Poetry

Stefanie Kirby

My body opens like a highway sinkhole. It’s a baby someone shouts and I know they are wrong. It’s a baby I shout, still wrong.

Stefanie Kirby

My body opens like a highway sinkhole. It’s a baby someone shouts and I know they are wrong. It’s a baby I shout, still wrong.

Jennifer L Freed

We’ve worked / for this / intimacy—
/ me, letting go / of my need / to know, //  you, trusting me / to let you / be.

Gloria Heffernan

Why do they want to see pictures / of what they looked away from / in disgust?

Daniel Brennan

People never want to leave the party, do they? Drinks full, lips / red, lies told to the point of truth. We’re waiting out the silence.

Alyssa Froehling

I’m a fair sacrifice. Steel tools pass in and out of me / like parishioners through the threshold / of a heavy door.  My flesh holds too much / that I cannot see.

Yakir Ben-Moshe

The street was quiet. A dog pissed on my motorbike chain / & I waved away the smell with my hand. / I got home, I gathered up my cat Zelda, / we listened to Leonard Cohen “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” …

Tom C. Hunley

this toddler toddles up to my table / and says Hi over and over, like fifty times, / or maybe he’s saying high because honestly / he’s behaving like a meth head who just got / out of a mental hospital

Tess Jolly

two children are rolling side by side / through images projected on the floor: // a train runs across the wheat field in Montmajour / onto their T-shirts

Cory Henniges

I google the name of the bird that is looking at me. / The black bird with red on its wing is called / the Red-winged Black Bird. / This has given me confidence in naming the rest.

Dmitry Blizniuk

We ate our youth from the knife. / Night fishing trips, moonlit dates, / and you, a jug-eared hero, / burnt yourself with naked girls’ flesh, / like with hot fish soup.

Svetlana Turetskaya

October 25, 1917 and the place is Petrograd, Russia, / and the horse pulling my stagecoach is whipped / mercilessly all the way to the Mariinsky Theater

Paul Hostovsky

He was my best friend in 2nd grade / and 3rd grade and maybe 4th grade too. I don’t remember / when it happened exactly, but he had a sledding accident / at the bottom of that hill

Addison Zeller

I will never entirely approve of the Frenchmen I meet, because they will never be the true Frenchman I apprehended in childhood.

Cathleen Calbert

I’m adorably playful while he never says / anything about my own womanly tush / (because he’s not insane) or my clothes or tits.

Clint Margrave

We are in bed talking about Queen Elizabeth’s death / and the ascendance of Charles to the throne. / “They should have made me king,” I say. / “You?” she says. “You’re too lazy to be king.”

Andrea Hollander

As if without a man, winter could take over. / But I loved winter, love winter still, so / what am I trying to say?

Elisabeth Adwin Edwards

My violence astonishes me some days, the way I regard the lesser / goldfinches in the lavender, each the size of a thumb, I want / to cram them into my mouth

Jeanne Wagner

I would tell him I told the officer you didn’t rape me. Because I was awake that morning before six. Because I was dressed for work. For the world.

Michael Mark

Trust my inabilities. They are / reliable as gold. Count on the / gravity of my fragility. It will / always let you down.

Adam Berlin

He holds the cigarette far out on his fingers. Like they teach in acting class. Tight to the chest. Tough guy. Tip of the fingers. Aristocrat.

B.A. Van Sise, Photo: C.S. Muncy

B.A. Van Sise

I have been asked to teach / a workshop at the public library / about found poetry and I / do not know what that is.

Frances Klein

The suspension slips pile up / like maple leaves in October. / The golem’s parents enlist a therapist / and a tutor, a rabbi and a cool college student / from the Troubled Youth Mentor Center.

Timothy Green

All I really want are the Seven Wonders / of a Marriage. Find me standing in line for / the Marvels of Your Many Moods.

Cleo Qian

Your books, I still can’t find them. / For years, when I remembered to, I looked. // Your legacy: an image of a split head / bleeding into a river.

Saddiq Dzukogi

Even / though I loiter on the cliff / of a love that wants me, I refuse / to fall.

Italo Ferrante

oh I love / how a tree bisects our garden / so we can reunite every time / we stumble on the other side / of our legs

Benjamin Paloff

After I’ve spent all day talking about concentration camps, my father tells me to get him out of this concentration camp. It’s his birthday.

Jenna Le

Before homo sapiens, the woods on this hill / were thick as a young bride’s wedding-night-tangled hair, / coronet of sunlight bedazzling / a canopy miles above moist earth

Rob Shapiro

I throw my voice / to the end of my life and what comes back / is bird chatter, dog whimper, a bow drawn / across a cello’s neck.

Klein Voorhees

All pilgrimage is trans · / position of the throat and hands / palming prayers into  the crooks of an unfamiliar / coastline

t.m. thomson

See how possum’s eldritch teeth chatter — a warning of the way the lowly can take the diseased into body, break it like bread.

Steven D. Schroeder

The children find themselves farther than they are. To return home means to earth. In their eyes, forest. In their hearts, more forest.

Ashish Kumar Singh

You have grown enough to know / that everything will kill you if you let it.

Julia B. Levine

Someone please remind me that it is okay / to feel terror and a terrible sadness at the visceral forge / where our friendship passes now into my sole keep.

Denise Duhamel poet

Denise Duhamel

I cut the line, honk my horn, chew with a full mouth, / then burp. The piercings in my ears have closed, / my heart has closed. And my clothes? I’ve stopped / doing laundry.”

Gaurav Monga

This Radha, unlike the one I spend most of my waking life with, drives a car with impeccable accuracy, almost as if she has eyes at the back of her head. This Radha, though cold and calculating, has been having sex with many men behind my back. 

Zach Gomez

There’s something grounding about a god who knows his place. Yet there’s something terrifying about a god who knows how to bring us down with him.

Helena Pantsis

Helena Pantsis

Husbands are not so hard to make: / my father is three microwaves / stacked on top of each other.

John Bonanni

John Bonanni 

Away from the key rattle of an office, / exiled from a bathroom, a school, a hospital / into you I return like the scratch on a vinyl

Dzvinia Orlowsky

Dzvinia Orlowsky

Raised to be polite, / I offered each lawyer / tiny sweets, iced / water with a bitter twist

Jessica Goodfellow

Jessica Goodfellow

There are things ha-ha funny about going / blind though. Like that time he walked / wearing a three-piece wool suit into the deep / end of a swimming pool in a hotel in Italy.

Erika Eckart

Erika Eckart

Maybe the witch wasn’t a witch at all, not to start with at least. She was just a mother who couldn’t feed her babies …

Imran Boe Khan

Imran Boe Khan

The baby onesie I stitched in the garage / became a colony of ants that nightly streamed / down my cheeks.

Lisa Bass

Lisa Bass

My joy / comes shot through with longing / it will not linger / for days like that acid gas. / I might have only moments / left before this exhilaration / dissipates

Sam Szanto

she is rising alone, pirouetting to her balcony / to throw her sapphires onto the street / as the audience gazes, she is laughing

Paul Hostovsky

I want bicycles to be my last word, my dying word — / not I love you, or bless you, or God forgive me, / but bicycles.

Jan Borna. Photo by Martin Špelda

Jan Borna

snow falls on horses hauling wood / beyond the opaque windows, / our seats shake over the tracks / and you touch my knee

Erin Wilson poet

Erin Wilson

I dream of holding a baby / a simple dream // My body will not let me // I dream of lying on the earth / a simple dream // My body replies, some day …

Max Sessner

This dog / how he looks at me / as if we must have known each other / I pay and / we chat a little longer / once we were / like brothers he says

Anna Belkovska

At night fish scales and the yellow brilliance of holy figures would glimmer in me.

Semyon Khanin

the future is the raw, then it gets braised in the present, and finally fried to doneness over low heat

Inga Pizāne

You get used to everything. / To contemporary dance and poetry. / To Bukowski, who drinks and fucks in every third poem / and sends everyone to hell.

Petr Hruška

True darkness is in a child’s bedroom. Deep black. Elsewhere there’s just a meager, watery twilight, in which everything, in the end, acquires a humiliating distinctness.

Jeff Friedman

The autocrat draws a large crowd for his speech. He begins to speak but no words come out.

Gerry Stewart

Calling this city my home / is a weighty dream I cannot cast aside / or let them haul away.

Jeffrey McDaniel

Little kisses have a way of growing / into big penises, said the grandmother / on prom night. Little leaks sink a ship / yelled the captain, seawater on his lips.

Joshua Weiner

The sun was high, and it was like the air wanted to have sex with you. Looking down I could see him slowly make his way along the street, stopping to say hello to someone, a man waiting with an old style hat …

Karel Šebek

I was in the madhouse I’m going to be in the madhouse I am in the madhouse everyone is / I write to keep the train on course to crush me / it’ll happen on a morning no less beautiful than this

Charlie Clark

My friend / the advertiser reminds me it was the poet / Lew Welch who came up with the slogan / “RAID Kills Bugs Dead.” He was a Buddhist, right? / I don’t know why he killed himself, but when he did, / his body was never found

Clint Margrave

Even if they exist, we are still alone. / Not like they’re going to invite us / to any of their parties / or read any of our books.

VJ René

After breakfast I force his genitals through the wind / shield of the white convertible, crying like a child. // The situation allows me ample freedom to explore / myself in various trajectories.

R. A. Allen

Friends and loved ones visit less and less, / and then not at all. Maybe they’re starting / to get the joke, to figure out we’re not down / there in those holes. Look up. We’re here —

Patrick Redmond

I say lovely too much, & it means nothing. / Outside is lovely. / The purpled sun is lovely / in its polluted backdrop / The shadows of men dangling from the roof

Beaver West

Springtime, I’m stoned at the wake. / Dad’s gray face sunk in makeup / asleep in the box. Mom weeps, / holding hands with the drywall guy.

J. Alan Nelson

Pablo Picasso enters his blue period / when his best friend stands from his plate / in the middle of a Paris café / and shoots himself.

Susan Barry-Schulz

On the island of Saaremaa I would have been considered a beautiful bride. No / shame there for size ten feet and thick calves wide thighs and no wonder.

Justin Lacour

I am a coward, / even in the service of exposing kids / to beauty

Siobhan Ward

Someone shouts There’s a fucking kid shot in the head. / After your death, from Belfast to Florida, your face / on murals. They say Lyra lives on. But that’s a lie.

Tim Postovit

I was the last place on the planet / where astronauts slept / my last customers were the planet’s / last people

Nelly Sachs

Which vein burst / to offer the holy geometry of yearning / a homeland in your eyes?

Mark Scroggins

Mark Scroggins

That thing you forgot to do last year / has turned out to be important.

Josef Kučera

There was a rippling pond and the croaking of frogs / and various birds anas crecca, / there was the tingling of sand on the Borecké Rocks / and the cracking of pinecones

M. Nasorri Pavone

I asked a man I was in love with once / if he was in love with me. No, he said.

Eric Nelson poet poetry poems

Eric Nelson

Eric Nelson’s new collection, Horse Not Zebra, which includes “The Creature,” will be published in 2022 by Terrapin Books.

Karel Šebek

Karel Šebek (1941-1995?) was and remains the most astonishing figure of modern Czech poetry.

Jessica Q. Stark

Jessica Q. Stark is a poet and educator living in Jacksonville, Florida. Her first full-length poetry collection is Savage Pageant (Birds, LLC, March 2020).

Pavla Melková

Pavla Melková is a practicing architect, visual artist and writer who regularly lectures on art and architecture.

Angela Topping

THE LAST QUEEN My sisters, deep in our cells, are still feeding me. But I know I will be their last queen.The succession dies with me. My

A. N. DeJesús

SPELL FOR ELSEWHERE An angry bleat urges me to fasten the seatbelt, metronomic clickof the blinker punctuating its screech-song. The windows are down & the

Radka Thea Otípková

OF Of my father’s failure to perishaged five        of rheumatic feveras well as his father’s undrowned boyhoodof my mother’s mother’s lilies-of-the-valley in a church

Patricia Zylius

MY FATHER TRIED TO TEACH ME THE FOXTROT The simple, square geometry of it was clear to me, but I couldn’t follow him.My hand on his

Sara Moore Wagner

NOT ABRAHAM When the dog wakes me up at 5 am,I wish for a coyote to get her and thenregret that only after I’ve takenthe

Milan Děžinský

NOVEMBER Such a picture of witheringdemands active engagement.Chrysanthemums bloom into the snowlike the color of a wounded animal.A free moment between incrementsof time filled with

Derek Ellis

CLOUD STUDIES Constable, in Hampstead,paints hundreds of clouds in oils on paper. He’s precise,dating them, adding commentary to their backs. His wife’s healthis nodding away

Christian Formoso

NEW DOOR STREETCALLE PUERTA NUEVA, SEVILLA from here—across the forehead—to there. he motions. although the pronouncement promises little. the excess description would suggest quite a

Justin Lacour

These words may make you uncomfortable. I won’t say I don’t care what you think.  Too many people told me that growing up; I won’t say that to you.

Francesca Bell

PREFERRED PRONOUNS: WE/US/OURS In the name of accuracy and inclusion In the name of full disclosure That we may say we love us and also

Kelly Grace Thomas

THE RING-TAILED LEMUR THAT SMELLS THE WORST IS IN CHARGE OF THE ENTIRE GROUP During face-the male odors himselfto victory.Rubs himself sticky in pheromonesfrom chest, cock.Saturates tail in

Douglas Piccinnini

PALM ROSE A moment goes unnoticed or cautiously glidesinto meaning fearful of its makingout of sequence, plotless and blessedwith almost “stupefying tones” but steadilywalking through

Michael Collier

MORNING CROWS IN A FRESH MOWN FIELD BEFORE RAIN Three in a group then one coming from a distanceto make four dividing into two scavenging

Max Sessner

ANGER I want to be someone else ayellow midday spreads itself outall the way into my pocketwhere coins clink and myfist lives with which today

Jeff Friedman

THE VOICE IN THE BUSH A fire burned in the bush outside my home. I stomped on it, but it wouldn’t go out. I threw

Brooke Schifano

LITTLE SHORTS Little Shorts, I bite my lip watching you billow up a breeze. Little Shorts,you tease. That loose fit. That wide stride. Know you

Sheila Dong

ABSENTEE a plastic sword sits in the dirt, next to a blank sandwich board. no one else is around so i wear the board and

Jeff Fallis

A talisman against the agony /
in his knees and hips //

for which he was taking /
black-market fentanyl

Vítězslav Nezval

I greet your gliding flight O wings of death / But there are other signs too

Ondřej Buddeus

The initiating parameter was me realizing that the horizon is a line constituting an intersection between at least two systems, the inner and the outer one. Between an observer on the move and the roads within the landscape …

Richard Jackson

the story / the two white women will not retract, despite the fact /
that inside each story we tell another writes itself