genre: Poetry
The Stony Sea
By Elisabeth Schmeidel
– Where do you want to go?
– I don’t know.
– When will you come back?
A Face in Solitude
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.
Night Meeting
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.
Scenes from a Single Life, 1985
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 »
Julie from Gaza
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;
What mud-drunk song waits
By Peter Grandbois
Let’s start with the obvious:
no one wants to be found
when only dirt-dreaming
Dépaysement
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 »
1982
By Daniel Lawless
The year many found the needle but lost the thread.
When was lost, stayed lost. AIDS. Rhodesia.
Snap Trap
By Ellen Steinbaum
“Snap trap” was his recommendation
after a glance at the mouse droppings
under my kitchen sink. I refused,
From “Hunger of Images”
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
The Reappearance
By Wendy Cannella
Turkeys, a rafter of 42—creeping parade
of purple wattles, rolls of soft tissue
Grendel, 1971
By Jennifer Jean
There’s a fist
making its way up the Venice boardwalk,
a cocked fist aiming. Its name
At the End of the Day is The End of the Day
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 »
Indications
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.
Stephen Dunn Interview
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 »
Ben Berman & Kathleen Aguero Interview
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 »
Danielle Legros Georges Interview
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 »
Prayer for a New God
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 »
Sing Sing’s Electric Chair, Old Sparky
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 »
Before the Last Shot
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 »
Salvage
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 »
Expedition
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 »
Not Our Tribe
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 »
March 3, 1991
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 »
Dark-Eyed Junco
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 »
The Undoing
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 »
Night Class In Wind
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 »
Fencing in Reykjavik
By Marc Vincenz
Behind the door the dogs are rhapsodizing, out in the garden the crocuses, not quite naked, are waving a little dainty lace. Last autumn, at Hfravatn I was moving mildly with water in my mouth. Remember when I waved my arms around gathering air? Then those days of mid-October snow that blanketed our little evils—and… Read more »
Every Last Syllable of Grass
By Marc Vincenz
(i) Wavers, hesitates in its urge to thicken as the watertable drops and we walk toward crisis in to the everything that is not me, in to the everything that is not you. What beautiful lies fuse the months together as we try and slip quietly past creation. Sorting pebble from pebble, we pick out… Read more »
Charlotte Bronte (Charlotte Brontë)
By Gerður Kristný
The sofa where your sister died so short that she must have been curled up The table where you used to sit barely larger than a doormat .. Your handwriting delicate like the pattern in the misty-white lace cap displayed on a tiny doll head that gazes eyeless over my shoulder Sófinn þar… Read more »
Darwin‘s Doves (Dúfurnar hans Darwins )
By Gerður Kristný
Two sisters with puffed out breasts Eyes closed The have landed in a museum and now bow to their fate Just as each feather was once counted by a gray-bearded old man their softness is now esteemed by his brother Tvær systur með þanda bringu Augun aftur Þær hafa hafnað á safni og… Read more »
abroad (í útlöndum)
By Ingunn Snædal
I miss how you do not look at me do not come to me never call me barely talk to me oh to be home now to experience all this rejection first hand ég sakna þess hvernig þú horfir ekki á mig kemur ekki til mín hringir aldrei í mig yrðir varla á… Read more »
Condition (ástand)
By Ingunn Snædal
throat constricted head empty hands flailing absentminded talk shifty eyes acidic stomach and inside it a knot the size of a dark haired man hálsinn herptur höfuðið tómt hendur fálma tal annars hugar augun hvarflandi maginn er súr og í honum hnútur á stærð við dökkhærðan mann Translator by Sola Bjarnadóttir-O’Connell is a… Read more »
feeling I (tilfinning I)
By Ingunn Snædal
I have stopped thinking about you I think ég er hætt að hugsa um þig held ég Translator: Sola Bjarnadóttir-O’Connell is a native Icelander who has lived in New York for the past 30 years. She is pursuing a life-long interest in bringing contemporary poetry and literature to an English-speaking audience and… Read more »
California Penal Code 484 & 488
By Iain Haley Pollock
The Irvine cops picked up Sherod while he was riding Jimmy’s bike to school. He’d snuck up into the scrub, coyote hills above our complex to work on the fort we were building with wood from a deserted rancher’s shack. By the time he came down to the bus stop, we were the diesel exhaust… Read more »
Black Cock
By Iain Haley Pollock
Fifteen years since Bobby Dougherty died. The night before our last day of school, in his closet, with a belt, he hanged himself. His girlfriend had left him, and he wouldn’t graduate this year—that’s what we chalked it up to. But grades and a girl couldn’t have been all. We should have seen the impulse… Read more »
Faceless
By Lee Sharkey
Maybe he never existed. Maybe this is all he is. Cobbled prop in a worker’s cap and prisoner’s shirt. Face without features. Puppet arm lifting a cup to an absent mouth. Two crossed triangles on a chest where a heart might flutter. Before, and after. Silence speaks where a tongue may not. Strangle it out.… Read more »
Landfill
By Jae Nichelle
bones. Visible under bits of meat and dark skin—strewn, wanting y’all-better-finish eating-‘fore-y’all-go-outside-bones left with animal still clinging by a child, too secure; whittled back-in-MY-day-bones used to pick teeth (also bones) with plaque; dried out bones of apples ex-red. The fibula of a last meal: two pizza rolls. Did-you-know-there-was-pork-in-this??-bones—of a pork chop; orange bones, pumpkin skull… Read more »
News of the World
By Marcia F. Brown
I dreamed all the boats in the world had run aground, the lakes vanished into hardpan, and the great migrations of birds had strayed so far off track, there were lost birds everywhere– one in my closet, nestled with socks in the laundry. When I looked at him, he looked back with hunted human eyes.… Read more »
Dorothy McKibben: Gatekeeper
By John Canaday
Each day a stream of new lost souls succeeds the last. I number the innumerable hosts in triplicate. My office door should read: “Through me the road unto a town of ghosts; through me the way to join an endless war; through me a path among the Lost Almosts: Abandon hope, all ye who enter… Read more »
Brigadier General Thomas Farrell Bears Witness
By John Canaday
Trinity Test Site, July 16, 1945 Great poets dream of clarity and beauty. Even hell has its finer points. But when the announcer shouts out, “Now!” and from the ethereal sky comes hideous ruin down hurled headlong flaming, winged with red lightning and livid flames’ fueled entrails rolling in black billows, words are beggared… Read more »
The Unveiling
By Steven Ratiner
Rain skinning granite. I lay the flat of my palm, let pools gather between fingers, streams skim the blue veins down. This is the real, I know it – stone, rain, blood, December cold – the irresistible claim of the material. And then there’s you, love – or rather the absence of you – how… Read more »
For Qays
By Adeeba Shahid Talukder
after Faiz, Sauda come walk with me by the lake’s empty benches tell me, dressed in roses that we need some air. the wound’s head has reached the heart– there’s no use in sewing it or rubbing it with balm. all the lovers have snuffed their lamps, headed back over the broken paths. said Sauda… Read more »
Counting Crows
By D.G. Geis
When Machine Gun Kelly rolled into Oklahoma my dad was a farm boy in Okeene. His world was a simple venue of unlocked doors, Wednesday evening prayer meetings, drugstore soda fountains, and Co-op elevators. Happiness was measured in bushels, then meted out on high school scoreboards. Even tonsillectomies happened on the kitchen table. My mother,… Read more »
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