Poetry

/Tag:Poetry

Slowcookery

By | 2023-12-09T14:14:21-08:00 December 13th, 2023|Categories: Issue 142: December 2023|Tags: , , , , , |

By Amy L. Bernstein   “Because when it comes to truly explaining racial injustice in this country, the table should never be set quickly” – Nikole Hannah-Jones, "What is Owed," New York Times Magazine, 2020   I stand on the far shore of the fast-moving Combahee River, opposite the Collective, afforded a distant glimpse through a [...]

The Whale

By | 2023-12-09T11:46:38-08:00 December 13th, 2023|Categories: Issue 142: December 2023|Tags: , , , , , |

By Kerry Loughman                                    never budged becalmed she was bleached by sun & beached     on relentless rise of blue water liquid leeched from her eyes           her orifices her great mouth agape her lungs did evaporate Climate-changed      her wishes drowned in sand   Kerry Loughman is a retired educator and photographer living in the Boston area. [...]

Two Poems by Linda Parsons

By | 2023-12-09T13:48:32-08:00 December 13th, 2023|Categories: Issue 142: December 2023|Tags: , , |

How a Woman Becomes Herself When the neighbor’s weed tree drapes over the power lines and shades her garden, she contemplates going out by moonlight to dump salt on the roots—but that could backfire and flow instead into the garden, be its ruination. These good neighbors invite her over for fine smoked brisket and can’t even [...]

Wildness Unafraid

By | 2023-12-09T11:45:12-08:00 December 13th, 2023|Categories: Issue 142: December 2023|Tags: , , , , |

By Tim Murphy   What if trees could talk? No. Of course they do. What if we could hear them speak just beneath our feet? What if birds of all feathers who lift the sky with song and frame it with flight told us what names to call them? What if we could simply bathe in wonder [...]

Wrong Rainbow

By | 2023-12-13T16:03:46-08:00 December 13th, 2023|Categories: Issue 142: December 2023|Tags: , , , |

By L. Acadia   Describing our droomhuis for Dutch class, my worksheet filled with my dream house’s garden: Hollyhocks, hydrangea higher than I, wrought iron table for morning coffee, serenading birds, frogs ringing a pond. My love wrote an interior my mind couldn’t fit: puppy-claw impervious tile floors, dormer bedroom, dinner-party primed kitchen, postprandial dancing space. [...]

Two Poems by Deborah Hochberg

By | 2023-12-10T11:14:56-08:00 December 13th, 2023|Categories: Issue 142: December 2023|Tags: , , , , , , , , |

Congregation of Ibis    “A barrage of storms has resurrected what was once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River, setting the stage for a disaster this spring.” – from “Tulare Lake Was Drained Off the Map. Nature Would Like a Word," Soumya Karlamangla and Shawn Hubler, New York Times, April 2, [...]

what happened before the good sex

By | 2023-12-09T12:04:05-08:00 December 13th, 2023|Categories: Issue 142: December 2023|Tags: , , |

By Bryana Joy   for God’s sake no more games she said setting the last set of lace panties in the trash i am befuddled by all this rigmarole this muddle this hullabaloo she threw a negligee out the door and all of her lipstick tubes i am i the only one you are you the [...]

that name

By | 2023-12-09T11:40:07-08:00 December 13th, 2023|Categories: Issue 142: December 2023|Tags: , , , |

By William Palmer   tide in— imagine waves scraping away that name and the lies upon lies that feed off it, dissolving them in foam imagine the mugshot gone the blue suits gone the long red ties around our country’s neck gone   William Palmer’s poetry has appeared recently in JAMA, J Journal, One Art, On [...]

Point Blank

By | 2023-12-14T15:49:48-08:00 December 13th, 2023|Categories: Issue 142: December 2023|Tags: , , , , , |

An Illustrated Poem by Jane Muschenetz  MIT grad and former Bain Management Consultant, Jane Muschenetz arrived in the United States as a child refugee from Soviet Ukraine. She is a 2023 City of Encinitas Exhibiting Artist and winner of The Good Life Review 2022 Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection, All the Bad Girls Wear Russian [...]

The Last Revolution

By | 2023-12-09T15:36:18-08:00 December 13th, 2023|Categories: Issue 142: December 2023|Tags: , , , |

By Lorraine Schein   The Last Revolution was yesterday. It was so successful, that all future revolutions were cancelled forever. A lesbian and her lover were elected President and Vice-President. Their lovemaking is televised nationally as part of the inaugural proceedings and greeted with applause by an appreciative at-home audience. Poets have been elected to Congress. [...]

Two Poems by Nancy Squires

By | 2023-09-04T10:24:44-07:00 September 13th, 2023|Categories: Issue 141: September 2023|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

As the Waters Rise   O God, look down On all our drowned. Hear us, we beg— We’re on our knees. Sorry, so sorry About the trees, The polar bears, the birds, The bees; the icebergs Gone, the thirsty lawns, Plastic gyres, redwood Pyres and all the many, many cars. The eclipsed stars We never see. [...]

Crying in Texas

By | 2023-09-04T10:23:24-07:00 September 13th, 2023|Categories: Issue 141: September 2023|Tags: , , , , , , , , |

By M.R. Mandell        after “Kissing” by Dorianne Laux            Crying as they hope for blood, crying as they flush the strips, crying as they hide their bumps. They are crying in bathroom stalls, behind Sugarland’s Kroger store. They are crying on Houston corners, outside the boarded-up laundromat. They are crying in each other’s arms, at [...]

Montana

By | 2023-09-04T10:52:47-07:00 September 13th, 2023|Categories: Issue 141: September 2023|Tags: , , , , , |

By Jeremy Nathan Marks For Zooey Zephyr   The big sky fifty-mile vistas where the Greasy Grass runs willowed valleys sweeping memory from the water to the sky an arrow long ago fired but whose arc is heard surely this land can contain one woman who says of our laws that while we pray to remain [...]

The first day of cherry season,

By | 2023-09-04T10:56:27-07:00 September 13th, 2023|Categories: Issue 141: September 2023|Tags: , , , , , , , |

By Emily Hockaday   the sky becomes apocalyptic. The air is wool in my throat. I wear a mask to pick my daughter up from school. The fruit vendors sit next to their colorful carts like the world isn’t ending, and I suppose it isn’t for now or it is just very slowly. And what did [...]

The Lure of Socks on Warm Feet

By | 2023-09-04T10:59:04-07:00 September 13th, 2023|Categories: Issue 141: September 2023|Tags: , , , , , , , |

By Amelia Díaz Ettinger Never forget, September 20, 2017 and Maria   In my La-Z-Boy I sit, a Puerto Rican queen, feet-up admiring my knitted socks. I made these socks by knit and purl. 5,746 miles away from you it is easy to say, I worship. —And oh! How I preach this veneration, the warmth of [...]