Poetry Archives - Page 3 of 14 - Solstice Literary Magazine

Reading Moby Dick on the Farm

By David Kann

But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. —Moby Dick I’m sitting by the pond where

Hard Times Require Furious Laughter

By Chantel Massey

After Alice Walker Glory! Glory! Glory! when Breonna Taylor did not walk back out of her apartment, i found refuge in instagram thread of videos where Black people are full of joy. come, let me show you a sanctuary made of deep dimples and gummed smiles.in the first video, i remember the forgotten humanity in… Read more »

When Kali Runs in Your Veins

By Ashley Somwaru

Her body shaking, she raises her ankle up to her waist, palm up palm down, arms vibrating bangles to the elbow. This bank teller turned devi who swallows flames, takes the soot from her mouth and rubs it into foreheads. Sticking her blackened tongue out, she’ll start searching for men to gather at her feet.… Read more »

cal·li·pyg·i·an

By Rex Carey Arrasmith

I like to watch my nephew walk in crowded airport terminals, outdoor shopping malls, movie theater lobbies. He’s unaware of the stares he gets as he passes by butch boys, garish girls, libidinous couples. Seventeen and unconcerned with open admiration, open desire, he doesn’t seem to see what I can’t miss; and I miss it—those… Read more »

Safe Word: Citizen

By Andreea Ceplinschi

we tremble through the metal detector – Go ahead! Go ahead! Go ahead! Go ahead! Go ahead! bouncing off polished stone named after dead presidents, shoes & wallets & black plastic tubs, histories scanned for threat down the conveyor belt, Vietnamese woman shakes so hard her legs won’t work, we go ahead with our bodies… Read more »

The Demise of Bonnie & Clyde

By Deborah DeNicola

–after the 1967 Arthur Penn film Their penance—not yet exacted— Warm wind, from the open windows of the pulled-over canary-yellow Model A Ford. Clyde flipping the radio dial. Static. Insects. Chirping. His shit-eating smile. Silence sparking through sunlight— but for a rush of starlings entrained with the dapple-lit couple as if—like the fiddlers and… Read more »

If I Could Trace Again the Honed, Flat-End Blade

By Justin Hunt

of my pickaxe, the arc it formed at the crossing you and I were sent to fix—the road cratered on both sides of the tracks, wallowed out by trucks loaded with wheat— if I could follow my pick’s shadow slicing toward your shadow— dark and wild, gathering weight and speed in the bright June air—and… Read more »

Punk Rock Aphrodite

By Elizabeth Mercurio

I The client fights his gag begs me to stop. He’s forgotten his word the one he chose. I never had a word. His agony blooms & sweetens like a four o’clock flower. Another afternoon of violence more cries of never-enough. II The tree outside my window leans left, shaped by the wind of… Read more »

October

By Tim Suermondt

The men mow the grass in the small park, the morning sun fanning out like a large searchlight. I sit at my desk and mow down an entire poem, nothing to save no matter how diligent the effort.

Approaching Zeal: A Run-On Abecedarian

By Pamela Wax

Alacrity—not my middle name— boldly lays siege, item by item, to a miasmic to-do catalog approaching zeal. That’s someone else’s doppelgänger, not mine. I’m more easy-going (except when I’m not), a laissez- faire drop-by-whenever, give-what-you-can kind of gal, list-less. However you slice it, whatever its name, I gave up on musts and have-to’s just after… Read more »

Baltimore Orioles

By Lyndsey Kelly Weiner

When asked the date of their return in spring, google provides baseball timetables. In a May snowstorm, a male grasps the tine of the hummingbird feeder with prehistoric feet. His wife, yellow-chested to his orange, builds her pouch of a nest in a high tree, ejecting eggs of parasitic cowbirds. In spring twenty years ago,… Read more »

Two Who Are Mostly Good

By Alexis V. Jackson

What does one do to protest when one is Black and woman in city sandy white and military and lonely? My lover, like Yahweh, is prone to the hyperbolic— never leaving nor forsaking, his anger always just and provoked. But he is numb and unmoved this lynching season. I am unsure of my capacity to… Read more »

Slideshow: My Father’s Faith

By John F. Buckley

A Nativity scene carved in granite. ** The bullfrog swells, pauses, holds his song like a brass paten beneath white jowls. ** This penny on the sidewalk you can never pick up, no matter how long you let your nails grow. Could be a fluke of gravity, could be glue, could be a magic intended… Read more »

After Sabbath

By Meira Kerr-Jarrett

I look through the water into the sink’s belly at the leftovers from lunch: chicken necks, fat, and skin. Yesterday, I stood in front of the mirror, touched my neck, wondered where the slit would be if I was in the slaughterhouse, tracing my veins as steam filled my throat. I am thin, my neck… Read more »

Swarm

By Kent Leatham

the first time I got stung by a swarm of I was going to say hornets but they’re not I know what a hornet is compared to a bee but I’m not entirely sure if a hornet is the same as a wasp I suppose I could look it up but anyway these were yellowjackets… Read more »

when she died

By Lilian Caylee Wang

when she died, i might have been eating churros out of a white paper bag licking the cinnamon sugar crumbs from my fingers and the corners of my cherry mouth, she called it or i might have been sitting in front of our family computer listening to a song about nightswimming or stolen hearts and … Read more »

Braided

By Oak Morse

Let’s untwist to 2003: My aunt slams a pair of size fourteen Skechers at my feet. They are large and lumpy like the Appalachian Mountains Boy, you betta wear these shoes I bought you. You can’t be worrying about what people say at that school about your feet looking big. Betta man up! Now swing… Read more »

Blueprints

By Suphil Lee Park

From the Styx memory foam a girl stems, fumbling to get why in the coil of what. Every what twisting for its scaled tail. From Thetis’s wedding to gravity’s threshold, the girl travels, the world unhinged like a door drowning in its frame. Snakes skinned alive too learn their bodies to be cartographic loops. Apple,… Read more »

Rome, in Hindsights

By Suphil Lee Park

of a bed birthmarked with espresso spills & stairs stacked up like well-thumbed field books & taxis straying out of traffic takes over the longer night ahead where you’re carried into his bedroom & placed like a finger in another woman where earthworms drown on your watch & a courtyard David lifts the blade of… Read more »

Interview featuring girl in hanbok

By Gary Jackson

I didn’t like a lotta shit going on you know daddy was an alcoholic all his buddies still remember me cause I be in the joints while he was drinking shooting craps or whatever they doing daddy just wanna boy all them Korean costumes are boys’ costumes in them pictures Like… Read more »

The Invincible Woman goes viral

By Gary Jackson

You’re walking downtown, thinking maybe you do miss the costume, the stupid codename, the old headquarters-turned-Bank of America, when the white guy bumps into the woman in front of you, and is off with her purse. You give chase, of course. It’s easy enough to catch him and pin him against the wall / punch… Read more »

Elegy for Little Richard

By Steven Cramer

Satori can surge upon you on the subway, lectured Dr. Tufail in Intro Zen. The mire gives us the very substance of art, goes Lorca’s Play and Theory of the Duende. A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom, reflected Little Richard in a Macon Greyhound terminal’s greasy spoon, up to his biceps in Georgia suds, boss- man piling on pot atop… Read more »

Making Out on a Hill Overlooking the Hudson

By Patrick Rosal

Above the boulevards of sweat where the kids are gathering again at the back of a public bus to plan the resurrection of laughter an old woman on a bench slides both pink shoes off her feet at the beginning of spring so she can sit a while longer and look at… Read more »

The Hanged Ghost

By Patrick Rosal

for my great uncles Mamerto, Nicasio, Prudenci Llanes who were hanged by the U.S. military for their armed resistance against the American occupation of the Philippines Who am I? I slide my body Into your body all my weight yours I even place the gnawed peach pits of my ankles into… Read more »

Where the Ocean Ends

By Patrick Rosal

I don’t know how I feel about so many masters painting me that stupid blue and calm as if I were not all salt fish shit and whale scum Doldrums Lunar collaborations Tradewinds and crosscurrents In your language when you say titanic colossal to grasp my vastness so do you measure my… Read more »

Slipshape

By Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

A golden shovel after Suheir Hammad A hummingbird lavishes the lilac on the first morning I am by myself and the open window ushers in decanted perfume, sea, rain on the brink of falling. What slipshape prayers a woman must make of her body. To write my way out of the stories of war… Read more »

Absent from the Body

By Cedric Tillman

The officer is kneeling on a man’s neck with the full weight of functional eardrums. When the audience begs for mercy, when he knows it is thoroughly engrossed, he shifts his weight a little, for effect, makes eye contact and holds it— what command he displays of this inheritance. Note the capacity for illusion, how… Read more »

The Fish and the Refugee Camp

By Mosab Abu Toha

To Ziad Khaddash I If you see me drowning, do not throw me a life buoy. Throw me a fish. She swims better than me. II If I see a fish drowning on the seashore, I won’t put her back in the water. We will go together to a vegan restaurant. She’ll have… Read more »

We Are Looking for Palestine

By Mosab Abu Toha

The sun rises and moves around. It sets to visit other places. And we, we are looking for Palestine. The birds wake up and look for food. They chirp on the blossoming trees, laden with fruit, with peaches, apples, apricots, and oranges. And we, we are looking for Palestine. The sea waves lap against the… Read more »

planting seeds and tasting flowers during the end of days

By Kai Coggin

we plant seeds in the rain today a slow drizzle falling on our faces as we bend over the little herb garden bed we share a pair of green knee pads both wearing one on our right leg like the uniform of some rogue gardening gang the rain beads on our slick jackets as we… Read more »

Interview

By A.R. Dugan