Poetry

  • A close up the dense textures in a piece of amber
    November 21, 2019 | Zheng Xiaoqiong
    Photo by Ervins Strauhmanis / Flickr 1 We maintain antiquity and elegance on paper; inside we are full of shame. We present heaven and hell on paper; our self-disgust results fro...
  • A photograph of an ivory-billed woodpecker
    November 7, 2019 | Linda Hogan
    Photo by James St. John / Flickr Fences I will never think of this in the same way, watching the woman in her daily brown skirt throw her own body against the fence and try to cl...
  • A group of people, clad in brightly colored clothes, march toward the camera waving the Hawai'ian flag
    October 28, 2019 | Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio
    Photo by Bryan Kuwada Aunty says She climbed a ninety-foot cliff in the dark Traced the scars of a long-forgotten waterfall Cried as she felt the green disappearing under her fingertips And I le...
  • The negative outline of a person blowing on a dandelion through which a photograph of a dirt road stretching into the distance can be seen
    October 24, 2019 | Brenda Delfino
    Photo collage courtesy of the author El Matador             after Argentina’s World Cup Victory in 1978 La Patria comes dressed in multiple costumes, during the...
  • A man sits outdoors in a thin yellow t-shirt with one arm draped over a block of wood next to a wooden airplane model
    October 22, 2019 | Sandra Meek
    Perfecto Santiago / Courtesy of the author Culebra, Puerto Rico, 2018 Let us sit in the open air where days I work, my hands shaping a small plane out of sticks. I tell you only what I l...
  • The text reads: Litekyan, proclamation, with typhoon wind, a precedent set by the white man’s purchase, from alcatraces, pelicans, prutehi, freedom within constraints, Litekyan, twenty-four dollars ($24) in glass beads, Fakmåta Guåhan! Barsandbullets, we protest life-fire training range complex, prutehi, prutehi, gone the hurricane of further desecrations, Litekyan, we offer this treaty in good faith, this tiny island would be a symbol of the great lands once ruled by free and noble Indians, fledglings swal
    October 8, 2019 | Lehua M. Taitano
    after Ai Wei Wei, Michael Lujan Bevacqua, and various documents of protest by Indigenous dissidents1,2    
  • A fig tree as dusk, dramatically lit in purple from below
    September 25, 2019 | Stéphane Bouquet
    Photo: AndyM / Flickr I imagine the crocuses also sometimes come down unexpectedly                 feverish, spreading their long green leaves through the wrong season. So it’s                 Oc...
  • A young boy pauses on his bicycle on a gravel road with the sun either rising or setting behind a makeshift wall
    September 3, 2019 | Zêdan Xelef
    A boy riding his bike near the Chamishko IDP camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, near the Turkish border / Photo by David Shook Non-Broadcast News Today a fire broke out in two tents The fami...
  • A spiny tree rises between sandy dunes as the sun rises in the right of the panel
    July 5, 2019 | Muhammad Harbi
    Chris Barnes, Egypt, December 2010 / Flickr To Hisham Harbi who said to me: “don’t stay in the shadows” but I didn’t listen   Epigraph rushing as always, my shadow jumped but...
  • The poet Phoebe Giannisi and translator Brian Sneeden
    June 20, 2019 | Phoebe Giannisi
    The poet Phoebe Giannisi and WLT Translation Prize (Poetry) winner Brian Sneeden Leaves Inside these articulations the beginnings of language outside of yes and no insid...
  • A whale surfacing, mouth agape
    May 14, 2019 | María Baranda
    Humpback whale / Photo by Wade Tregaskis / Flickr 7. For about a minute you spin and the world shifts galaxies. What germinates in your flesh is the viper’s dream. You slither through the underbr...
  • Thin, tapered, and lit candles arising from water
    April 25, 2019 | Sophia Galifianakis
    Photo by Dennis Jarvis / Flickr Bema In Greek it means step. In church it separates me from the nave, where the quiet sit and wait. Behind the screen the altar boys, age twelve, a...
  • A red balloon hovers mid-frame against a dusking sky
    April 11, 2019 | Meetra Javed
    Denisse Leon / Unsplash The Beginning Mother gave birth during an earthquake. She screamed, Mera bucha – my child. Inhaling, exhaling, withdrawing – Mera bucha mere pa...
  • A black and photo of a long shadow cast across what looks like a piano keyboard
    April 9, 2019 | Gary Fincke
    Richard Smith, “Piano Shadow” / Flickr A day without news. Left behind, last night’s lead story – a friend’s untimely death, his son surviving the head-on two miles from home. This evening, my n...
  • Thick sheets of ice warp to reveal a dark hole within
    March 26, 2019 | Brandon Rushton
    Ellenm1, ice formations, Barton Dam, Michigan / Flickr Dismissed from some other duty the drawbridge attendant questions the stability of days. As in: how long until what we’ve been holding on to...
  • A painting of a brown dog with just his head emerging from brown waters
    March 14, 2019 | Jonathan Fink
    A detail from Francisco Goya, The Drowning Dog, ca. 1820–23 / Museo Nacional del Prado I wish that I could find myself asleep tonight             in a house on the banks of the Manzanares,        ...
  • Coffee dregs sitting at the bottom of a red cup, as shot from above
    March 5, 2019 | Ruxandra Cesereanu, Gabriela Melinescu, Ioana Ileana Șteţco
    Iain Broadfoot, “Epic abstract art” (coffee dregs) / Flickr   The Storyteller by Ruxandra Cesereanu Just like that, we used to talk together in the café, not sitting down...
  • A statue of a reclining figure in a cemetery
    February 26, 2019 | Salvador Espriu
    Photo by Daniel García Peris / Flickr   The Pounding of Hoes The pounding of hoes — don’t you hear them? Behind high stone walls, unceasing, yet slow, beyond the folds of time. T...
  • A sculpted bust of the minotaur, who seems boyish and frail
    February 21, 2019 | Stephen Eric Berry
    Mercè Cañadell, The Young Minotaur and Ariadne / Photo by William Murphy Night Shift at the Globe I am the Master Leafblower, a.k.a. Tornado in Rags: Sopped, half dizzy, ears plug...
  • A desultory looking bar, decked with neon signs, presumably in Las Vegas
    February 19, 2019 | Rose Hunter
    Ty Nigh, “Atomic Liquor – Fine cocktails,” Las Vegas Desert View Overlook   the chipmunk’s prayer hands & hunched tremble munch & swipe at whiskers bat-like in front of bik...
  • Water lilies floating on the surface of blue water
    February 4, 2019 | Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee
    Natalia Rifai, “Floating Carpet,” Srinagar, Kashmir, 1990 on Agha Shahid Ali’s 70th birth anniversary February 4, 2019 I In the post office, moored to the ghat, Secret g...
  • A sculpted angel throws herself across a grave in a show of grief
    January 29, 2019 | Richard Hoffman
    Mike Schaffner, “Angel of Grief,” Glenwood Cemetery, Houston, Texas / Flickr In Which I Try to Imagine Justice   without a thought to efficiency, without a thought to deadlines, wi...
  • A large inkblot stain on white paper, through which writing on the opposite side just just be seen but not read
    January 22, 2019 | Nicholas Samaras
    The bruise of ink on white paper. The words that line transcription and record. I know I am more than this thin sheaf. The written name of my village can’t say anything about the openness of its...
  • A child's hand pressed up against glass with a moth perched on the other side
    January 17, 2019 | Sean Thomas Dougherty
    Greg Jordan, “Moth, Glass, Hand,” Sept. 2009 / Flickr Before there is sausage and bread And blood-red wine Like the light Over the great lake Are you a ship Or a sequin Something so tiny It c...
  • A black and white photo of elephants trumpeting at the edge of a water source
    December 7, 2018 | Achy Obejas
    Elephants in Etosha National Park, Namibia / Photo by Richard Jacobs on Unsplash for Reinaldo Arenas I have seen a land of regal elephants, you wrote some years ago, not many really, back w...
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