BEST OF THE NET 2023; Essay in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2018;
(cited in BAE 2015, 2016, 2020, 2022); PUSHCART poetry finalist
By Glenn Morazzini
On his stomach, head to one side, where the land is too far, sea too near. My child slept like that under a white cotton blanket, in her crib. I’d stay near. Sometimes, I’d place a finger under her nose to check for breathing. How’s that for near? This child. Mediterranean blue waves for blankets,… Read more »
By Bonita Lee Penn
is all that is seen / piano keys dance / click and clack / kick, slides cross empty palms / snap of heels on concrete stairs / ledge unsteady as hot wind hurries through a field / cane field / flames chase / sweet douse of tears that stopped crawling out lids / wet love… Read more »
By Celeste Schantz
En Plein Air, Summer Beyond these muggy river catacombs in afternoon another mother sinks down in despair: Spill over, spill over Now my only son is gone She howls down phantoms from the sultry air. On moss-wet stone two little girls are watching; the vapor chills; heat hovers like a prayer as something plummets deep… Read more »
By Lee Sharkey
The thief has stolen the water from under the village. He flees, holding it in his arms. The land is parched As a hand gathers eggs from the nest, the rich have gathered all the earth. No bird opens its wing The land idolator builds his house in our orchard. He’s in love with his… Read more »
By Ellen Hagan
after Nikky Finney Be reckless when it matters most. Messy incomplete. Belly laugh. Languish language. Be butterfly stroke in a pool of freestylers. Fast & loose. You don’t need all the right moves all the time. You just need limbs wild. Be equator. Lava. Ocean floor, the neon of plankton. Be unexpected. The rope they… Read more »
By Ellen Hagan
& somehow the name fits. My daughters with full on beaks basking & flaunting on their walk/jaunt to school. First day flitting & flirting in April’s early sunshine. Each step, a float from bodega to BX36 bus stop. Their arms as wings, hailing & Miriam, who caws, Morning, in a baritone. So the driver says, Hey there… Read more »
By Ellen Hagan
Ok, fine she didn’t say shut up but she might as well have. Her mouth a small pyre exploding. Be quiet she said & stop talking. All they’re saying is their names back-and-forth. Anyway. Celi. Miri. Celi. Miri. Be quiet & it truly takes all that’s inside me to not become tornado. Nor’easter. The eye… Read more »
By Ellen Hagan
Chris “Ludacris” Bridges Usher, “Yeah!” Nah. In the streets, watch me spit, suck, stuff, scrawl, loop, lilt, launch, lick— out loud. Do deep squats at stoplights, and grind it loose while leaning at the bus stop. I don’t stop. Ride the pole on the A train, up & down, don’t give a thousand shits. You… Read more »
By Iain Haley Pollock
We gunned each other down, gunned each other down in the street, abandoned each other unburied. Later, those left bearing the palls burned to show their love. Burned to light our streets with the dying asterisms of their rage. And we watched until our watching made of them a carnival: He, the twirling fire-spitter.… Read more »
By Dzvinia Orlowsky
Hope was a thing with pink feathers circling Olympic ice. Despite her tender years, a woman of great composure. Circling Olympic ice for gold, Ukraine! We could hardly believe our ears: This woman of great composure, triple Lutz-flip-loop world premiere. Ukraine! (We could hardly believe our ears) representing the once orphaned and lost… With… Read more »
By Kathleen Aguero
Ninety-six, my father floats in a fearful dream, rises outside his body, but he’s stuck in the living room, which appears tilted at a surreal angle, ceiling fan coming out of a wall. Float somewhere nicer, my sister suggests. Havana, Athens, Cairo, places he traveled as a younger man, extra pages stapled into his… Read more »
By Robbie Gamble
Dubiously framed as third-world proverb, dusted off and paraded as realpolitik but consider: my new-found friend (or second-generation enemy)— what if he has an enemy, do I watch my back doubly, or trust my new friend to keep a newer enemy at bay? And in such a hostile world where enemies and pseudo-friends line… Read more »
By María Luisa Arroyo
her ebony hair to her knees hid her twisted young spine & limp love to him her coconut sweat her sweet bread her whispers of his given name ay, gerónimo every time he wrote her songs by lantern light in bed every dawn his kiss still on her lips the machete’s glint gone ten… Read more »
By Artress Bethany White
In the middle of my lecture on antebellum plantation life abolition Lydia Maria Child and William Lloyd Garrison pronged slave collars hung with iron Christmas bells ringing and Kara Walker’s oeuvre a recasting of slavery for the next generation I finally vocalize a question I’ve suppressed while binge-watching episodes of Say Yes to… Read more »
By Joanna Solfrian
Everything welcomes you—thorny lizards, the West Indian keeper of fighting cocks, the fog caught in the throat of the valley. They step towards you, or drift like airy continents, for they know you are a conjurer of seeds, of balances, and of the wind that shepherds them both. Your lithe form cuts the sea… Read more »
By Barbara Siegel Carlson
It’s as if each morning were a pool into which I have been lowered. Or I dove in and now sit on my blue sofa at the bottom of the sky, swathed in a milky substance amid the trilling of crickets. A few minutes ago my husband clinked his spoon to his cereal bowl,… Read more »
By Félix Morisseau-Leroy
That little box you see on the windowsill
is keeping my ashes
after my body’s been burned
By Elisabeth Schmeidel
– Where do you want to go?
– I don’t know.
– When will you come back?
By Srečko Kosovel
Moonlight bathes the Karst trails,
the shredded fields, the junipers between the rocks,
my soul all shaken weeps,
wounded as if from sharp dew.
By Srečko Kosovel
O, I don’t care what you are,
I don’t ask about your ways,
nor where you’ve gone, where you’ve been,
whether you’ve killed, or you’ve sinned.
By Linda Aldrich
“‘Tain’t natural to be lonesome.” Our Town, Act II At the Berkeley Psychic Institute, seven students and one teacher watched the air around my head to see what might appear about past lives and contracts I had hidden from my consciousness regarding children. A boy and a girl, they finally said, will come to you… Read more »
By Susan Eisenberg
A person can take just so much sad news
or guilt: that teenage Arab boy, his mouth
forced into a funnel for gas and set ablaze;
By Peter Grandbois
Let’s start with the obvious:
no one wants to be found
when only dirt-dreaming
By Daniel Lawless
(—French. The feeling of being in a foreign place, exiled.) For Thierry R — For three days you were like a piece of ripe fruit Falling through a tree of many sharp branches. But what could I do? Ice chips, damp washcloths… Finally, the halls grew quiet, The doctors, even the nurses departed. It was just the… Read more »
By Daniel Lawless
The year many found the needle but lost the thread.
When was lost, stayed lost. AIDS. Rhodesia.
By Ellen Steinbaum
“Snap trap” was his recommendation
after a glance at the mouse droppings
under my kitchen sink. I refused,
By Marta Del Pozo
Having eyes, I could not resist climbing to the highest
branch and plucking the last of September’s apples. Put it
in the fruit basket and, at ten in the morning, place the basket
on the garden table. You bring the coffee and the croissant
By Wendy Cannella
Turkeys, a rafter of 42—creeping parade
of purple wattles, rolls of soft tissue
By Jennifer Jean
There’s a fist
making its way up the Venice boardwalk,
a cocked fist aiming. Its name
By Denise Bergman
A minute in its creaseless uniform in a row of cadets, salutes Dusk can’t contain the torn sky’s entrails A half-past-nine like all the others but its own half-past-nine An unpassable valley between tick and tock, the scout reports back The scout measured: distance equals length times time Distance circumnavigates time The prisoner’s minute was… Read more »
By Allan Peterson
We saw dog hair caught in splinters, twisters in the sink,
the sheet-covered moon indicating sadness,
dust balls moving like storms under the furniture.
By Lee Hope
STEPHEN DUNN author of Whereas: Poems Interviewed by Lee Hope Solstice Editor-in Chief and Fiction Editor (From Lee Hope): It is my privilege to interview one of the foremost poets in our country and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Over the years, I have read all of Stephen’s Dunn’s eighteen poetry collections as well as his book… Read more »
By Kathleen Aguero
BEN BERMAN author of Figuring in the Figure Solstice Poetry Editor in conversation with KATHLEEN AGUERO author of After That Solstice Consulting Poetry Editor (Editor’s note: Kathi and Ben interview each other, using a more back-and-forth style than a traditional interview format.) Kathi: Strange Borderlands, your first book, took its impetus from, among other… Read more »
By Ben Berman
DANIELLE LEGROS GEORGES author of The Dear Remote Nearness of You Solstice Consulting Poetry Editor Interviewed by Ben Berman Solstice Poetry Editor Ben: Many years ago, when I was teaching high school in Hyde Park, you visited my class as a guest speaker, and I remember being struck by how immediately you connected with… Read more »
By Tyler Erlendson
-after Francisco X. Alarcon i want a god who lives in a tattered shack by the sea mold growing up its cedar shingles, a god who offers thunder as applause, who knows the heart is both a rapturous and feigning preacher, prone to believing loud praise in the body. i want a god who longs… Read more »
By Isaac Black
“We are what we have done…” –Wendell Berry You didn’t know they were going to shuck down Death Row’s deadliest killer (supposedly forever) in 1966. That oak-wooded strapped chair was the “pay your bills, reaper,” you told the ghosts nodding around you, oh yes, yes, dawn to dust. You ignored the others–the grim-faced madmen who just took up space close by. The… Read more »
By Carlos Gómez
What was I doing at fifteen? Face down on the pavement, nostrils tinged with bullet-smoke, the brick-dust falling around us like fresh snow or white chalk, I watched the kid stalking the sidewalk. It was summer in Brooklyn. Nothing ever happens until it happens. That’s how my brother and sister-in-law described their tours at war… Read more »
By John Sibley Williams
—Delray, Detroit, 2014 From this fourth story window I see power lines eating sky, gray awnings blocking all light from the recesses. All neon-like; the entirety of night is captured, drowned in inch-deep puddles. A child half-buried in tarp, asleep between walls. Walls buried up to their necks in empty… Read more »
By Valerie Duff
Before Louisiana, Jefferson signaled Lewis with a mirror to his home at Monticello, the hilly path between plantations ten miles on horseback. Distance was a summons to expand the language of one’s purchase, to annotate direction. Knowing the terrain was, for many, second nature. Lewis tracked veiny rust-colored routes that arced like hipbones in his… Read more »
By Jed Myers
My daughter writes, to all those who follow her on the web, my eyes are the same as my father’s. She means to reassure herself they are not so strange. But mine are a stranger’s eyes, as were my grandfather’s, open late like the immigrant grocer’s lit with the awnings up after midnight, eyes… Read more »
By Miriam O’Neal
At the undertaker’s I open the box, pull pins from cuffs and collar, shake out the folds, stroke the soft sleeve of the nicest shirt my father will ever own. Then, like the aproned women in The Gleaners, with my sisters I bow over his pocket’s leavings. White comb gray with oil. Timex with replacement… Read more »
By Rebecca Hart Olander
Doesn’t the name bring to mind a dangerous woman at a table in the back corner of a smoky bar? The kind you walk into after disembarking from a six-month stint trawling the ocean, your skin indiscernible from salted cod? Aren’t you both afraid and compelled by her, cloaked as she is in her dark… Read more »
By Betsy Sholl
Sidewalk bricks upended by winter’s freeze and thaw– no looking up here, we take mincing steps, and our talk turns to everything undone—frayed boot laces, laundry, taxes, bills, books—so many books piled up unread, sliding off the night stand. Even the universe, you say, is not done expanding into whatever lies beyond. Once I thought… Read more »
By Betsy Sholl
“Will God, or somebody else, give me the power to breathe into my canvases … the sigh of prayer and of sadness, …of rebirth?” –Marc Chagall Outside, louder than street noise, the wind is making itself heard. Trees, wires, loose casements— the whole world’s its instrument. What does it want, banging at these windows… Read more »
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