Poetry Archives - Page 2 of 8

Opuntia stenopetala / translation or prayer / luciérnaga

June 9, 2020/in Poetry, Poetry, Summer-Fall 2020 / María José Giménez

your island, before storms and faces crashed on your shores with new names for death and stolen lands, whips and dark nights, histories of ancestors piled in the hulls of ships[…]

At the Lynching Museum, Bryan Stevenson Says / Signs Nailed to the Mailbox on Winnequah Road / Reparations

June 8, 2020/in Poetry, Poetry, Summer-Fall 2020 / Dominic W. Holt

The auction block still rides on the black backs of ghosts hurling themselves town to town […]

Credit: Jobi Adams

Signs Of Spring / Who Made The World / Black Gold

June 7, 2020/in Poetry, Poetry, Summer-Fall 2020 / Halee Kirkwood

The chapped lips of last season’s flora, the winter-cracked cattails slowly recovering their limber. Today I saw a willow precisely […]

Credit: Rebecca Aranda

LOLITA ERASURES: 2, 5, 6, 8, 11, 14, 18

June 7, 2020/in Poetry, Poetry, Summer-Fall 2020 / Eva Della Lana

Credit: Luke Peterson

Whales of the Allegheny / The Crown and Anchor Pub / The Nurse Log

June 6, 2020/in Poetry, Poetry, Summer-Fall 2020 / Tobias Peterson

Photo credit: Ryley Eden Priest

Dear Mama / Watercolor / They Tell Us to Live in the Moment Because the Moment is All We May Have

June 5, 2020/in Poetry, Poetry, Summer-Fall 2020 / Kimberly Ann Priest

I want our childhood back to watch the ice break off at the shoreline and float away when the sun begins to warm the waters of Lake Superior early spring. Or spend whole Saturdays planting the pink and purple candy-striped petunias you loved in flower boxes and along the borders of our little sidewalk. […]

Credit: Tyler Raso

Depression Aubade, or My Therapist Has a Breakthrough / Feedback

June 4, 2020/in Poetry, Poetry, Summer-Fall 2020 / Tyler Raso

Everyday the author takes the bus like a distant hum, I love that. I love that somebody leaves the author a voicemail and doesn’t talk about pain as a thin golden feather. I love that the author calls back.[…]

From the Trees Full of Birdsong Comes Unripe Fruit

December 4, 2019/in Poetry, Poetry, Winter-Spring 2020 / Albert Abonado

Waorani Legend (With Appropriation)

December 4, 2019/in Poetry, Poetry, Winter-Spring 2020 / Lauren Brazeal

My Gardener

December 3, 2019/in Poetry, Poetry, Winter-Spring 2020 / Benny Sisson

Of a Fixed Nature

December 3, 2019/in Poetry, Poetry, Winter-Spring 2020 / Ronald Dzerigian

Two boys pull green oranges from the tree
that hangs over the churchyard fence. They

throw them into the street with such auto-
matic skill that they may be the same boys

sent to kill in any war that will never be theirs […]

ednos

December 3, 2019/in Poetry, Poetry, Winter-Spring 2020 / Stephanie Yue Duhem

Not Yet Five / Mother

November 30, 2019/in Poetry, Poetry, Winter-Spring 2020 / Alafia Nicole Sessions

With Cleopatra eyes and Sadé skin her words sting clear as Noxema lather:
“Mom, I’m not pretty,” she confesses. “What?” I accuse—“What do you mean,”
I spit and sputter, my mind scrambling to organize an understanding
of this violence she commits against herself […]

Post-Partum Jenga

November 30, 2019/in Poetry, Poetry, Winter-Spring 2020 / Katie Manning

I almost see myself trip and shatter
us both on the stairs. I almost see
my arms slip and tumble you over
the balcony to crack on the sidewalk
below […]

The Shekhinah, The Key to the Cinema, & The Very Breath of Children Is Free of Sin

May 25, 2019/in Poetry, Poetry, Summer-Fall 2019 / by Joy Arbor

The Shekhinah Some say the Shekhinah is the queen of presence, pulsing upward through the living earth, bidding us to bloom in our skins. The apple orchard in full blossom. But when you see me, I am a burning flame, blonde hair billowing behind. You have no throne festooned with ribbons, no needle to embroider my […]

Rets

May 24, 2019/in Poetry, Poetry, Summer-Fall 2019 / by Jan Ball

The children pick the peeling yellow paint from the bathroom pipes and lick it while Mama is gabbing on the phone with her sister. Papa returns from work at four and takes the yellow plastic strap out of the second dresser drawer and whips their thighs since Mama has delegated punishment for their transgressions during […]

Jesus Wears a Puerto Rican Flag on his Jacket and a Flower in his Hair

May 23, 2019/in Poetry, Poetry, Summer-Fall 2019 / by Levi Cain

in college, the men i gave trembling permission to scurry inside of me, would, more often than not, send me hobbling to the student clinic. the nurse, as incandescent as a light bulb with rage, tells me that sex is not supposed to require three tylenol. my roommate, eyebrow raised at the troupes of grubby-nailed […]

A Definition

May 22, 2019/in Poetry, Poetry, Summer-Fall 2019 / by Andrea L. Hackbarth

mother 1. noun. presence, as in constant ex: “the mother is here.” see also: mama, mommy see the child cry out in fear, in loneliness see the presence quiet the child see presence beyond himself 2. verb. to rear, as in to create ex: she mothers and mothers and mothers until she is no […]

Na

May 22, 2019/in Poetry, Poetry, Summer-Fall 2019 / by Christine Imperial

Christine Imperial is a queer Filipino-American poet. She is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at CalArts. She won the Loyola Schools Award for the Arts for her poetry in 2016. Her work has been published in NoTokens,Heights,Rambutan Literary,among others.

Triptych of the Adobe-Cotta Army, los frijoles ya se quemaron, & Apology to Her Majesty, Queen Cardi B

May 21, 2019/in Poetry, Poetry, Summer-Fall 2019 / by Antonio López

Triptych of the Adobe-Cotta Army East Palo Alto, Circa 2000 AD My fingers are desperate to unearth the ruins of my countrymen. Only to find a Tesla on the second floor of our apartments —now a parking garage. The Amazon logo smirks above me, like a biblical cloud. * Out here, hooded saints tore the […]

Not Your Color

May 19, 2019/in Poetry, Poetry, Summer-Fall 2019 / by Madison J. Salters

I am not a girl who is pretty in all seasons. With the russet of fall painted on my mouth the scar across my face (climbing from the lip) Splits the silence with a noise less like Mozart, Closer to clanging; Rock metal, metal and rocks. Winter blues recall the time, Drowning in surgery, waves […]

Mordekhai

May 17, 2019/in Poetry, Poetry, Summer-Fall 2019 / by Joshua Sassoon Orol

אמר רבי יודן Rabbi Yudan taught: פעם אחת חזר על כל המניקותOnce, Mordekhai searched but ולא מצא לאסתר לאלתר מיניקהcould find no wet nurse for Esther, והיה מיניקה הואso he nursed her himself. • My breasts judge a handshake, have five-o-clock shadow. I know the proper verb for a deal with God is To Cut. […]

Sasha Fierce asks ‘Why Don’t You Love Me?’

November 23, 2018/in Poetry, Poetry, Winter-Spring 2019 / by Immaculata Abba

Today I find comfort in the thunder’s holy growl. Hunger sometimes smells like petrichor: dead bacteria awakening our most primal sense to the promise of replenishment. All this while, I’ve been singing along: Honey, please try to understand it’s time to love your woman. Maybe it is time to make me your woman, to let the […]

Q & A

November 23, 2018/in Poetry, Poetry, Winter-Spring 2019 / by Chaun Ballard

—Do you have a fear of losing people? I once rustled moonlight underneath the blanket and threatened to keep it. I unwrapped it slowly like sand loosed by waves, a child with one present come Christmas morning. —Do you feel that being black makes you a target? If shooting holes into darkness was not a […]

Portrait of a Slave-Owner’s Wife

November 23, 2018/in Poetry, Poetry, Winter-Spring 2019 / by Aileen Bassis

Light folds around her yellow-silk like a pillar-candle Shadows round her cheek curve between lips press below her nose On her left a thickened impasto of fading paint and varnish layers obscure shapes and it’s hard to see a dark boy in blue livery bending brown skin black hair without a stroke of light to […]

Architectural Integrity & Aretha Franklin Has Died

November 23, 2018/in Poetry, Poetry, Winter-Spring 2019 / by Dalton Day

Architectural Integrity My floor could possibly be coming apart but I’m hanging on for now & for good reason Catastrophe should only be used as the name for a fragrance that only exists in a fictional universe One where a person starts every day with a montage full of clues I’ve spent the past week […]

Mayhem—Arrival and Departure

November 23, 2018/in Poetry, Poetry, Winter-Spring 2019 / by Kiyanna Hill

Rally (n.) 1650s, originally in the military sense of ‘a regrouping of renewed action after a repulse’ I confuse the armored buses for deliverance a line of colored steel some tarnished some spit— shined My surprise at this release of white bodies Their flocking together Their delivery of renewed action the guns hanging […]

In Champaign, Illinois

November 23, 2018/in Poetry, Poetry, Winter-Spring 2019 / by You Li

Up the stairs coiled around the hotel my new friend Frank and I are lamenting that there is no gym after all—he lamenting— I going along—at my door I half stick the key in, he asks again about how to iron his pants, I have these pants with a crease—he uses his hand to saw […]

Elegy, yet again

November 23, 2018/in Poetry, Poetry, Winter-Spring 2019 / by Clara Paiva

Not a pyre, but a chimney, a beetle shaking mercilessly on top of my doormat to the sound of its own catharsis a tongue my neck both hands shaking exactly the same. My teeth as antenna & my cords wings Sing I watched a beetle die today; not a crate not a crypt not a […]

Poem in Which You Are the Church

November 23, 2018/in Poetry, Poetry, Winter-Spring 2019 / by C.J. Strauss

Real boy the love I have made to you is unremarkable, as it should be in a perfect world, impossible to tell where you end and I begin. Real boy I have recessed in your nation, your looted land, pronounced it dead, & closed the borders I once bled for. Real boy I dream of […]

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