Category: Poetry

A Stone for Mark; Blackbirds; Miracle of the Fish

A Stone for Mark Mark Lanier (1958–2019) The stone was one of the large river stones Mark collected in the Japanese tradition of suiseki. Picture him in denim overalls, a red bandana tied around his bald head, his...

Ascension; Tongue-Tie

By Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi | Poetry

Ascension My mother slips out of her skin to travel the hospital’s halls. She’s abandoned her body for a respite from monitors and the blessed nurses she swats with a gloved hand. She stretches: like...

Citizens of the Wind; The Salt Waking; A Drawn-Out Anxious Sense; The Extinction of the Dinosaurs

By David Mason | Poetry, Subscriber Only

Citizens of the Wind Go then, citizen Of the wind. —⁠Seamus Heaney Finding the glass, the ice in joy, the clean cold of it, the light entering and bent and set free, because I didn’t know I felt it...

Trying to Write a First Love Poem at Seventy; For the Earth Dwellers

By Brian Culhane | Poetry, Subscriber Only

Trying to Write a First Love Poem at Seventy Should a troubadour happen to drop by, Lute slung over an Occitan shoulder, Say I’m sitting by the picture window, Looking at the sandhill cranes flying past, Smiling at their...

At the Grave of Tiem Duc Bui; Woman Raking Leaves in Barry Park; Late Bedtime Story; Camden, 1969 (After Borges)

By Charles Martin | Poetry, Subscriber Only

At the Grave of Tiem Duc Bui Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best. —⁠Sophocles If it were truly best not to be born, Or if our kids had gone their separate ways, Then I would not be here today to...

In Wilkins’

By Daniel Tobin | Poetry, Subscriber Only

He looked at the world of his parlor with a sidereal eye, squinting, as though something had hooked a plummet from the socket those afternoons our mother would take us to Wilkins’, seating us on the whirl-able...

The Deer Mouse Berates Me; Sox in the Underworld

By Joan Murray | Poetry, Subscriber Only

The Deer Mouse Berates Me You should have known it was autumn from the cold, yet as you fumbled for your gas station beanie in the basket by the front door before you took your evening walk, you never pictured me⁠—...

My Blue-Eyed Son

By Kevin Cantwell | Poetry, Subscriber Only

i.m. Stanley Booth (1942–2024) Before they date-stamp a claim-chit and take down-payment cash for a guitar, there ought to be a five-day waiting period, same for a pistol, so says the street on this heroin stop I’m from...

Love Letter to My Apartment

By Michele Herman | Poetry, Subscriber Only

Dear best thousand square feet of thrift shop, warehouse, hardware store, archive, costume department fully stocked with my size⁠— here I can get my hands on whatever I believe I need right this minute or ever: curling...

Colorful Circle Center Whole

By D. T. Holt | Poetry, Subscriber Only

My Dutch uncle—the Jesuit⁠— he told me I ought to read Oscar Wilde on account of he was incarcerated. And it occurred to me: No, those were different circumstances. Not to mention the fact Oscar evoked in vivid colors what...

First Prize: The Riven; Egg Tooth

By Arah Ko | Poetry

The Riven Where are the trees that thickly furred the mountainside? Rough brush breathing through valleys? Where is the hillside blown open, scarred down with dynamite and metal teeth? Where are the soft sea cows,...

Second Prize: Inheritance; Built Close to Water, No. 1

By Mary Fontana | Poetry

Inheritance Twisting too fast in its narrow bed to harbor moss, the river whitens and grows old. Only crows and branches cross the river. The mother’s house nestles like a layer cake in a box of birches. November...