Poetry

  • November 2013

       By Dorianne Laux
    When I was young and had to rise at 5 a.m.I did not look at the lamplight slicingthrough the blinds and say: Once againI have survived the night. I did not raisemy two hands to my face and whisper:Thi...

  • November 2013

       By Quraysh Ali Lansana
    Boy, don’t you kick that ball in tha garden. If you kick thatball in tha garden one mo time, imma tan yo’ little brown hiney!                                                Anna “Mut...

  • November 2013

       By Kathleen Hellen
    The vendor closing up on Wolfe and Monumentdeconstructs the skewered souvlaki. A striped umbrella on a truck.Someone buys a soda. Someone rents the scent of onions wafting up.How is it upheld? This fo...

  • November 2013

       By Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
                                        for the sharecropper I left behind in ’79  Thirteen years ago,   before bulk barns  andfifth gear diesel tractors, we rode ro...

  • November 2013

       By Rain C. Goméz
    Five years old, I am chubby, strong, husky, and brown. My hair bleached under southern sun smelling of saltwater, Spanish moss, and cedar, parted down middle pulled into pigtails, that droop in aftern...

  • November 2013

       By Brian Fanelli
    My dinged-up Honda sputtersto the next school, next class –Freshman Comp 101, where students in sweatsyawn away my 8 a.m. lecture and the new recruit quarterbackslouches at his seat, texts while his g...

  • November 2013

       By Jim Daniels
    If you have a map, eat it.The old man wedging curb-dirt under his nailswill give you directions for getting lost.Getting off the grid involves talking in tongueswith other tongues. Follow the sidewalk...

  • November 2013

       By Jeanne Bryner
    Behind our homes a road liesit suffers like a patch of skin alteredby its rash, a scarred spine, yearsof combined ruts. Aging fence linesborder the fields’ windswept grass. Retired from factory work,...

  • November 2013

       By Hakim Bellamy
    In the year of our Constitution, 1787, our country was already over 150 years into the practice of creating FREE & CHEAP laborers for life. And in 1786, printers in our then capital of Philade...

  • November 2013

       By Ibtisam Barakat
    Photo by Mike Baird/Flickr Scribbles on the Poverty Line When I was a girl in a poor familywe hung our clothes to dry on the povertyline,and with it I jumped rope.My friends saw and joined me.We were...

  • September 2013

       By Samiya Bashir
      White Body Radiation Every day adjustments   before give upbefore make do   start where a clothespin clips a nose and breath is held until – What is a thing of beautyif it isn’t us? And if a body i...

  • September 2013

       By ko ko thett
    Photo by Takeshi+81/Flickr §          Leaves and twigs on the ground Do I have to know the name of that tall tree to free-fall from her canopy? In my language there are 1,500 synonyms for penis, and...

  • September 2013

       By Edward Pasewicz
    Photo by Bill Barber/Flickr Essay on Caution Unmatched is freedom from ties,he says, giving me a dark blue plum.  I have frayed shoelaces and there is shameattached to these shoelaces, great shame. I...

  • September 2013

       By Norge Espinosa Mendoza
    Norge Espinosa Mendoza. Photo by Carolina Vilches In the wee hours of the sinister National Night,when winter is nothing, and nostalgia can barely endure,I return to you, I shield myself in you, I se...

  • July 2013

       By Mark Tredinnick
    Photo: Daniel Boud   This is my devotion, then: to walk sometimes                                             with the dog through the sclerophyll Cathedral of the morning. To let myself Off my lead...

  • July 2013

       By Jacques Roubaud
    Translator’s note: Roubaud wrote the first poem, “À cinq heures du soir” (itself a nod to Lorca’s famous “La cogida y la muerte”), about Warren Motte’s dog Lucy, who shared with her owner a g...

  • July 2013

       By Shakeel Badayuni
    Ghazal Shakeel Badayuni My heart longs to go beyond the obsession of love,and find joy in a new session of love.  Love drowned me in its tidesbut my heart hopes that was a mere dig...

  • May 2013

       By Zvonko Karanović
        Placing Everything on the Line Zvonko Karanović A car stops in the middle of the screena gentleman walks out dressed in black, wearing a hat,  grabs a frightened girl by the armblackmails her to...

  • May 2013

       By Roberto Castillo Udiarte
    Blues Cola de Lagarto   Su frenesí candentede espiral infinitamuere, revive– b...

  • January 2013

       By Lauren Camp
    Photo by Bu Yousef/Flickr At the Market in Baghdad, 1940 Every morning the elder took his sons to pray,then let them swim through the heat of the dijlawhile he and his servant went to marke...

  • January 2013

       By Mark Tredinnick
    Kookaburras in a tree. Photo by Jaraslavd/Flickr I thought it said on the girl’s red purseA kind of sad dance and all dayWondered what was being defined . . .The real love that followsEarly...

  • July 2012

       By Caitriona O'Reilly
    The Suicides They ask: the world gives them a stone,revolving until the greater part of her is in darkness. Out among the night-stations the signals falter,the mechanism of the cell winds down. We can...

  • November 2012

       By Kiki Dimoula
      Romantic Disagreement Of course I amagainst disturbing the moon.For many reasons.Not only is it an unseemly exaggeration—personally I’ve long avoided exaggeratingbecause of exhaustion—but it is also...
  • Dipika Mukherjee
       By Dipika Mukherjee
    Dipika Mukherjee. Photo by Bobo Lin, Shanghai. Dipika Mukherjee wrote the following poem in response to the August 5, 2012, Sikh gurdwara shooting in Wisconsin.     My name is Simra...

  • July 2012

       By Fred Dings
    Illustration by Ciaran Duffy/Flickr   The Blue Whale Our five-year-old daughter bubbles with laughteras she bounces on her bed, pure joy flashingin her eyes like the glint of fingerlings in sunlit wav...
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