Poetry

by John Arthur Raymond Petrik he was beautiful out there two years after graduation, the day before Thanksgiving, surrounded by a stadium of sugar maples, playing tackle with guys still strong enough to kill each other with one lowered shoulder, no pads, dodging defenders and stiff arming, spinning, our bodies sliding one by one down his hard, lean body, my lips pressing to his leg in one final desperate kiss as he shed me, advancing to an end zone that had no lines, all of u

by Zachary Kocanda Paul Gauguin//Public Domain After Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) by Paul Gauguin (1888) Our great aunt was a nun, but she never told us this story. Gauguin lays it out best, the angel’s hair yellow like belts we earned in YMCA basement karate. The biblical figure nudges Jacob into the red earth, the two fighters flanked by dozens of devoted French women, heads bowed in prayer. Jacob asks the angel for his name and receives no answe

by Azhar Wani Ralph Mayhew Q: What is your fiction? Tell us about your stripes. A: This was before you knew me: I was exiled from the Sundarbans. Behind each mangrove, my amber eyes still flicker underwater, craft fear under god’s air. I hung around the river at first. Brilliant conversationalist, she began reading the oracle on my stripes. Before she could translate from fur to roar, the sea caught us off guard at coast. No chance around that bully. I turned back, walked ups

by Jill Kitchen Chanbora Chhun back when every evening would unveil the unknown. virginia thick, fig leaves dripping on uneven brick, the way footsteps vanished into the soundless wet. the night another person, another being watching as you walked beneath tree tangle, drove windows down through whispered shadows, forest become car-less curve of highway, country road become empty strip malls and office buildings, traffic lights flashing yellow to no one but you. there were oth

by Olumide Manuel The Ian/Unsplash means to trampoline. means to lit a bloom between the fangs of griefs. means to change direction after hitting an obstacle. I remember my father cracking jokes in the poorly lit room where his mother laid dead. people laughed then fell to silence. people fall and remain capable of joy. it is a reckoning. the same sky of hailstorm is the same sky of sunlight. sometimes, our trauma forgets to wear us. It doesn’t make it less of a skin. but it

by BEE LB Compagnons/Unsplash here is the key to your crossword, scrabble loss, word search, mad lib: priority, badly, unimportant, work, insignificant, apologize, better it’s best in the viewfinder but if it has to be one or the other choose the future always, over the past. the shutter-click sepia-haze isn’t a choice, but what really is here is the key to your numbers game: 29 years, 3 months, 13 days 5 years, 9 months, 16 days 6 months, 27 days you get no hints, i didn’t t

by Leia K. Bradley Emily Morter Georgine, maybe it’s monetary — my insecurities on dating the fairer of the dyke genders, the softer one, femme for femme for ephemeral, for efflorescent, for lace and silk and lately I’m dreaming in doppelgangers, I’m a question mark in stilettos staring at question marks in platform boots I am muse and fury, furious at myself, fearful of mouthing truths my body can’t bear. Is it enough to drink a bottle of orange wine in pink sheets, is it en

by Tim Duffy Olivier Collet In the parking lot, the men walk bow-legged, like cowboys after the last cattle-thief has been shot. In the town, the mines have already collapsed and they drive from shuttered windows to orange signs, a cigar in the mouth casting shadows on the too-bright shirt, the sidewalk, the worn jeans stretched with a faint pile of cash. When we approach, we were told it was our destiny to destroy the last great citadel of desire. Secretly, we hoped to be tu

by Marceline White Mateusz Raczynski She lost her shoes in the last goddamned storm, wind came through ripped them right off her feet, now they seed the fields somewhere far beyond her sightline. Her socks flap in the breeze, stripes warn away raccoons, frighten the deer. But she’s been out here on these Plains for too long, by herself for too long. She’s been lonesome from harvest moon to strawberry moon, hanging around by herself with no company to keep except the cawing of

by Joshua Effiong Nathan Dumlao dear white brethren/do you ever think about the thickness of my accent?// do you ever wonder why my larynx wasn’t enslaved too?// here in this cold room/i begin to untangle the names of my fathers/& brothers/& mothers/& sistas from the cloak of intergenerational trauma//i begin to oil wounds/dem libraries of memories/& beautifying of dem scars as receipts for survival//last night/i allowed my spirit wander through the city of Minneapolis/to rel

by Mike Bagwell Moon Zhang Don’t even think about colorless depths. All they want is to politicize the body. The year of the rat is so empty it walks back to its apartment spilling cheesesteak on the library’s copy of a Brautigan novel —  The Abortion — reads near half before realizing he is not moving toward a home but is a home and so damn unfinished a person could fall through the first floor into a womb. I wrote my friend in prison only once, visited him two, maybe three

by Luke Janicki Alex Diaz I have been out in the open all day under the surveillance of trees. In three days’ time, I will resist the urge to entrench myself in post, after post, after post. I will lose somewhat, in a hole, my aunt responding: but what about this, and that, and the other. The thing is that I don’t want to be closed into a hovel; my ideas ensnare me more than their reactions hanging down. The thing is that 19 children will have been killed, and they will all w

by Timi Sanni Paul Zoetemeijer I have seen men with hair the color of rust whip caution like sand to the wind at the sound of the bàtá drums. In my language, the word for bee is the same as for honey, which is to say: a man is what he makes with the machinery of his body. Look at what we make with ours. In truth, elixirs are only fancy words for alchemy’s sting. Observe, people of the world, the drum and its folk, the avian rhythm for which, again, we mistake feet for wings.

by David Hanlon Jan Canty Unravelling does its dirty work again, and I ossify into a walnut shell, a slab of marble, cubic boron nitride, shout at the wrong things, how they left us: foals wading through crocodile-infested rivers, our insides deluged with shunned tears. Once, a boyfriend took my hands & moisturised them & it felt like being touched for the first time, it felt maternal. Now, I macerate into soft putty, life rolling me between its thumb & forefinger, my form ma

by Alicia Hoffman Danny Lines Because everyone deserves a do-over. Because back when I was blotto more often than not I played the ivory keys of the day like a bull elephant. Smashed the back of my palms on haphazard chords. Broke the delicate strings of relationships. Tenuous. Made it through recitals, barely. Intention was a word I erased from the page, preferring then to throw vocabulary to the wind. Now, hyacinths cower in a white dust of snow, and April is an infinite sc

by Melina Papadopoulos Daniel Lerman I have written poems, lined them with flowers, run the dirt of a dirge through my fingers. I’ve spoken of what turns to dust and then gathers it unseen. I’ve looked to the skies the dead leave behind: One wears the moon like a musky perfume, Another hides stars behind its storm. In this room, lilies parse sunlight from a white vase. I search for the bluest one, bright and reverent, one that burns into the darkness. In this room, my mother

by Joe Mills Alec Favale From my hotel room, I watch the sun rise and illuminate a line of cars circling a Starbucks on the other side of the parking lot. The light and line continually shift as I read about the poet Weldon Kees, who in a conversation with a friend asked, “What keeps you going?” and the sadness of that question flavors my coffee and morning. He disappeared afterwards, his car found with keys in the ignition, and some say he either “killed himself or went to M

by Nnadi Samuel Avinash Kumar A town this gorgeous once held rust. I offer myself as a vista for how war is perceived. the scaffolding with teenage lamp, spreading incense —  the way a pope’s lung stretches over a church of Psalm. I gaze past the bloodied notes. look what tarnishes this grassland: metal feel of rugged light, perishing the way a crayon self-destructs on the cardboard of doubt of name & buttoned landmines. of bloated promises — inked in wasteful ceremony. & whe

by Petra Chambers David Boca This feeling will not conform to any size or shape of slot, no matter how firmly I press, breathing cautiously until I hear the click that says it’s locked away. Loneliness is to be hurried away from, left holding its broken umbrella, long after the last bus carries the residue of multitudes, delivered, sorted, snapped up tight in stacks of boxes, neatly stowed in rows of rooms on dear & tidy squares of streets. It resists my efforts at containmen

by Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi Namnso Ukpanah it only takes the opening of the street to walk into my people’s cry. between the space of life and death, i’m swimming backwards in the river i will later discover to be the tears i gather every night of each day that loosens into a janazah. just after bidding the corpse farewell with an offering of peace assalamu alaikum, we said, a reporter asks if we know every dead we cry, & pray for. we show him our foreheads where our birthmarks ar