Everything is intensified and wonder as one more way to go about the woods. Stay there for a bit and a bite into the word woods. How it wishes well in one breath—the trees’, regardless of time, wind, and want. Everything is intensified and wonder into the particularities of forests as opposed to trees and […]
Featured Poetry
Words of Collective Meaning
Cloud Migration
by Emma Bolden
I believed in silence as a gateway to a greater
silence, to the infinite zero some called God.
Your tax dollars kill kids and other American dreams and I am not myself
by Isaac Pickell
Your tax dollars kill kids and other American dreams It all seems very mundane, the sounds of children running, heavy clomping feet as they fast-dawdle down pavement headed nowhere so much as away from wherever their parent’s voice commands, gleeful cries receding into the safety of the middle distance, a comfortable fade that still promises […]
Minor Details and Don’t Look Back
by Joshua Gottlieb-Miller
Minor Details It’s not these artists, exactly, I worship— Chagall hidden in a blue flower, Soutine in swirling carcasses of beef— but the binding they self-fashioned: in red, in black and white, fastened to a dream as if through a firehose. I’ve reduced each generation before me to the story it tells about itself, of […]
AMERICAN OPTIMISM and ON ACADEMIC LIFE
by Whitney Koo
AMERICAN OPTIMISM The door leads to no room. You walk through and back without arrival. I won’t get political, only sad that a body is a dying thing. How to love a dying thing? They ask on the lawns of the university, only to be wagoned off in snow’s agenda. As if I could do […]
On My Parents Reassuring Me About the Future
by Zeke Shomler
“You have time,” they said, as if time was something I could hold, could own. They called me starling, a word so much like starving. Little star. In my earliest memory, I’m spreading toothpaste on their comforter: sticky-wet medallions of green purple gold. Nothing was dangerous then, not even the sting of menthol in a […]
Forging a Letter to Reach You
for Terceira Island, Azores, Portugal
by Ryan Clark
I uncover what I have touched, contaminated forever with touching, the America of it, the victory, beach sand affixed to the soft tissue of memory. So clear the heavy wind I can’t ever touch it, the home untouchable. A letter caught in vicious gust and flung 2,823 miles over an ocean is an uneasy document. […]
The Length of Water is Not Desert and Send Utopia
by Zachary Zalman Green
Loss is two oceans: /
the preview and the wake,
Splitting and Impatient Love Poem
by Virginia Kane
Splitting Outside Albuquerque, you pulled over your father’s Bronco to look for fossils. I wanted to go to Georgia’s museum, to stand in a room of her pistils and study how she opened things. You led me down a ravine, one hand on mine the other on a chisel in your back pocket, told me […]
Purple Rain and Queerspawn Creation Myth
by Isaiah Yonah Back-Gaal
“Once, I was a boy. / Tonight, there is a sunset.”
