by Maya Tevet Dayan, translated by Jane Medved

My father stands over the pots
in my house, baking sweet potatoes,
giving me back the taste
of a world where mothers still exist.

His hands slice thin answers
to my questions, laying
them in orderly rows: consequences,
actions, reasons, reactions …

by Iman Jaml Arbasy

I am alone, sitting in a restaurant in Jerusalem.
I order a Kanafeh for me and my friend—
who never arrives. The waiter makes a noise when
he puts the dishes on the empty table.

I ask for a cup of tea; I like to amuse the self,
the impatient self, with the presence of things on the table.
The smell of semneh in the Kanafeh is so strong; it tickles my nose
and opens the door for my tongue to taste …

by Shimon Adaf, translated by Becka Mara McKay

The poem carried her
through time

she lay reading on the balcony
on a sun-wombed border

a chrysanthemum ignited
the garden’s actuality
a well of gravity …

by Oak Morse

They’ve gotten my classes     crisscrossed

   sulking here     swallowing the wrong,

      compacted in       the regular classroom.

I belong

   in a seat that calls my name …

by Monika Cassel

Keusch bewahrt,/ In bescheidener Knospe: In downstairs Berlin bars she meets young men
while machines rip the city’s old seams, laying streets open for new phone lines.
Cranes raise their beaks to the winter sky; the city slips daily into new silhouettes.
Winter rain falling onto the roof of the gold-bricked brewery washes coal-smoke
from the air as the U-Bahn one block over rumbles overhead on high rails
and streetcars rattle below across the cobbles. It has been decades …

by Tobi Kassim

Just gravity pulling what free
bodies it touches down, and at times
their refusal. Despite this shaking over
the mouth of the trash, a plate
holding its residue. Adherence the new
law of frustration guiding
this moment …

by Daisy Fried

in a turbulent dream,
I wake troubled, confused,
a tabby nosing round the sheets…

the market stalls are dressed in meat,
bavetted, boned, ground to links
beady with nut and veg, dusty
with paprika and cheese—the art …

by Carolina Ebeid

Carolina Ebeid holds a PhD from the University of Denver and has had fellowships from CantoMundo, the Stadler Center, Lannan Foundation Residency, and the National Endowment of Arts. She teaches at Regis University’s MFA program and helps edit poetry at the Rumpus and Visible Binary …

by Kylie Gellatly

Kylie Fellatly is the author of The Fever Poems. Her visual poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, Poetry Daily, DIAGRAM, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Vermont Studio Center, and the Juniper Writing Institute …

by Rodney Gomez

Rodney Gomez is author of four books, most recently Geographic Tongue, winner of the Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, and Arsenal With Praise Song, recipient of the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters …

by Katrina Roberts

The poem is from Katrina Roberts' series, "Kennings: a book-length sequence of erasures based on Abingdon's Interpreter's Bible."
Katrina Roberts has published several books of poems including, most recently, LIKENESS. Her graphic work, poems, and visual reviews have appeared in BOMB, Poetry Northwest, the Ilanot Review, and elsewhere …

by Shane Eaves

I am grunting along the 60, returning

from Calvary Mortuary in East LA …

by Hannah Schultz

because no one else will. His eyes
are white and cracked like the moon …

by T.William Wallin-Sato

Last night I read Lorca in the bathtub
Three candles and an incense lit …

by Idalith Bustos

My cup of coffee has gone
stale in the late afternoon and it hits
me as the cloudy stuffiness of suburbia creeps
through the kitchen screen door: …

by Jennifer Bartlett

1.

I am your moon.
You are my light. …

by Quinn Gruber

You direct my eyes
to the yellow door of the bookshop.

Help me when I ask. Don’t just pull me …

by Tonya Suther

“What are you reading?” she asked,

from behind an orange mask.

In the past, I would have smiled, …

by Saleem Hue Penny

Rookie,   this shift blows–still,   wear your tie, though
    in time   you’ll goddamn the   Southside. Lord   knows

I’ve spilled   coffee, ink, blood’s the worst. June’s cursed,
    dead bodies ride the ‘L’,   too broke   to hearse.

Rent-to-Own   funerals. Hand-me-down wakes,
    violate parole, the drama they make:

gravesite / drive-by   hospice room/ hostage site.
    Handcuffs   cut off   handouts: Boy, keep it tight,

stand up straight! Dad’s splintered 2 x 4 screamed.
    More love for   his unit,   than us   we gleaned …

by Eva Griffin

From curator Stephen Sexton about the poem: "The spookiness of adolescence, small town life, tragedy. Poems like this, of loss and its aftermath, operate on a particular wavelength. As much as they transmit, some otherworldly resonance feeds back. I’ve no reason to think ‘Ritual’ happens in Autumn, but because it’s Autumn, I think of James Wright’s ‘Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio’ when I read it, and that poem’s proud fathers whose “sons grow suicidally beautiful”. Eva Griffin’s is a poem, among other things, of communication, of what is and isn’t said: the Oujia board certainly at the heart of these matters, or mute, concrete as a ledge. I’m haunted, in the best possible way, by the italics, the voices from elsewhere. There are two such voices from the elsewhere of the poem, where the universe, the poems says, is owed three" …

by Jessica Traynor

From curator Stephen Sexton about the poem: "In its splendour, this poem negotiates the double identities of woman and mother, the mild pleasures of of wine and popcorn, and everything else with which the body is consolidated and maintained. But the gold-laced wrists are braceleted, the body is, in its gothic elegance, a gibbet, that is to say, the frame on which the female body is publicly witnessed and known. Extending the witchy and incantatory poems of her books The Quick and Pit Lullabies, ‘what the women are doing’ is a subtle, sophisticated poem of intimacy and responsibility" …

by Dane Holt

From curator Stephen Sexton about the poem: "I’m compelled and frightened and full of admiration for this poem which describes the valedictory moments of its character, sent off, we suppose, down the river. Its ritualised violence is all the more striking for the casualness of its presentation and the strange peace of its victim and the attendant choir. The poem echoes the work of Shirley Jackson, of course, and James Tate too, in the mild surrealism of the flamingos curved into question marks. The everyday cruelty of small towns (and big towns too, and nations) is satirised here, and how easily it can be neutered by an idea of tradition. We’ve always been like this, the poem might say, we can’t change now" …

by Andy Eaton

From curator Stephen Sexton about the poem: "Andy Eaton’s poems have for me a rare, numinous quality. They feel classic, and agile, philosophical and, in this case, entirely of the body and its fragilities. It’s cartoonish too, in the way the world of childhood is often recalled; of clear, fundamental signs: the wonderful, inviting simile of the open fridge; the glass of milk. There’s a longing to the poem too, of course, that deep, plaintive realisation, between houses and homes, that there is no elsewhere to go to, you’re already there" …

by Nayelly Barrios

Let the sky flip and shake off its dust onto your forehead.

There is no time for rites. Every time you slept

the clouds would fill their lungs and hold …

by Cesar L. De Leon

1.
Sister Juanita buys cherry flavored
Lip gloss for the girls
Apple bubble gum for the boys
The lord’s prayer
Smells like a fruit stand
Under the summer sun …

by Edward Vidaurre

By throat is how we arrived

A cradle in voice

A passion & command

By hands is how we arrived

A touch …

by jo reyes-boitel

In a race for a tree, one Mexican soccer player almost beat the rain,
only to be met at the tree by lightning. Light, that cold sheet, replacing his blood,
joining with his muscle. His skin bursting into glorious copper …

by Jose Hernandez Diaz

I’m smacking around a piñata shaped like a palm tree. It is southern California, mid-summer. The palm tree piñata is swinging back-and-forth beneath the bright summer sun. It is my birthday. I’m thirty-eight years old. I don’t always act my age, yet I am …

by Aldo Amparán

there’s
  a woman
  screaming

on the radio
  a cry …

by Tania Langlais, translated by Jessica Cuello

Percival’s song
is an unruly beast
a howling story
I am a defiant
beast

*

I’ve gone too far
will you sail to the sea
with me
recover the drowned
like last Sunday
when this story
came to ruin us …

by Tomasz Różycki, translated by Mira Rosenthal

This world, along with several other worlds,
can fit into the outside pocket of my backpack
or in a bag from Switzerland procured …

by Simone Muench and Jackie K. White

I stood in a room that contained every moment—

it contained Tranströmer, insects, and charcoal …

by Aldric Ulep

1. n. part, fragment, piece: I watch her slice the peeled calabash gourd into tiny windshields. 2. v. agpisi: to cut up, divide: Bonnet-mouth fish fermenting in a glass jar, blue plastic lid browned with …

by Byron Aspaas

A writer forgets how to write
when a writer forgets how to see
oneself through words written,
the voice of a poem drives
all night to watch summer
fall into equinox to imagine
how words view the world
where words pique atop
the 35th floor of a hotel
built within a desert crossroad
a collection intersects thought—
occurs on a line, sketched, to begin
to write oneself cannot write
a reflection without water—each end
lines a memory to a momentary pause,
silent whispers escape as caesuras …

by Preeti Parikh

Born a hard seed
     I sprouted into a milky clump.
          Cotton boll picked,
               I was carded, warped, spun.

One amongst many, I arrived at the [ ]—
     wound, ready for the weaving.
          The weaver interlaced us tightly—
               his weft silken, glistening …

by Max Early

A lint covered clay vessel
hides inside the China cabinet
anxious for her slipware.

Potter’s hands lift her out.
His breath, a rush of wind,
frees her from dust and inertia …

by Kenzie Allen

There is no wall, yet
an ocean looms

lace currents, fingers into every inlet,

I’d call it a longer coastline …

by Fátima Vélez, translated by Camilo Roldán

From Roldán: "I met Fátima in New York City. Though she has been living outside Colombia for some time, Fátima's work is well known in Bogotá for the way it speaks from Eros and memory to address the varieties of experience where Colombia's political and cultural history become manifest. The work I chose for this publication not only reflects that Colombian imaginary, but presents it as the background to an unfolding theater of doubts, fears and defiance in the life of an expatriate" …

by John Galindo, translated by Camilo Roldán

From Roldán: "I heard about John's poetry before I read it or met him. Fittingly, this book-length poem, Diosestiércol, begins with a quote from Antonin Artaud: 'There where it smells of shit it smells of being,' which not only directs us to the lingering presence of the author as a miasmic specter, but perhaps to the divine nature of existence itself, as might be found in the pantheism of Baruch Spinoza. There is a search through psychic realms splayed across references to the ancient and the contemporary, in tropical heat and in the dream of seasons, whose surrealist-tinged self-mythologizing suggests the anarchist politics of sincerest punk" …

by Daniela Prado, translated by Camilo Roldán

From Roldán: "I first met Daniela at an independent book fair. Her wide range of activities—directly and indirectly related to poetry as such—are also representative of a contemporary push towards independent publishing that breaks with Colombia's staid institutional structures, creating spaces for new voices, specifically women's voices. For example, Mujer Oblicua (Oblique Woman) is not only a chapbook of sensitive, explicitly feminist poems, it is also the name of an ongoing project to highlight the work of other women writers through readings, interviews and other literary events" …

by Sergio Muñoz, translated by Camilo Roldán

From Roldán: "I first met Sergio at a poetry reading in Bogotá. While his work as a performer is legible within US spoken-word poetry, his main influence comes from cuenterismo, a form of storytelling performance that can be informative, comedic and didactic. The intersection of cuenterismo, paratextual literary mechanisms and political satire in his work—always self-aware and grounded in authentic experiences of everyday life—not only provides insight into the concerns of contemporary Colombian literature, it can also give us new models for how to experiment with form, voice and differing traditions." …

by Raquel Salas Rivera

En el centro del ring gira un círculo más pequeño,
las llantas de un carro que corre solo.
Metemos el mundo en las peleas más sencillas,
invocadas sin matices.

Es increíble que estaríamos de acuerdo
con apostar nuestras vidas
y las vidas que trajimos
a presenciar y girar
en revoluciones más tensas …

by Cynthia Manick

like the air ain’t filled with
coarse windchimes
sirens loud as a jet in flight …

by J. Estanislao Lopez

My daughter learned to point
in a cemetery.
There were many deaths that year. …

by Crystal Tettey

Sundays are for the depressed
half-naked
dancing in alleys …

by Khairani Barokka

because do calls this house an ecosystem

where straddling folioles tangle mighty-fisted

along a wire canopy he strung

above the brick-and-pot garden, and city fox

coming like a client for bananas they feed it sunny

and rats on rare occasion, ‘because this is an ecosystem’,

while i’d lie, wide-eyed for a tail out the window

and up there explosions of birdstrain, as though not far there isn’t …

by Anas Atakora

At the threshold of the sitting room
Standing
On the only stair that separates the door and the floor
The device snapped …

by Macaire Etty

We will keep wake up until the boundaries of insomnia
We will not sleep
We will pluck out the eyes of …

by Marie Ketline Adodo

What storm is brewing
With the falling of dead stars
That lie along these alleys of sea foam?

Suicidal waves
Rise and crash …

by Martin Egblewogbe

who now pleads with the ancestors
seeing with naked eyes the gates of the dead

who now sees the impossibility of life
finding at last the answer to the question

and wonders how it could all be so ugly
if it be under the power of god

and wonders how it could be so petty
despite the promise of colour and glory

now asks of the ancestors
illumination of the path to the end

now despairs with the ancestors
the lack of light before …

by Matt Donovan

From Erika Meitner: "I had the pleasure of reading Donovan’s forthcoming book The Dug-Up Gun Museum in manuscript phase, because I wrote a blurb for it–it’s due out from BOA Editions in 2023. As someone else who has written about gun culture in America, I was blown away by the nuanced way Matt takes on this topic from all angles, using narrative, lyric, and more documentary modes throughout the book. [The poem] takes us through NRA headquarters–and into the National Firearms Museum located in those headquarters–and recreates the experience in great detail, until the poem pivots to speak to America directly. 'America, I’m done / with prayers,' he writes, and goes on to meditate on the efficacy of poetry to solve a problem as big as gun violence, and the inevitability of anything changing when we drive the same roads literally and metaphorically over and over" …

by Susan Nguyen

From Erika Meitner: "Nguyen was a student in some of the first undergraduate creative writing classes I taught at Virginia Tech, and it’s been a joy to see her publish her first collection of poems this past year–Dear Diaspora, which came out from the University of Nebraska Press in 2021. What I love about Susan’s poems is how bold they are–they have a strong and distinctive voice, and 'I’m not sorry for the summer I gave you chlamydia' is no exception. It’s a pleasingly winding poem, with surprise turns every few lines–bees, a sexually transmitted infection, scientists with tiny microphones, and all of it is ultimately an unapologetic love poem stitched with humor and a little melancholy simultaneously" …

by Karisma Price

From Erika Meitner: "I first encountered Price’s poems when I read her application to our MFA program at Virginia Tech–it must have been almost five years ago–maybe longer. Her long and vivid narrative poems about her home city of New Orleans after Katrina stayed with me for a long time, and I had the pleasure of reading her forthcoming book I’m Always so Serious–coming from Sarabande in 2023–in manuscript form. 'What’s It Like Escaping Something Trying to Kill You?' is from her forthcoming book, and starts in a car with a family trying to escape the path of a hurricane. It begins as a road-trip list poem that plunges us into the immediacy of flight through palpable details, and morphs into a set of deeper existential questions around agency, family ties, caretaking, race and racism, and survival" …

by Danielle Pafunda

From Erika Meitner: "[It] is the closest of everything I’ve read that articulates the visceral feeling of mothering during the pandemic–in this case, as a state of drowning and stuckness and overwhelm. As we come up on the two year anniversary of the initial set of pandemic school closures and lockdowns, mothers are still in distress, our government has still not passed any kind of legislation or funding around paid parental leave, universal pre-k, or affordable childcare, and no amount of journaling or self-care tips can save us. 'The mothers were drowning' is both wholly surreal and utterly recognizable–the mothers are whale-human, beached, and have lost their sheen–they are in perpetual literal and metaphorical distress." …

by Soheil Najm

Shadows stick into the horizon
like thorns of flame.
I am a magician …

by Leeladhar Jagoori, translated by Sarabjeet Garcha

My story
is the story
of a hoe wearing thin …

by Gerrit Achterberg, translated by Thomas McGuire

The gloaming falls like ground.
In Holland lopes a hound.
A hound with yellow teeth …

by Boris Khersonsky, Translated by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky

All animals were once human, but then
they sinned—
and God flooded our Earth …