Poetry

by Rowan Tate BHLNZ - Biodiversity Heritage Library NZ The world may end with a poppy blooming between my toes. Its ripe red face splitting open from roots made from my skin. It knows. Mother, forgive me for I have pluck-pulled petals from their stems, swept dirt beneath the altar steps, let the bees drown in a glass of sugared tea. I walked without looking, past the face of a trembling bird, trampling moss that was still learning to breathe. I have turned my back on a callin

by Snehal Bhadani Max Griss Steel bars crosshatch the sky into trembling cells of light. Below, the taxicabs glint in emerald so sharp it stings my eyes. The fruit-seller’s cart spills overripe melon: sweet, gangrenous. Little black plums crowd like wet beetles. The train’s horn guts the air, bellowing the arrival of the traveler. The elderly shuffle in slow arithmetic. Children dart with expertise, like minnows through the throng. In one hand a newspaper, and in the other, c

by Sarp Sozdinler Max Fleischmann Someone’s shadow stalks me on a rainy day. Asks me out on a candlelit dinner with saffron rice. Folds herself into the steam rising off my tea. Twists my bedsheets into folds. The shadow knows I’m obsessed with Patti Smith’s Horses. Shouts DANCE LIKE YOU MEAN IT. Bounces on the couch like a kid. The shadow calls me her oversized mermaid. Orders bánh mì a little too spicy for my taste. Tips in fives and tens. Parties past dawn. Blows in my ear

by LC Gutierrez Sami Salim To whom this may concern We are writing to confirm that LC’s mother, xxxx xxxxxxxxx, was admitted on xx/xx/xxxx. She maintains a beauty tendered like that of a felled tree consumed already from beneath. Her fragility reminds one of a keepsake stored in crumbling tissue. He hesitates to touch. We know that you need him —  but he is ours for now. He sits still bedside studying 9 Traits That Make a Decent Man. Encased in shadowed memory and half-forgiv

by Spencer Eckart No Revisions/Unsplash They held a parade in your honor, but you hadn’t vanished yet. You were still wolfing hummus, still putting on one odd sock. Everyone kept applauding anyway. They mistook your doubt for performance art. The mayor read a speech about how brave it is to disappear. Later, someone said you were just hiding in the crawlspace beneath yourself. They brought blankets. They waited all year. Spencer Eckart is a hybrid poet with work published or

by Molly Thapviwat Aron Visuals I mailed my voice to the wrong decade / it came back wearing bell-bottoms and asking for my father / who at that time was still a question mark in my grandmother’s uterus / the letter opened itself and read: dear misremembered self, you left the stove on in every lifetime / I took this as a threat / or an invitation / depends on the weather of your guilt / a goat showed up on my porch and claimed to be my therapist / she chewed through my insur

by James Kangas Luca Bravo This brown ceramic rooster, this mottled arc, ceaselessly crowing of its imminent fall from the bric-a-brac mantle to a headlong, unfeathered oblivion; the liquid calm of this hand’s idle arrangement on its startled throat, could spark the trick of flying blind to a streaked light, to a grand poetic dawn. This postcard from Rhode Island of the morning room’s heavy doors, the damask grouping rosy before the fireplace, the faceless mirror, the massive

by Eric Pankey Europeana At the pace roots grow, I make a descent into the depths but with no exit plan. If there is a hell to harrow, so be it. If in digging, magma is released, and lava flows downward to the sea, so be it. If the shades will not be coaxed forward by sacrifice or bribe, so be it. Downward to darkness, like a drowned man with stones in his pockets. : : Was it night fears or fever that embodied me, burned a thousand scriptures onto my retina, that dull gray sl

by Alicia Potee Listen. I was born from a plastic bag, pimped to life by a long pump of mechanical breath. Like you, but go ahead and think you’re better — than this rubber body, these double-dip breasts, vinyl hips and dummy thighs, banana sundae split, lips two fat cherries on top. Look how you’re stooped over slab, streetlight autopsists, snapping shots for laughs. Whose husband left you like this? My sapphire spider eyes won’t snitch. If names are punchlines, just know th

by Paula Gil-Ordoñez Gomez Magnus Andersson I love Brooklyn because most people I love are here. I’m trying to be more present — smoking at different intervals on assorted elevations, making eye contact in the elevator. Late one night someone banged on my door. I was itching for some action, after five days I finally swallowed. I pulled a back muscle. There is something wrong with my body. On the internet I find the prettiest doctor in Greenpoint. She says I am very stressed.

by Amorak Huey William Bout My favorite shirt when I was 18 said “Panama City Beach Shark Hunters Club” & had a bite-shaped hole at the side & I imagined my girlfriend sliding her hand in against my ribs but she broke up with me pretty early that summer, we were a bad match & anyway it was my favorite shirt mostly because I bought it in Florida during Senior Week during which I imagined hooking up with a girl from Atlanta, say, or Charlotte, & certainly many people hooked up

by Amrita Noor Jen Theodore silence, and incense shoots an arrow straight through. angel & i sit in the sweet -grass, searching for signs of life: birdsong, maybe. a swollen teat for suckling. here, palms suckle on the sun while we sleep; organs burst from bodies lest the knife escape questioning. of knives, Shahid writes, on knives. his Urdu balmed then bloodied. at its end, a gazelle cried to the Lord above &| for its piety was granted the curse of poetry. the official acco

by Tex Gresham Slava Taukachou Where are you going? You are up here, the pressure of the air out there is in your bones. The bodies around you and you, all moving from where you were to where you are going. A destination connected by the air at 30,000 feet. You have to obey the laws at 30,000 feet. Sit still and just sit. Forfeit yourself at the cabin door and become a child at the whim of an absentee parent who’s not against treating you like the child they never wanted. Bec

by Suze Kay Cherry Laithang is also lost. He stumbles on an english garden, likes the ramble rose. He also likes that darker bloom of gun smoke in his name. He damns a woman who killed her child but first He said yes when she read proverbs 23:13. it’s all for Him, He thinks. His algorithm makes it so. it shows Him a french horse nosing into hospice rooms, a crying man whose wife will die. what the hell, He thinks, tosses $5 to their fundraiser, does the same for cats enferale

by Mihir Bellamkonda Akhilesh Sharma For L.H. Who are we? We are the people by the water in the morning — Where did we come from? — we came from close by, those small cabins, there — What is this rock called? — that’s quartz, you can see from the color, white or goldish white — Can I throw it into the water? — yes, but be careful, don’t hurt the sleeping birds — Why should we be careful? — we should be careful with beautiful things, young things sleeping — And what is beautif

by B. Montemayor David Pupăză let it be of mangoes. of hearts cast in stone. or else, inanimate objects with a hairpin’s mortality. i want to be the patron saint of women trapped in flea market paintings, their knowing gaze a mirrored stillness. perhaps a mise en abyme, an artistic abyss. the kind of death i’ll only get to know when i am canonized for my trivial deeds. let me be the patron saint of lost, defunct websites whose links wormhole into a 404 Error, where poetry in

by Abhinav Andréas BRUN It was late in the night, too late. Anyone who had a place in the world was already in it. Everyone else was shifting, in one queue or another. The train like a coil shifting in the dark, the dark of the earth shifting against vacant space, the space shifting in its own vacancy. Like memory shifts every time it’s wrenched into language. The platform a rectangular slab of white light, silhouettes slicing it drown in crumbs and murmurs. I was arguing on

by Shiyang Su Will Turner When Odysseus woke from an ancient dream and didn’t recognize Ithaca, he limped along the loud, ashen sea, sobbing. In another translation, it was a whispering surf-line that he sealed his cries in. Odysseus, oblivious now to the lexicon of his homeland, grieved in the rhythm of the sea. The low wails lapping the shore, the tearing of rocks near the dark estuary —  Desire fluctuated between harpaleon (gentle) and argaleon (hard) by night and day. Eve

by Taylor Hamann Los NCI I an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts Doctor Moreau, are you proud? I stitched it together myself. Collected specimens & scalpels. Placed lavender bundles around its head so it could believe it was beautiful — & it was even as it shrilled in surrender, the sound both sweet & chilling. The echoes still reverberate through my chest, bouncing from bone to bone & leaving hairline fractures behind. You see, vultures pick through bodies, bu

by Matthew Thomas Bernell I like the idea that, really, there is only one poem, and it is the song we all sing to ourselves, not as ourselves, necessarily, but as each other. Don’t you remember the story, now? The one about the beautiful singer who strutted into a river, singing, and drowned? And it was you. You were the singer and the river and everything else, too, even those moths that punctuated swampy darkness. But how did that one end? Tell me again. Wasn’t it a while a