In this poem, Chris Watkins utilizes religion, spirituality, and modernity to reclaim queerness with evocative language. Note from the author: “This poem employs queerphobic language. I am a a genderqueer poet and feel comfortable using/reclaiming the language as it is…
“When he handed them over, earrings dripping with teeth—the heavens / howled in protest & the silver tigers cried out.” Arya Vishin tactfully uses imagery inspired by the epic story, Mahabharat, to delve into the nuances of devotion. In the…
“Some day, I realize, underwater archaeologists / will find, upon necropsy, the artifacts of my brief presence / in the stomach of the last Great White that entered the lagoon” Take a deep dive into the crystalline imagery of “Some…
“I said flesh / was a soft patch of wheat, a half-knotted rope. I said / rain was the unnamed radar sound in a dinosaur rib.” Shiyang Su zooms into a singular moment between the speaker and their father that…
There is an earnestness to the inward reflection that comes from the boy in this poem, who is moved by a whale. He slowly uncovers the hatred of men, the fear of what one might become, and the urge to…
There is beauty in release. A freedom in succumbing to the water that envelopes us. Louise Kim shows us, with rich texture and calming imagery, that there is a lushness in letting go. Looking up and glimpsing the light can…
The implied sterility of a hospital bed; communication through a tablet; processing death in a sterile environment. These experiences during hospice care are contrasted beautifully with changing seasons in Leland Seese’s poem. The silence of the words a fatherly specter…
In Ashleigh Xindan Kennedy’s poem, the reader is trapped between past and present, longing and loss, put into the perspective of both Icarus and the Minotaur. The narrator explores what it is to be human or maybe not human at…
Divyasri Krishnan’s “Ars Poetica” perfectly balances the pastoral image of a flighty canary with the urban one of languishing on a train. These two central scenes build a sense of tension, an ode to liminal life spaces– to the “beauty…
It might be nostalgia, it might be the winter world around us, but we’re desperate for this poem of summer by Winshen Liu. In the midst of wherever you may be, let her latest poem sun your head and fill…
