Ellery Akers: After the Election
Beautiful wreckage of my country, I’m still trying to love you.
Video: Do You Want To Go Down This Way, Or Go Back The Way We Came?
A new film elegy by Bryan Konefsky that uses the lens of loss and grief to explore intersections between memory and artifact.
Thomas McGuire: Rust
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. —Matthew 6:19-21 . Rust ruins metal everywhere. Dad, you would’ve fought … Continue reading
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: About My Birthday
when the last leaves let go, let go,
have all let go, & it’s almost winter again —
don’t remember my birthday
Michael Simms: Strange Meadowlark
years later jazz, a free communal experience
embodying love, saved me just as poetry saved me
Bill Knott: The Closet
I shall find room enough here
By excluding myself; by excluding myself, I’ll grow.
Valerie Bacharach: Crows
Some days I don’t know what to do with this rage I carry.
Darnell Arnoult: Widowhood & New Life
Peer passed vibrant stalks of rain. Think of his absent face
now uncaught by earth, light among stars. The man
is now stardust. His voice like the riddle of dreams.
Robert Okaji: Dream Score
I empty my mother’s ashtray of its treasures—
various picks, the broken watch, a mandolin bridge,
that lock of my wife’s hair—then peer through the amber
glass at a distorted day. What looks back at me?
Richard Hoffman: Mourning Gaza
What does the pale infant turning to dust
in the gray light deep in the powdery rubble know
of the torn hands of her parents digging to find her?
Kathryn Levy: Three Poems
The geese are calling—this is
time to depart. They gather and sink and
soar toward somewhere.
Michael Simms: Imperfect
My native tongue doesn’t allow
the imperfect tense, so it’s difficult
to say how something might used
to happen but no more.
Lisa Suhair Majaj: For the Dead Among Us
We will keep you alive
in our longing, in our breath.
Margo Berdeshevsky: God Bless the Child That’s Got His Own
He says — you will let go he will let go the branch when he is
Ready I nod, yes, he says, climbing the hill from the sea
Where he has gone to wash distance and salt before it comes
