Yesterday, I ate a lion for free, an elephant for the asking; and a leopard for my pleasure. I ate when I was not hungry, hunger stitched me into pieces and I could not eat. Hawkers and market women pleaded with me to accept a river, with two skies for a discount. If I decided to pay for an ocean, even the sea would flow along. Wherever my shadow fell, there the world was my limit. Now, the cub of a lion hides from me and the young elephant sharpens his teeth; though I was … Continue reading Shadows of their Bones by Jonathan Chibuike Ukah→
At the Concourse End of the Sky Bridge Discombobulated by my inability to sleep on a plane arcing across the wind-tossed top edge of Europe, the next thing I know we are making an unscheduled stop and I’m in a stop-and-start line where each passenger is being greeted in their native language by a woman who, when I get to her (she’s smiling) says to me, Welcome Good Morning, and I walk away marveling at not only the urge I am feeling to return to the back of the line so I can hear her … Continue reading At the Concourse-End of the Sky Bridge and Can I Pay Next Month What I Owe This Month?, 2 poems by Ben Sloan→
……………………………………………..Collision risks are growing every year ……………………………………………..as the number of objects in orbit ……………………………………………..around Earth proliferate. ………………………………………………………………………—CNN How can prayers make it through 130 million pieces of space junk careening and colliding at 18,000 miles per hour in an orbital graveyard bits of broken satellites, the remains of booster rockets and wreckage from weapons tests As violence spreads like head lice more and more prayers swirl the skies jostling and jiggling to make it to heaven and petition the Lord please one night without sirens ………….wailing us awake let my daughter learn to walk ………….on … Continue reading Space Junk by Claire Scott→
We usually consider mea culpas as good things, honest actions, purges of guilt, wiping clean the chalk smudged slates (to start again.) We want to regain a certain state of innocence, of internal peace. A sincere confession seems more purposeful than an everyday apology, a “sorry” which has become almost a place word in auto-fill conversations. So, what transgression(s) prompt me to spill my guts? Throughout my writing years, I have made notes on how I think poetry works (or doesn’t) along the lines of academic poets who write how-to books on how-to write poetry. … Continue reading A Confession by Fred Wilbur→
The forsythia outside my window has given up the brilliant citrus yellow and is fading back to the sticky green leaves. I am trying to hold a dull panic at bay. My aim is to steady myself, my nerves. I do not want to doom scroll exhaustively, rants and laments of our country’s frightening descent into chaos. Look out your window, I tell myself. Write about the forsythia’s brave first burst that ushers in the redbuds’ purple halo. See the lime green of spring grass and tiny leaves. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers’ Karamazov, Ivan, the … Continue reading Ars Poetica by Trudy Hale→
for Caitlin Daughtered with the dogwood’s dirge, we expect love to have seasons, ceaseless in its business of change, inconsistency its own persistence. Gravity and petals disclose the antiromance of an age ahead of innocence. The syllables in neglect are more dutiful than parents. Undaughtered onomatopoetics: the how creak of the floorboards, the could you of stiff hinges, a question mark of dust motes. When the father left, the river branched into three and she took a city of bridges. Maggie Rue Hess (she/her) is a PhD student living in Knoxville, Tenn., with her partner … Continue reading running like water by Maggie Rue Hess→
One mile into my daily jog, New Yorker poetry podcast in my ear, hoping for insights and hardware to Sherpa me up poetic Himalayas, and Mary Karr is reading Terrence Hayes’ Ars Poetica with Bacon, which leads her and host Paul Muldoon, to a number of salutary comments on rashers, including Mary’s confession that she never ever passes up bacon, and that given our genetic proximity to Sus scrofa, eating bacon is a form of Eucharistal sacrament, although as a Jew I’m thrown a bit by the host’s claim, though both Mary and Paul are … Continue reading Ars Poetica, Forbidden Fruit by Gary D. Grossman→
As if to be human is to seek the warmth of another body, ……………………………………………..skin and the course of blood beneath The blood beneath the skin of a city street, how it gives back ……………………………………………..the heat when dusk untethers from the sun’s radiant reach The radiant reach of the heat rising from the skin of the street ……………………………………………..as would any figure of lonely drift and form A form that you meet in the shape of its heat ……………………………………………..and carry into the cool clime of dawn. Ken Holland has been widely published in literary journals and nominated … Continue reading The Radiant Reach of Heat by Ken Holland→
I ready myself to read poetry for a group of graduate students. They’ve had the ingenuity to find an old, abandoned chapel near campus and turn it into a poetry space. Eavesdropping from a pew, I find myself listening once again to choruses of before; before the first published book, before marriages and mortgages and self-support. There are lots of munchies—I’ve forgotten how hungry students are, how irregular the meals. There are students reading poems from phones rather than spiral notebooks, whose edges might as well be the coiling of years between us. There is … Continue reading A Place to Hold Us by Sharon Perkins Ackerman→
Keeping Time The mayfly lives two days, a swallowtail butterfly two weeks. The last generation of monarchs born each year endure for months flying the hundred mile a day migration, ribbons, orange and black, unfurl high across the sky. Dragonfly nymphs thrive five years in streams hiding under roots and rocks. Arctic woolly bear caterpillars chew willow leaves for seven. Spiders spin their silk orb webs for twenty years, liquid in their abdomens pulled out as threads by gravity, like water stiffening to icicles. A human life is to the lives of stars as the … Continue reading Keeping Time and Awake in the Night, 2 poems by Patricia Hemminger→
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