Featured Poetry

Names are invasive fungus and sestinas are just tough games of poker—so goes G.J. Sanford’s new poem, “O. unilateralis.” When we look, when we trace backwards from our own small handed mothers: what do we find greenly crawling up the…

“Razing” is Anna Newman’s self-improvement letter to myself: a rummaging of pain and home and pine. Notice the urge to follow the speaker wherever she leads, even the false and the broken, even to a mirror for our own selves—that…

Though the poem would split you into stilts and beads and strangeness, Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s “What I Said to God” also brings you back, sinks you back into your body—that which you, so very often, forget you are. Notice the gentleness…

Like most contemporary sonneteers, Anthony Borruso has taken aim at the right margin of his “Another Dusky Sonnet” and the lines bristle with dynamic force and momentum—like bones protruding from the sand. And like the poem’s inspiration, Dali, he builds his…

Chisom Okafor, who we’ve been admiring for a while now, delivers a dark and moving portrait of a specific and not unfamiliar moment: “A shorter Note On My Coming Out.” Chisom speaks with such ease through his untouched dark, his…

“mi sister/mi hermana,” by Heidi Seaborn, is a tender performance of sisterhood, of two women standing in each other’s lives. Butterflies and whipoowills and a blue walled garden—but also choked throats and lions and needles that pierce and pin.  …

Is there meaning in nonsense? A symbol hidden in the wound? Ask Ben Zarov—ask his “Wounded Bee” and his silkworm god unspooling the exact measure you need. Whatever nonsense that may be.   Wounded Bee The wounded bee dances her coordinates,…

“False Friends,” by Natan Last, moves with intoxicating energy. So much relies on the subtle strength of Natan’s diction, his adventurous associative leaping, and the sly lubricating humor (via Old French from Latin humor: ‘moisture’) from beginning to end. A wonderful…