Featured Poetry

Poetry: Arko by Austin LaGrone

By Austin LaGrone | April 27, 2018

LaGrone’s “Arko” elapses within a single sentence, tucking moons and bones and love into its nine couplets. The poem gathers its imagery on the backs of short, delicate three and four syllable lines—a fragility that LaGrone bears with envious ease.…

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Poetry: I Keep Having the Dream Where My Father Is Dead by Ojo Taiye

By Ojo Taiye | April 20, 2018

Taiye lands this poem in the delicate spot between bodies and dreams—a primal response can’t be helped against the throaty “leaves”, the “claws” of death and drowning. The reader wakes from Taiye’s “Dream” with their whole day changed.   I…

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Poetry: Questions by Amanda Bales

By Amanda Bales | April 13, 2018

Bales packages her frank questioning here with untamed energy and honesty. “Questions” crafts a strange comfort in the face of death—precisely—as its title suggests—because the poem does not gesture at hollow answers, but wrestles with humor and charm the incredible…

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Poetry: Close by Ashton Wesner

By Ashton Wesner | April 6, 2018

For “Close,” Wesner generates—with the smallest lines she could—the broad ambiguity we have toward our bodies, our parents, our thinking. So many powerful punches land between these two-three word lines; these sentence long stanzas fight above their weight.   Close…

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Poetry: Aubade with La Bestia by Alfredo Aguilar

By Alfredo Aguilar | March 30, 2018

“Aubade with La Bestia” beautifully parses the potential of a love poem through eyes contemporary and rarely seen. As all good love poems, Aguilar’s aubade sings of power, and generosity, and longing, and violence—the dark immutable violence always hugging the…

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Poetry: Game Theory by Z.K. Hitzig

By Zoe Hitzig | March 23, 2018

Some poems step out from conventional wisdom of lines and stanzas bashful and hesitant—”Game Theory” by Z.K. Hitzig is not bashful or hesitant. The atypical shape is a joy for the reader’s eye, a puzzle to put together that once…

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Poetry: The night I watched Moonlight for the first time, I thought about how both the Earth & by Michael Pagan

By Michael Pagan | March 16, 2018

Michael Pagan’s beautiful ekphrasis reminds us what is so compelling about the film—the tender exploration of love and self, the bodies holding bodies, the water. Are you water enough?   The night I watched Moonlight for the first time, I thought…

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Poetry: Two Poems by Meg Eden

By Meg Eden | March 9, 2018

These two poems by Meg Eden offer clear vision of so many homes: the losses that age inevitably brings, the memories that lift and twist with time, the search for a daughter’s place and difference before her mother. It’s all…

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Poetry: Hunger, or What I Should’ve Told Grandma When She Declared We Lived in the “Ghetto” by Alan Chazaro

By Alan Chazaro | March 2, 2018

Alan Chazaro’s poem gets in your body and roots around—asks you to hold uncomfortably warm objects in your hand, cracks open your reluctant jaw, unknots your tender limbs. One of those pieces: you walk in a stranger, leave a lover.…

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Frontier OPEN Finalists: Part 3 of 3

By Frontier Poetry | March 1, 2018

Our last finalists are three amazing poets: Ebony E. Chinn, Regina Marie, and Amanda Hawkins. So many stunners included here: the moonlight tied down, the withered claw, the stones we hold in our chests. Enjoy, share, lift up these talented…

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