Featured Poetry

Erin Williamson’s “Dream Bird” is an exceptional display by a new poet: a fantasy of warriors and  feathers, of getting lost in a landscape’s leering masculinity. “This is just a dream,” the speaker says. “So real. So real.”   Dream…

“Beauty is life’s only holiness / And the widow sits calmly / Satisfied”—and we knew we were publishing this beautiful, moving poem from the talented Marsha Larsen. Sink in, enjoy.   The Seven: And Occurrences Thereof – for Felice 1.…

Mónica Gomery’s “Here” feels as if it must be a prose poem—the rolling sentences and stacked syntax reveal the enormity of what can’t be said, the enormity of trying to say what can’t be said. Touch the flowers at the memorial, instead.…

“The Ballerina,” by Marisa Webster, holds together with the glue of its own unmistakeable question: when does a ballerina stop being a ballerina? i.e. When does an identity become a story and no longer a lived reality? Through prosaic syntax…

The musicality of “The Fact of Things” surprises—it’s skinny shape and journalistic voice bely a deep song about the fraught beauty of the world around us. Ja’net Danielo’s words firmly hold our gaze, right at the facts, at the bus…

“Hypostasis” soaks in mist, in daughters missing, in the mute colors of a dark and eager earth—in a few stanzas, Triin Paja peers into death and finds a violin. Listen to it sing:   Hypostasis Have you thanked God for…

Sarah Carey’s “Consistency” breaks itself on the idea of the love poem—what changes in marriage that changes love? what changes in ourselves? With wet and gripping imagery and a voice interrogative of all, Carey’s poem creates new, loving, meanings for…

Ugonna-Ora Owoh composes a world wherein bodies reign—holy and radiant, so much born and buried from the thighs and mouths of “Belonging.” Notice the black grazed elbows, the swallowed saliva, the forbidden appendage. Notice the holy love for the earthly…