Poetry

Sheldon Lee Compton Daniel Olah Forget the stars. They have abandoned you into mystery. There are more cosmic godheads than these neutron stars. There are more supernovas, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your host galaxies. But even supernovas cannot matter in this cavity of endless imaginings. A star collapsing is only a reflect-mist of vapor disappearing at the exact rate it’s appearing. One casts off the other until we are all left wondering if anything happened at all. Was

by Christina Veladota Liana S The one Eagle Scout I knew dropped acid every weekend, read Ferlinghetti, saw poetry in the poverty of an empty hand. Every poem was an eon in the making. He asked for sex in the heat of his almost sorry. We woke in a field inside a world closing its every eye. I thought the chuff & cry were mine, but they were the distant train splicing my breath into fragments. Our idiom was the dawn’s shattering glass. The railroad tracks stretched like a zipp

by Ireland Griffin ostudio you are sitting. by the edge of the dock, soft waves of moonlight making trails down your cheeks. a fishing rod is clutched, in your gnarled hand. held the way one would hold a lover. the salt from the air has seemingly made itself into a new man inside of the constraints of your skin. for why else would your top lip catch the edge of soft drops of water as it splatters down the dock. the sallowed lines of your face illuminated by the sky, your

by Shawn Berman Alex Lee don’t feel the need to join in with me y’all because this isn’t a happy song that you’ll find on any impeccably-curated top indie road trip playlist brought to you by spotify user sunshinebb2002 or anything like that. nah this is a sad song a public service announcement if you will about the horrors of not taking your health seriously. more specifically this is about the horrors of stuffing your face with totinos pepperoni pizza bites at 3 in the morn

by Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí Marc Sendra Martorell I want my life to mean beauty, for the lilacs to bloom & for summer to make its music, its manic magic of beleaguered birds. I stand in the light, pretend this once I am golden, a star, boy in a movie of cowries & coins. I want the river to bleed into the wound & for the wound to bleed into the river. I want God’s nose for breakfast, his toes fried, snack for the hours before noon when I’ll have his testicles, peppered. fear not, th

by Guillermo Rebollo-Gil Carlos E. Ramirez The child wants to know who’s that on my shirt, an occasion his mother had warned me about. I could call him a heel , but my friends the poets have advised against using wrestling terms in my poems without defining them first. I could say he’s a friend but dead wrestlers aren’t my friends so much as my role models? His mother asks, smiling. Personal prompts for sorrow , I reply. Take Bruiser Brody, for instance. Stabbed in a locker r

by Debasish Mishra Wei Ding From the vague signpost of memory to this tiny station of time where the train of life doesn’t bother to stop I was/am obsessed with English Speaking it was/is a luxury a sign of one’s education the very science of knowing When I was a child with brown skin and white hopes, the foreign alphabets in hardbound books and bright colourful paperbacks with the promise of a choklet accent grew over the chalk-clad roots My dreams were in English too: soph

by Maria Picone Stephen Hocking 12 / adoptee / musical / Wang Theatre / parents thought “good for her” / a million dreams are in me / what between this Saigon & / Joy Luck Club ’93 / Asian women were / trod down by / circumstances / men / war / cigarette smoke / villains / lifted up by / white men / lifted up / against other Asians / paid by white men / slim / slant-eyed / small-eyed / short / fitting / in their pocket / in their army shirts / not fitting / in their perfect /

by KB Sergio Lapunin After the Texas Winter Storm of February 2021 The leafless oak trees. The junipers hanging down, insisting on being caught in my hair. The splintered leaves sagging on red oaks choked by old christmas lights. The hackberries, perfectly aligned on the wooden pointless fence. What is a fence but a boundary, but a harsh message to stay out? The ball mosses outnumbering the leaves on the battered oak tree. The cacti, mostly brown but still green in the middle

by Noreen Ocampo Jim Gade We dug holes deep enough to bury ourselves, sand blooming dark beneath our neon shovels. Our skin bloomed beneath the neon, darkening sun & we danced, red-faced, away from the ocean, away from our mother, red-faced at the table. We never managed happy summer vacations. Happy summer vacations were for families who loved each other the way they should. I loved my brother the way I should, always. We were six & thirteen at the beach. When you are six &

by Sodiq Oyekanmi Danielle Suijkerbuijk for F i start this in the name of the grief which now ripens on my brother’s head — a floral garden i’m walking through as i pen this poem. i pluck a chrysanthemum… & i swear to God, this is supposed to be a poem about perfumed flowers & not grief growing in vases meant for roses. tell me, what is it about grief that keeps morphing into a synonym for everything beautiful? it is September 2013, & my brother is alive. he beams to a birthd

by Lorrie Ness Grant Whitty for the way I whispered fuck you instead of amen. and for the way I wanted to, but never did, say it loud enough for anyone to hear. because every mole must hide because some moles lose their nails digging and others surface clean fingered but choking for thinking god fucked his son with a childhood. and jesus fucked us all with his example. and nobody fucked poor mary except they did. because every daughter is an echo and every echo is a sound bo

by Hannah Grieco Nathan Dumlao When I flip back through this life, fifty years from now, shrunken in a hospital bed, or tomorrow, laying in the wreckage of our minivan it will be your face I see. The printout from the ultrasound, your thumb in your mouth, lips pursed, eyes squeezed shut. Your face, purple as the labor and delivery nurse slapped your feet, your heartbeat slowing, the doctor slicing and grabbing, tearing us in two. Your face, a reverse line of you shrinking fro

by Nora Hikari Dallas Reedy Summer of my youthfire, tender liking of my token sun, there is always a close. A canticle of the turning susurrates through the cattails, up the river. Eagles leave and the birch stand empty, waiting without knowing. It comes, she whispers. It comes bellowing, it comes wailing, I cannot bear it she says I cannot hold it she says. The morning is crisp with settling. Into my bones, the snap of autumn waits. Twigs among twigs, antlers left unbloodied

by Vanessa Maki Uliya Kurilova when the trauma finds me / in my dreams / & starts stalking me / waiting to pounce / with razor fingers / & a chesire cat grin / i feel like i’ll never / escape / that i’ll disappear / even when i lay my head down / to rest / but then i remember / that i’m into survival / even when i’m tired of just surviving / & i won’t wait for someone / to wake me up / to save me / to cut the umbilical cord of trauma / til it reanimates / to pick me up / & ca

by Jeffrey Hermann S. Laiba Ali God bless those who don’t wake up to task lists. Peace be to the humans who sleep late and miss garbage day, who have to live with the odor another week. The wind is whistling through the tall grass, through your lips. Let’s photograph us on this bridge. Let’s come together around this tart I made for dessert. I made it with love. I made it without sugar because of your diet, your starving. We’re going through a difficult time. A tunnel, a path

by Olabisi Bello Klim Musalimov Warning: Our company is not liable for any explosion triggered during this process. Pro Tip: Perform the cleaning with the help of a trusted loved one. Step 1 Unearth your minefield: glass fragments forced under torn skin and buried in cavities long forgotten, triggers, primed to explode from the careless graze of a wandering hand. With a grip so gentle, like the hands of a mother lifting her child, uproot the shards and embrace the fountain sp

by Lynne Schmidt Bjarn Bronsveld After “Your Life” by Andrea Gibson When they tell you that you are a crime against nature smile and show them your teeth. Thank them for the compliment, for recognizing that yes, you are more powerful than your body dictates. Your biology does not determine the rest of your life. They will ask, what kind of monster doesn’t love their child? What kind of monster would view a pregnancy as a curse, wishing for cancer during the three minutes of p

by Jaclyn Garver Fab Lentz I don’t believe in signs or fate or angels or ghosts but once, I studied a painting to see if I could part the chimney smoke curtain by the feather duster pine in the southeast corner of Florence and find a love letter from Thomas’s brushstroke to my collarbone but once, I studied a love letter to see if I could word-scramble its laced traces of pencil lead and R.’s alphabet to solve a promise that one day, he’d leave a song for me there at the b

by Shannon Austin Daniel Romero Where we gather our superstitions & play with them freely, building a ladder to walk under. Where we step on every spine in the sidewalk, cut a splinter at the place it becomes a birthmark. Where an umbrella is always open in the wake of a dry wedding. Where we gift yellow roses & toast with water, our bodies. Wear red to call lightning. Where a mirror spies another looking into itself. Where we break both. Where we hoard a thousand copper memo