Poems

The Letters of Robert Oppenheimer: Postscript by Hildegarde Flanner (originally published in a review of the book The Letters of Robert...

The Pivotal Kingdom by Alice Fulton (published in her 1994 book, Powers of Congress, David R. Godine, Publisher) A head capsized the wild...

A Voice Speaking Out by Faye Turner-Johnson (published in Sky Island Journal, Issue 7, Winter 2009) I have a voice that roams wild...

Chimera by Vievee Francis (published in her 2016 book from TriQuarterly Books, Forest Primeval) She's not "maternal," she's dangerous....

we only took pictures of special events. Film was expensive and getting photos developed was even more costly. And we got charged for...

Advice to the Photographers of Atrocities by Judith McCombs (published in The Anthology of Women Poets, 1973, edited by Pamela Victorine,...

Poem for My Love by June Jordan (published in the 2005 collection, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan) How do we...

Life on a Killer Submarine by President Jimmy Carter (published in North Dakota Quarterly, 60:1, 1992) I had a warm, sequestered feeling...

Ode to the Maggot By Yusef Komunyakaa (Published in his 2021 book, Every Day Mojo Songs of Earth; Farrah, Straus and Giroux) Brother of...

The Saturday Afternoon Blues by Wanda Coleman (published in her book, Imagoes, 1983, Black Sparrow Press) Can kill you can fade your life...

The Lion by Conrad Aiken (published in his book Cats and Bats and Things with Wings, 1965, Atheneum, drawings by Milton Glaser) The lion...

Theme for English B by Langston Hughes The instructor said, Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of you— Then, it...

Art Thief by Neal Bowers (published in his 1997 book, Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiaris, W.W. Norton) All art defines itself...

With Emma at the Ladies-Only Swimming Pond on Hampstead Heath by Linda Gregerson (published in her 1996 book, The Woman Who Died in Her...

Homecoming Tallahassee by Kavita Gandhi (published in The Loch Raven Review, Winter 2009) We passed into the city like sterile vessels...

Theory I’m Conspiring to Share by Kristin Berger (published in her 2022 book, Earthwork, published by The Poetry Box Press) Love is...

Sparus by Tolu Oloruntoba for Anthony Bourdain (published in Under a Warm Green Linden , Issue 6, 2018 ) This neural mesh, the coral brain of sads, knows when another of us is sunk. Some speak of Grey Goo, the mitotic mush that will eat the world. It already has, and the Sertraline suds of our sewers have not washed away the denticulate scum, the flocculant ar

The Struggle Staggers Us by Margaret Walker Alexander (Originally published in Poetry , 1938) Our birth and death are easy hours, like sleep and food and drink. The struggle staggers us for bread, for pride, for simple dignity. And this is more than fighting to exist; more than revolt and war and human odds. There is a journey from the me to you. There is a journey from the you to me. A union of the two strange worlds must be. Ours is a struggle from a too-warm bed; too cl

Who Has The Whip-Hand Over Aimless Animals by Patricia Lockwood (published in Zone 3, Vol. 25, No. 2, Fall 2020) Who has the whip-hand...

Out, Out— by Robert Frost The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,...