genre: Poetry
The Nightmare Touched Its Forehead to My Lips
By Andrés Cerpa
This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.
After Life in Two Parts
By Casey Zella Andrews
in purgatory there are only beds with blue sheets no, the walls are white the bathroom floors, red tile, water slick. in purgatory. you are watching. close your eyes. there is nothing you can do. there is always something you can do. no the walls are white, the bathroom floors red. tile water… Read more »
How Far, How Far
By Elena Croitoru
Our train moved faster until our country was a blue fold in the horizon. Passengers remained still as our carriage fell off the dining table. You smiled with lips that had dried as you queued in the snow for monthly rations. That day, you brought back the carcass of a bird, laid it on the… Read more »
Cachexia of Time
By Annaliese Jakimides
His heart punched me. Now, not just the random heart strokes that everyone else is talking about or was talking about yesterday but the infinitesimal strokes that are what I most held onto after his last breath. I cannot begin to tell you the last breath—deep gutted scent of what couldn’t be eaten. He so… Read more »
Nostalgia
By Judith Terzi
Like I’m waiting for kismet. Maktoub. Waiting for a number, a letter––cryptic for stage, grade. How many nodes did she twist away? How many, how many… Tell me to focus on healing. Friends bring guavas, mini pumpkins, t-shirts, pens, soup. The house is a garden: five white orchids, purple tulips, yellow roses, irises. Red bromeliad… Read more »
The Drowning House
By John Sibley Williams
The rain is a hood pulled over the world. Our neighbor’s house, vanishes. & its windows through which we watch things undress. The plastic deer neck-bent as if chewing up the lawn go the way of other deer, of the wolves, the arroyo turned creek again. & beyond… Read more »
Citizens
By Latorial Faison
circa January 20, 2009 Some were perched on the limbs Of D.C. trees to get a glimpse of it, History being made, once again, In the middle of so much black & white, To hear Aretha spin her rhythm with Our blues into a hymn where hymns Had never been made, up close. All… Read more »
Envisioning the Life, Post-Parole, of my Father’s Murderer
By Richard Michelson
Rainbows exist, the nurse explains, not in the troposphere, but only on the viewer’s retina. Then, staring at her iPhone as if it housed time, or regret, she excuses herself. Alone till my pupils dilate and the doctor arrives, I have leisure to ponder how doubt can enter the eye socket of the body… Read more »
Envoi : at the Five Spot Café
By M. G. Stephens
Visions of Thelonious Sphere Monk at The club piano, playing “Monk’s Dream” Or “Green Chimneys” or “Well You Needn’t,” Man oh man, those were great nights to be there When the musical genius in the fedora Showed up four hours after he was due to play, But none of the customers seemed to mind… Read more »
Abecedarian
By Judith Terzi
Lines in italics were pronounced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a speech outlining U.S. demands for a new Iran nuclear accord. America is sort of tripping down the alphabet. B for balk, ban, bigotry, bully. C for Children separated from their parents, moms & Dads detained, demonized, deported. Expired visa sole crime of… Read more »
The Gospel According to Here
By John Sibley Williams
Where the edges of homes run together an incision of alley just wide enough for bodies to pass without scraping the paint off the bricks. A flowerless plot of raised earth meant for greener things. If those are strays praying wildly with their teeth, it’s not to the moon. I don’t think we’d recognize that… Read more »
The Complication of Multiple Lives
By Jennifer Boyden
My father is in bed half a country away telling my mom how to make chicken from the sun. His cancer opens a shadow hand in his brain and where it darkens, the world slides sideways. He looks through the window by his bed into the 1940s. He thinks it’s TV and he tells me… Read more »
Crushed
By Quintin Collins
Toine has a new stereo. Mystikal grumbles “Shake ya ass, but watch yo self. Shake ya ass” into the street. A squirrel crushed by a car, baking on the pavement— you have a stick in hand to prod the roadkill, but Chris passes grayscale porn printouts, hot sauce stained. You can’t see much because of… Read more »
Poem for a Blue Page
By Sofia Herzog
who would have known the brick the nostril i ask you cheek-to-cheek my my, much and much to be this thread to follow my shatterings but it is… lovely so lovely aren’t we? which is appendix and for enough not true of forearm handles/hammers. do not confuse lashes wet for frame of mind’s eye or… Read more »
Young Monk
By Marcus Jackson
I knew a boy named Shaun whose mother loved successive men that charmed and tortured her. One day in ninth grade Shaun brought a luminous hunting knife to lunch and put it near the throat of the dean, who had always seemed the wryest, most unmovable force as he supervised and distrusted us for no… Read more »
A Type of Crying
By Marcus Jackson
You can cry quite long in a diner without much interruption, assuming the diner is only moderately populated, the décor is outdated and immaculate, and you are capable of the type of crying during which tears do not disrupt your posture. You must hold inside a muscular sorrow and a sense of endurance for torture… Read more »
My Aloe
By Elizabeth Lara
this morning I woke up spiny and sharp-tongued turned my eyes towards the sun some things are born this way long slice down the midsection where I am cut, the living gel pours out glutinous after the night has gone, persistence of dreams think of a mirror memory of a mirror slippery as mercury, a… Read more »
Retreat
By Kamilah Aisha Moon
Flooded with off-key carousel music days careen by, dizzying thoughts, meaning more blown out than a famous self-taught trumpeter’s cheeks. Patted down & packed into shrinking seats, I feel myself ballooning into less. Flew away yet took it all with me, on fire doused in northwest tranquility. Obscured by clouds in the brain, I knew… Read more »
Windows
By Kamilah Aisha Moon
Deflowered dreams thin the air on a gorgeous day & peace becomes an iridescent thing, flitting at the corners of your eyes, darting by indecipherable. A pair of ginkgoes’ finery blares gold as they shed, flared arms reach toward things long buried, tapping kegs of tears that today’s young already understand root, volume & salty… Read more »
Poem Inspired by the Historian with the Loud Laugh
By Alison Stone
The therapist urges, Feel everything. Don’t make an ordeal about everything. Love takes off our layers. Kept promises and sustained tenderness peel everything. We had a democracy, a middle class. Will the one percent steal everything? The weak suffer from our violent hungers. In the butchered pig’s last squeal, everything. My cat grown blind and… Read more »
Super Grover
By Connemara Wadsworth
I stitched the Halloween costume my son chose, its blue cape heralding an orange capital G, a bobble-nosed mask. He didn’t like each fitting but new blue jammies were fine. All dressed, he revealed the child he was— standing still, waiting, his look expectant, began to melt away. Had I left in a pin, was… Read more »
West County Saint Louis
By James Bradley Wells
Stealing glances at the glowering clockface, Wednesday afternoon, the workweek’s foreboding balance sheet. The liabilities are quarts of good intentions rotting on the vine. Beading assets are teaspoonfuls of quicksilver. Quarts and teaspoons are inscrutable units. Meaning-well carries Happy Hour arguments in favor of ascending out of the red. Unventured ventures worm into old wounds… Read more »
Miniature
By James Bradley Wells
Was I so small and contained, small to together with younger sister Julie, contained to swim, sunlit, shore to shore, across the ocean of a washtub filled with water? Swimsuits, summer trips to Thayer Missouri, grandparents’ farmhouse, from the picnic table, mother and father cackle. Adulthood and its ulterior motives, I tried very hard to… Read more »
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