Michelle Moroses makes a powerful statement in her poem, “jeopardy people,” when she writes, “the ugliness will not stay inside of you forever. eventually it is going to let itself out…” This kind of statement likely resonates with many people,…
Welcome to LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons from Poets of Color, a monthly column in which writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo zooms in on an element of craft from the work of BIPOC poets. LINE LEVEL unfolds in three parts:…
Natalie Gates does what we all wish we could—she talks to herself, but herself actually talks back. In this tongue-in-cheek coming of age narrative, “intervention with an imagined older me,” a present-day Gates interrogates a later version of herself, hoping…
Jill Mceldowney’s “Are You Calling To Me, White Deer With No Horns?” brings threads of violence together, a kind of everyday violence that comes from the repeated way that we can all sacrifice our own needs for acceptance, or because…
The first lines of Youssef Mohamed’s poem published here represent a kind of challenge, or perhaps a threat. For those of us participating in the Sealey Challenge, reading a book of poems each day during this August, we can certainly…
“…Kate Winslet is a masterpiece all on her own / but in 2015 she disassembled both ventricles, they / no longer pump my heart,” writes Liz Sutherland. Their poem is eerie and ominous in the way it evokes blood and…
Raza Ayoob’s rhythmic poem, rife with layers of family and memory, recalls a moment of migration and hope. As the poem traces the veins of time, we see the way he repeats words and phrases but manipulates the details so…
Welcome to LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons from Poets of Color, a monthly column in which writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo zooms in on an element of craft from the work of BIPOC poets. LINE LEVEL unfolds in three parts:…
“Do not be fooled / by this impenetrable face. / I am origin,” writes Roxanne Cardona in her poem, “Luquillo Entre las Nubes.” There is a timeless, ancient feel to these tercets, and Cardona manipulates her voice into the specific…
Ali Wood’s emotionally charged depiction of this speaker’s experience shows the rise and fall of a Hallmark wedding commercial featuring lesbians, comparing it to the love story of her own two mothers and their wedding. Both bitter and sweet, Wood…
