All Posts

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,...

Things We Will Forget about Whales by Laura Budofsky Wisniewski (published in Canary, Issue 47, Winter 2019-2020) How the shy ones sang...

Home on New Year’s by Dina Ben-Lev Never mind about being alone. At least when you need it, the bathroom’s unoccupied. Couples won’t...

Windigo by Louise Erdrich (published in her collection, Jacklight, 1984, Henry Holt Publishers) For Angela The Windigo is a flesh-eating,...

Soap by Karin Gottshall (published in Juked, 2013) It is full bitter winter when I begin to bleed. Too ashamed to tell. Aligning myself with the crows I take the back way home. Pages of book reports blown down the hill. What constitutes anger is passion plus a disappointment of hopes. Bad math. The body plus the smell of burning. The Pine-Sol ghost of the school hall and early mornings I can’t wake up. The fluorescent bulb was invented for us, and the closed window. Moths

I’m not a religious person but by Chen Chen (published in his 2017 book, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, BOA) God sent an angel. One of his least qualified, though. Fluent only in Lemme get back to you. The angel sounded like me, early twenties, unpaid interning. Proficient in fetching coffee, sending super vague emails. It got so bad God personally had to speak to me. This was annoying because I’m not a religious person. I thought I’d mad

You Tell Me You Want to Live Close to Nature by Joan Mazza (published in The Mark Lit Review , August, 2021) You plan to have acreage, a garden, pots with herbs on every windowsill. You’ll have a dog and cat or maybe two of each, and wildlife will gather on your property, a sanctuary. How lovely the fantasy of back-to-the-earth, the simple life. I plant basil seeds in handmade flowerpots painted with dragonflies and flowers, with potting soil I store in the garage. The mic

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now by A. E. Housman Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.

Saint Monica Burns It Down by Mary Biddinger (published in Valparaiso Poetry Review) It wasn’t her house, but she would strip it of its...

Arizona by Kaitlyn McNab (published in Electric Lit, Issue 171, 2021) I want to be whisked away to Arizona and kissed in the depression...

Poems I Probably Won’t Write About My Stepfather by Jennifer Stewart Miller (published in Crab Creek Review, March 25, 2021) On Holding the Phone to Your Ear the Night Before You Die So Your Half-Sister Can Read You a Poem On Missing Your Last Breath Because I Had to Stop for Gas Poem in Which My Mother Reminisces with the Funeral Director About Meeting Him When He Was a Little Kid How to Choose the Right Locally Sourced Wooden Urn for a Former Forester On

Thanks by W.S. Merwin published in Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) Listen with the night falling we are...

(The Mothman Leaves the Used Car Lot Empty-Handed) by Robert Wood Lynn published in his book, Mothman Apologia, from Yale University...