Jose Padua: Another Friday Night Lost in My Head vs. the Collected Songs of the Filipino Genius
the people have
heard enough of everything
that’s real and want nothing
more than something
that’s easy to believe
James Crews: The Poetry of Connection and Joy | A Conversation with Michael Simms
My husband is a farmer, so we often wake up before first light, and I go off on my own with a big cup of coffee to scribble in my notebook for a few hours.
John Zheng | Valediction: Poems and Prose by Linda Parsons
Parsons’s contemplation moves from shaping garden beds to shaping life. Garden is an island of necessity where her “orbits in and out of the perennial beds” have shaped her life for thirty years.
Elizabeth Savage: Five Sijos
His father’s death left a star-sized hole in Oklahoma. Alive,
mine is already all absence, out of breath with wishing to be
light like the deer he kills. Out of range, he seems small. Up close, smaller.
Rick Campbell: Two Poems
Here, in the modern invention
of South Florida, I am trying
to remember a place that never was.
Doug Anderson: Carnivale
Saw them moving through the ground fog
like fly-casters moving against the stream
and the moon rolling with them
in the spun glass of it
Pascale Petit: Salt Bride
How long has Earth floated in her salt dress?
When did her bridal gown crystallise,
weighing her down like an anchor
inside a dead sea?
Chard deNiord: April
There is a new quality in the air: a sweet
fragrance from the first flowers—that smell
spring passes under your nose to wake you
again, more than wake you, stir you
Majid Naficy: Stomach Ulcer
The night that Father packed his suitcase
To travel to America
I ran to the alley shops
And bought a package of barberry candies
Emily Suzanne Carlson: Motherhood
I want
the officers to hang their shields
like wind chimes from the plum tree’s
branches.
Jean Toomer: Beehive
Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb,
And I, a drone,
Lying on my back,
Lipping honey
Alice Friman: Puddles
As if overnight, the flowering pear tree
is flowering. A froth of white.
James Crews: We Are Constellations
So much coexists in the heart’s container,
as in a carved teak bowl on the table.
