Poetry

  • April 25, 2019 Sophia Galifianakis
    Photo by Dennis Jarvis / Flickr Bema In Greek it means step. In church it separates me from the nave, where the quiet sit and wait. Behind the screen the altar boys, age twelve, ar…
  • April 11, 2019 Meetra Javed
    Denisse Leon / Unsplash The Beginning Mother gave birth during an earthquake. She screamed, Mera bucha – my child. Inhaling, exhaling, withdrawing – Mera bucha mere pai…
  • April 9, 2019 Gary Fincke
    Richard Smith, “Piano Shadow” / Flickr A day without news. Left behind, last night’s lead story – a friend’s untimely death, his son surviving the head-on two miles from home. This evening, my ne…
  • March 26, 2019 Brandon Rushton
    Ellenm1, ice formations, Barton Dam, Michigan / Flickr Dismissed from some other duty the drawbridge attendant questions the stability of days. As in: how long until what we’ve been holding on to…
  • March 14, 2019 Jonathan Fink
    A detail from Francisco Goya, The Drowning Dog, ca. 1820–23 / Museo Nacional del Prado I wish that I could find myself asleep tonight             in a house on the banks of the Manzanares,         …
  • March 5, 2019 Ruxandra Cesereanu, Gabriela Melinescu, Ioana Ileana Șteţco
    Iain Broadfoot, “Epic abstract art” (coffee dregs) / Flickr   The Storyteller by Ruxandra Cesereanu Just like that, we used to talk together in the café, not sitting down S…
  • February 26, 2019 Salvador Espriu
    Photo by Daniel García Peris / Flickr   The Pounding of Hoes The pounding of hoes — don’t you hear them? Behind high stone walls, unceasing, yet slow, beyond the folds of time. Th…
  • February 21, 2019 Stephen Eric Berry
    Mercè Cañadell, The Young Minotaur and Ariadne / Photo by William Murphy Night Shift at the Globe I am the Master Leafblower, a.k.a. Tornado in Rags: Sopped, half dizzy, ears plugg…
  • February 19, 2019 Rose Hunter
    Ty Nigh, “Atomic Liquor – Fine cocktails,” Las Vegas Desert View Overlook   the chipmunk’s prayer hands & hunched tremble munch & swipe at whiskers bat-like in front of bike…
  • February 4, 2019 Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee 
    Natalia Rifai, “Floating Carpet,” Srinagar, Kashmir, 1990 on Agha Shahid Ali’s 70th birth anniversary February 4, 2019 I In the post office, moored to the ghat, Secret gr…
  • January 29, 2019 Richard Hoffman
    Mike Schaffner, “Angel of Grief,” Glenwood Cemetery, Houston, Texas / Flickr In Which I Try to Imagine Justice   without a thought to efficiency, without a thought to deadlines, wit…
  • January 22, 2019 Nicholas Samaras
    The bruise of ink on white paper. The words that line transcription and record. I know I am more than this thin sheaf. The written name of my village can’t say anything about the openness of its…
  • January 17, 2019 Sean Thomas Dougherty
    Greg Jordan, “Moth, Glass, Hand,” Sept. 2009 / Flickr Before there is sausage and bread And blood-red wine Like the light Over the great lake Are you a ship Or a sequin Something so tiny It co…
  • December 7, 2018 Achy Obejas
    Elephants in Etosha National Park, Namibia / Photo by Richard Jacobs on Unsplash for Reinaldo Arenas I have seen a land of regal elephants, you wrote some years ago, not many really, back wh…
  • November 26, 2018 Sudeep Sen
    Photo: Marion Ettlinger [Meena Alexander, February 17, 1951 – November 21, 2018]for David, Adam & Svati Name me a wordGreat, simple, vast as the skyA word that has,…
  • October 30, 2018 Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee 
    Statue of Gandhi along San Francisco’s Embarcadero / Courtesy of Ilya Yakubovich / Flickr To the farmers who braved the police on Gandhi’s birth anniversary The farmers left their f…
  • September 21, 2018 Frank Sherlock, Carlos Soto-Román
    María Verónica San Martín, from In Their Memory: Human Rights Violation in Chile, 1973–1990 (2012), silkscreen, digital print. San Martín is a Chilean born, Brooklyn-based artist currently w…
  • September 4, 2018 Brian Swann
    Photo by Andrew Neel / Unsplash   Journal, or Story Without Words And I follow the hand copying what it had written years ago,never knowing it would…
  • August 10, 2018 K. Eltinaé
    Photo by Sabah El Basha heirloom  Ninety thousand men, women and childrendragged their dust to rivers,dams were never built for. Under six cataractslie the bones of my ancestors.Under my bed is the c…
  • August 7, 2018 Don Schofield
    Sunset on Ithaka by T. Zengerink / Flickr Once on Ithaca Walking the harbor that day, I saw a cronesitting at a loom on her front porch.Was this Penelope, I wondered, weavingin midda…
  • August 2, 2018 Shakti Chattopadhyay
    Photo by Paul Streltsov / Unsplash   Grief that is now old, I ask it to come and sit near me today.I’m sitting, there’s my shadow, and if grief indeed comes and sits beside meI will feel quite good;…
  • July 26, 2018 Samantha Thornhill
    Photo: Peter Dressel Protective by defaultaffectionate by design apron, youare my mother:sweet bread bakingblue veins racingdown white expansedotted with delicioussplatter and spill. My mother woreyo…
  • July 18, 2018 Linda Hogan
    Photo by Michał Mancewicz / Unsplash Bathing with Tender Care And not this time the body of my child,but my own skin, loving the wrinkled kneesand the scars dealt t…
  • June 26, 2018 paula ilabaca núñez
    Photo (left to right) - Translator Rowena Galavitz (courtesy of  Emerson Richards) and author Paula Ilabaca Núñez   Hell hang the heartsBlack and dull as the…
  • June 19, 2018 Fabián Casas
      Lifecycles I was chatting with your executioner,a sweet, tidy man.He said because it’s me,I could choose the way you go out.He said when Eskimos get old,they wande…