Sarah Carey’s “Consistency” breaks itself on the idea of the love poem—what changes in marriage that changes love? what changes in ourselves? With wet and gripping imagery and a voice interrogative of all, Carey’s poem creates new, loving, meanings for…
Ugonna-Ora Owoh composes a world wherein bodies reign—holy and radiant, so much born and buried from the thighs and mouths of “Belonging.” Notice the black grazed elbows, the swallowed saliva, the forbidden appendage. Notice the holy love for the earthly…
Nicole Stockburger writes in investigation of the evocative “crow-flying hour”—to fill the shape of a absent you with words, with mountains and fire and birds. “At Dusk when I Hear an Arrow” explains: time is never enough to fill the hole…
Hajjar Baban reveals in “Love Litany” a universal maternity—we all make babies out of our dreams one way or another. Our babies, who keep us up at night: as horror, as negotiator, as double, as hope, as center of all…
Charity E. Yoro’s prose poem opens the line to syntax in the way a prose poem should—the repetitive dependent clauses leaning against one another like dominoes, reflecting the speaker’s own “stained teeth” vulnerability. Even prose can howl, even prose can sing.…
“Aftermath,” by poet and translator Andrea Jurjević, performs the haunting which is its subject: the fall invades, inevitable. Filled with incredible color and texture, each tercet rolls forward as if of the ocean—as if to swallow our lost and our…
Calvin Olsen’s “Pavilion” puts its fingers on the fragile things: the light, the grapes, the seeds, the lover. He weaves here the idyllic rural as gently and quietly as any introverted dead before him. Pavilion Tucked away under the…
The motion of m mick powell’s “poem in which my whole hand fits in my mouth” zooms and widens as if from a telescope: the fully focused hand, knuckled and scented, then the jaw, the braids, the dancing and fluorescent…
As an elegy, “Those First Days” asks us, with good humor and friendly temper, to reflect on loss, on being trapped in tragedy’s den while beauty softly pours itself over the earth outside. Fay Dillof is mesmerizing here: gentle and…
Kaja Lucas captures an essential modern and American element in “by you, I see only blue light”—the feed, the incessant reference to what has faded and what demands to stay alive. Almost a sonnet, almost an ode, almost, finally, morning.…
