Featured Poetry

Max Lasky’s new poem, “Bad Aesthetic,”  lands like granite, like stone. “for the fifteen minutes you were dead,” the poem explains—it’s all burning, the funeral is near, but still the fireflies go.   Bad Aesthetic Helpless on the carpet, harmed…

“Babel Sestina” performs a journey through the powers of language, of naming and gendering, of grammarizing our own identities. James O’Leary’s poem declares, “We invent anew mountain, reach up for new holy”—but ends in a question: what’s left in our…

“In the desert, I am—” Faylita Hicks’ “Arco” gathers the brittle and brine of syllable and vowel to press upon the reader an urgent hunger, her every word a “facility of ghosts, starved for the heated flicks.” Welcome to the…

Jordan E. Franklin has seemingly made the right choice: an “imagination / that ran naked / and green through / the Flatbush” of her skull. And it shows—”Multiverse of Madness (in Technicolor)” races through its broken lines and mad whitespace,…

Akhim Yuseff Cabey’s “Final Relaxation” is a full row of teeth: neatly and densely packed, every word carefully designed by its context to lift more than its muscles should allow. This is how words get in our bodies—this, this.  …

Kathryn Hunt’s elegy pursues the ultimately elusive goal: meaning and sense before the lip of the grave. Somehow, “What Rituals Did You Perform?” answers itself, as only poetry does, in the asking.   What Rituals Did You Perform? When you…

“Foundling” by Anna Seidel: a poem that leaves room in the mouth for tonguing the edge of each sweet word. Foundling In the evening, a scorpion in bed. A cheerful and a sad wind blowing across the room. You kiss…