Featured Poetry

Elisávet Makridis delivers a technical scorcher, a palindrome that shifts and moves with precision. The mirrored stanzas deliver surprise, though you’ve already read them, fresh emotion, though you already know the story. “Propulsion” is a compact mirror to the face…

Kendra Allen’s new poem crackles with the energy of language on edge, language in transformation. Without irony or posturing, “Your Name Was Supposed to Be Africa” explores the complicated layering of identity across names and bodies and continents.   YOUR…

“The Wound in Drag” is a manifesto of youth—troubled, hopeful, full of phones and wounds and love. Tallon Kennedy cascades their self—wounded, aching—across the four parts, landing finally, perhaps precariously, on the dance floor.   The Wound in Drag I.…

Jesse DeLong writes of a time seemingly eras ago—when black children saw one of their own in the Oval Office, when pigments and not political terrorism were the musings of philosophy professors. The vulnerability of “The Exit Ramps” returns us…

Grace Lau’s “Yuhua Hamasaki” arrives at just the right moment—with power, with vitality, with dragulous charm. The poem crunches your expectations of womanhood, of Chinese womanhood, and invites you to a feast of new realities.   WHEN YUHUA HAMASAKI WENT…

We love how José del Valle’s “The Opposite of a Great Truth Is Also True” compresses some of the biggest beliefs of the day into small marbles of imagery, rolled out across the lines. Time is squeezed, the past is…

Gabriel Seals writes delicately of family, of houses and siblings and parents. “The last, the only” layers gentle loneliness on the soft threads of relationships, on the “naked masses” of our familial hopes and losses—asking, where is home?   the last,…