Poetry

  • DESCANTS

    by Damian Smyth

     

    1. Christmas Lights

    What made it December, in the fields, was that everything
    Was silent, except for the ice creaking in every blade of grass,
    As if each one …

  • Aviary

    by Anna Loughran

     

    Milling about before the clinic
    opened for a routine blood test,
    I walked through a flurry of parakeets,
    ducking as they swooped to feed
    on blueberries & sunflower seeds,
    & …

  • Exact Fits Make Me Superstitious

    by Dean Browne

     

    The fusty pinstriped suit jackets of larger men
    are sagging the racks. Stretch full length in one until
    your ears surge and still your fingertips won’t reach
    out of the …

  • Cats of Cádiz

    by Miriam Gamble

     

    Cats own the breakwater rocks of Cádiz. This has been decreed – or has grown up as a consequence of cats deciding it and congregating there: Cats own …

  • Only the Water

    by Brandy Nālani McDougall

     

     for the stolen water, lands, and lives of Hawaiʻi, and especially those of Lahaina

     

    to divert, to steal, to hoard,
    to pollute, to contaminate

    to leak fuel   into
    to …

  • It was now when it happened

    by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe

    Editorial Note: This poem twins a Māori legend of the pīwakawaka (New Zealand fantail) with an Irish myth concerning Diarmuid (son of Donn), and …

  • 7th North Street

    by Matthew Petit

    Glowing cross red neon perched
    like a robin on the church roof vaulted
    made of stone thick tresses of ivy

    spill from it afternoon light scatters broken
    images of the Virgin …

  • WHEN THE LETTER ARRIVES

    by Ezra Fox

     

    My dad’s letter sways the mailbox slant.
        His name, reduced to a number, weighs
    heavy, loosens the red plastic flag
        from its hinge.

    Prison is a war …

  • Washing My Mother’s Hair

    by Allison Albino

     

    I. 

    My mother’s nightly ritual: sitting 

    on the floor in front of the hallway 

    mirror, a wet comb, the right 

    amount of hair. She ropes 

    a plastic pink curler 

  • The Neighborhood

    by Aaron Banks

     

    The wind grows furious as the grounds
    around my house sicken. My neighbor’s
    been pointing at a tree bordering our
    properties with a gash down its trunk.
    All I …

  • Honey Hole

    by Jennifer L. Knox

     

    The lower my estrogen dips, the more young
        men (in their delicate, whole-body certainty
    that shatters like that, like ice calved off a glacier)
        grow downright adorable. …