Photo: Daniel Simon
Egret
The bird was just searchingfor food not metaphors –or taking rest from a day’s flight
It was dusk after all and its ancestorswho might have crossed the MiddlePassage, crosse...
Satiro della Valle, Capitoline Museums, Rome
Эти бездонные ночи в июле
Эти бездонные ночи в июле, О!Ты вопрошаешь: — Меня обманули? — Да, — отвечаю, — но как!
Лучше не спрашива...
Photo courtesy of the authorI.A mark across the body. The morning I watched my beloved uncle disappear down the alley. His car left sitting in our yard for thirty days. This tattoo we...
Norman Akers (Osage), The Gathering (2012), lithograph, 22 3/4 x 16 3/8 in / Courtesy of the artist (normanakers.com)
Summers we lie out on the hot porchpalms splayed—
raising flames from ra...
Tony Tiger (Sac & Fox / Muscogee),Intertribal / Courtesy of the artist(facebook.com/tony.tiger.5268)
I
Mix cultures of homeWest Africa West Indies disrupted along slave tradeFrench and...
Photo: Ruth Ellison/Flickr
for someone who’s been delayedon a cold, gray, rainy daytakes me backto that little girl waiting in the cold car with the littler onesas the night took over the skywhile he...
Photo: David Hepworth/Flickr
i pull my brothers from words, stupid injun, shot like bullets. when people ask why my brothers hated school i say: the spirit remembers what it’s like to be lef...
Photo: Jin Choi/Flickr
All the mangoes I’ve tastedin California were imported and lost their true flavors in transit. And, even though all the mangoes I’ve enjoyed in Hawai’i were homegrown and ripen...
Photo: Jake Bellucci/Flickr
What holds water in a droptension that holds humans in
between their sweet skins
water holds usher arms baystide of bloodbeat so close just our skins betweenhome and oce...
Photo: WerbeFabrik/Pixabay
A bottom-lit sea ponders the lake’s questions,their secret conversations thatch howls to whimpers exhaled from an isthmus of drowned wolves.
Its glossary’s cataclysms smoo...
Photo: Mark Brodie/Pixabay
between landscape and the female body:earth sand stones plants flowers blood
a silhouette
digging molding carving space
visible & tactile
between the body...
Photo: Granger Meador/Flickr
Our stuck tongues screamed louder In Alabama, words hung in a rhythm
Reservation hands could basket Tied back rocks rose, picked
Tarnished cigarettes unsupervised Betwe...
Marwin Begaye (Diné), Riders of the Storm II, lithograph, 15 x 22 in / Courtesy of the artist (@m.begaye2015)
That day my guardian angel was cast out,she responded, “Fine, your heaven is too bougie,a...
Photo: HeinerTenz/Pixabay
Daybreak
After the watch, dorveille,pin-prick of stud in sky,before that six a.m.first warbler wake-up callfrom elm above the deck,in dream a wife no longeranswers...
Kim Shuck, Warrior Trout (2016), 15/0 glass seed beads on brain-tanned hide, 9 x 2.5 in / Courtesy of the artist and Doug Salin Photography
Memory spirits give me days full of Words I’ve forgotten or...
Photo: David Cantu/Flickr
Brother piles sand on his pregnant girlfriend’s belly. On her sandy stomach I draw a belly button. Soon it will be dusk
and the last surfers in the distance will disappear ...
Photo: Dan Zen/Flickr
I think they know – about every leaf I’d catch to peel from my tongue. It spoke to how good I was at being alone. This morning I sit in the still kitchen, rued by autumn passing...
Photo: Mike Charest/Flickr
That slick envelope of developed film is tumbled in a storage closet next to old seating charts and a stale granola bar in foil.
In one of the frames, faces are locked in a...
Photo: George Moga
No.
Nothing.
Nothing on a really tall chair; a chair with very long legs; up to the sky, which was empty.
And down fell fragrance; fragrance of flowers, although there were no fl...
December 5th 2016 / No Spiritual Surrender by Zoë Marieh Urness (zoeurnessphoto.com), taken at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, North Dakota
there are persons who delight in human suffe...
“Vets Stream into Standing Rock.” Photo: Joe Brusky/Flickr
for Zhooniyah Ogitchida, with gratitude
He walked to the frontline in his Army combat shirt.On it, his sergeant badge, name tape, U...
Anila Quayyum Agha, Alahambra Nights (2016), acrylic and halogen bulb, 30” x 27” x 30” / Courtesy of the artist
Qasida of the Bridge of Teacups
The soul cleaves into two somewhere along the...
Photo: Tanya Hart
Go Thee
And the way you gathered up your excess soulbefore it spilled to the floor.At the end of the Hebrew-Yiddish-English poetry readingand you went to eat shawarma.
T...
Photo: Andreas Manessinger/Flickr
Old friend, when we meet, we will meetas two shelves of wings and many harsh years, as one imagination that won’t exchange toasts:there’s no one to stomp the grapes...
Photo: Susanna Hsing
Rhythm
Lucretius’s atomic rain falls graduallyabove daily congestion, wetting my earlobes with noise.I’ve swallowed the good parts of several dropssleepy dissonance.
On one side,...