
They called me Maggot-the-unborn-fly
and Lanny Millman shot me with a BB gun—
Is There Anything Else I Can Help You With Today
By Kurt Brown
Records topple,
the Midwest melts, rippling through a scrim of heat
as though it were an illusion
and not reality.
The Great Molasses Flood
By Ben Berman
With Prohibition on the horizon
and the demand for rum about to take off
no one could convince the supervisor
Personal & Metaphysical Derivatives
By Christopher Buckley
sus huesos yacen caidos en el povo —Eugenio Montejo At 5, I picked up French with ease attending a parochial school my parents couldn’t really afford— le morceau de gateau! I knew a table from a window, the book on the desk from the stars in the sky—le livre sur le bureau de l’école a… Read more »
The Lacework of Coherence
By Kelly Cherry
We know so little but the little we know
we place beside a neighboring bit or byte
of information, thereby shaping knowledge
as fields of knowledge, finding correspondence
Music for Airports
By Richard Garcia
To those transfixed in the tunnel of colored lights,
to those frozen on the escalators
below constellations of candles
wreathed in the cascade of didgeridoo vibrations
and the wet clicking of tree frogs.
Flood
By Dennis Hinrichsen
Shook foil—that’s what a river is. Catfish hauled like bars
of iron
from a mid-town bridge,
the wire that holds them
Fragment: Winter Journal
By Dennis Hinrichsen
…then seizure again, that
blue clot, level
of the larynx,
can’t breathe, can’t
Sub Rosa
By Lindsay Ahl
I spent my childhood in a world of imaginary
swings, the rope lines frayed, the base a heavy board. I’d do magic
higher than tree tops, high enough for the burn
Remembering Qatar in the Robes of Spring Rain
By Jim Daniels
Here in Pittsburgh, March,
rain, days-long, relentless as sin.
Ash Wednesday
but I only have beard stubble
Autumnal
By Kathleen Hellen
One-by-one the trees undress in carcasses
of seed, scatter in cascade, in flimsy under-orange,
a negligee of red. The colors lost, caught with vine between
the tines of rile and wind. What dread in bleeding?
Psalm 107
By Eugenia Leigh
Praise you for that blanket.
Praise you for the stranger
who draped it over my mother,
The Rope
By Natasha Sajé
twisted of two
strands
that pulled us
through gardens and ditches
out of caves
Dear Fisher Cat (martes pennanti)
By Natasha Sajé
Never seen you in the flesh. I’ve seen
a cousin, martes martes, stuffed, in a shop window
in Bavaria, where they chew wiring in cars,
and martes zibellina turned
The Old Moon in the New Moon’s Arms
By Jean Monahan
The trees unravel,
plowed by a bright prow.
What’s light enough
First Death in Winter
By Jean Monahan
New snow’s made our yard a white slate,
a Winter tale written out in shorthand.
Purity
By Barry Spacks
When the new kitten chooses my lap for her nest,
when miraculously I’ve earned her trust,
I feel the way the sky might feel
to learn we see it as vastly blue.
Speeding
By Barry Spacks
In an Updike story, we feel deep trust
as the young hero dozes beside his buddy
who drives them precariously through the dark.
Advice for Aspiring Writers
By Diana Der-Hovanessian
“Try talking yourself out of it.” Richard Ford
But, of course, you can’t, or won’t.
And at night the poem persists
inserting itself into what you write
Advice for Aspiring Lovers
By Diana Der-Hovanessian
Do not wax sentimental on the first “good night”.
Never mind confessing how you feel.
Fight, fight the urge and keep it light.
Pencil Factory, Est. 1972, Blackfeet Reservation
By Diane Glancy
The message came by the carriers of doom
with books, pamphlets, primers.
They Said Hallelujah
By Diane Glancy
They said he was seated on his throne. The wounded got up from the ground. He made them whole and it happened before our eyes. We had not seen this before though the missionaries said he would. He is a God who robs his people of what they are and want to be and makes… Read more »
Subscribe for FREE!
Receive news, reviews, interviews, and more in your inbox! Plus be the first to hear about our latest issues, contests, and literary events.
You have Successfully Subscribed!