Category - Poetry

Jamie Kitts Literature Poetry

This is not a poem, it’s a meme

after “Dick from a Girl with Autism” I love autistic gay trans queens Us sensual sensory gals Euphoric smut and top-shelf memes From squishy a-spec pals High-stim, low-stim Not him, zmm zmm Tattoos, role play Bound by the High Fae Head pats for days and no more shame I hear you call my name I wanna...

Breanna Ho Literature Poetry

My Shore

My father told me he came from an island. A boat in the middle of the night took him and his brothers to the city. They would grow into men, become part of another land to tell stories from, be named in— no longer speaking ways of the water. When my father became a settler on the prairies, I came...

Lisa Richter Literature Poetry

New Year’s Lament

I am writing you this letter from the bottom of the ocean where my eyelids are bottle caps and my stomach turns burnished copper. Maybe it is time for a new oral tradition. All day I flicker and sometimes I go out and leave in my wake the faintest trace of sweat and hibiscus. Maybe I am an embryo...

Katherine Alexandra Harvey Literature Poetry

The Wake

I removed my belly button and paid attention to the healing process. No one believed I could feel the hole closing over, that it reminded me of being born. My mother was laid out on the kitchen table for a week. Formaldehyde high, you never noticed when my skin blackened. I felt undesirable. You...

Literature Poetry Shannan Mann

The Lie

Her body was part-whale, part-mouse—behold the lie! It lives in your belly. Like an unborn baby you mould the lie. Slice my ears with the jagged stars. What did you ever do with the gift of music? I buried the violin and told the lie. This lamp in the ocean. A wolf with feathers for fangs. The...

Conyer Clayton Literature Poetry

Low Maintenance

I don’t really have a preference. Which name you use. The coffee beans. Fonts or flowers or flavors. Except when it comes to bubbles. Keep my water flat, I don’t need it to be interesting. I’d prefer not to say—that’s a preference. I’d prefer to stay—that’s a...

David Ly Literature Poetry

Dragon Hunting

The Hunter’s Moon reaches bloody illumination tonight obliviously obscuring what would be my first glimpse of the Draconids. I’ve yet to witness a meteor shower which is to say my blood still burns from when I saw a star fall by chance years ago and didn’t make a wish— how dare the moon rise...

Eli Mushumanski Literature Poetry

the creation of adam

    i think of myself in images: oranges split down the middle, pavement damp with rain. spring fields     are the same as being under water and fill the hollow in my gut where a rib used to be. sometimes, i am a row of naked bodies on different planes, reaching out to touch fingertips     that...

Literature Misha Solomon Poetry

Shopping

We buy a speckled ceramic vase for his mother and then we buy a new vase for ourselves. The vase we buy ourselves is glass, hand-blown, twisted and prismatic. There’s an Italian word for it, surely. Before this glass vase we had a ceramic vase: floral and millennial pink, yet vaguely 70s. We grew...

Amanda Merpaw Literature Poetry

Essay on Closure

I try to end it the night we lunge lung first into the north country, the unappeasable shores of Lake Superior and me too unappeasable, restless and reckless, tensing the edges of the waves. We can’t tell if they’re advancing or receding. Gravity forgets us our measures of depth, the possibilities...

Katrina Lemaire Literature Poetry

Homegrown Prairie Love

a speckled bloat of metal-ridged rooftops come to life from deep under the roots of blue grama grass stuck over a cast of wither-dry sun beams boredom is rampant plastered in checkered flannel top countertop stale coffee over a pot she is homegrown straight from chernozemic soil Moose Jaw is an...

Jade Wallace Literature Poetry

A Ladder Set upon the Earth

d i m e n s i o n s w e c a n s c a r c e l y r e c o g n i z e. ever been. The balance of our faces will be alien— nostrils, our eyes round as planets, wide as they have ourselves going grey, left with only the twin slits of our move more swiftly toward our demise. Soon, we find human cells...

Literature Poetry Tannaz Taghizadeh

Unedited me

Not a pretty structure No beautiful content Ruthless Lots of typos Lots of mean adverbs Repetitive form Contrasting voices Yelling in Farsi Shouting in English Not pragmatic Just dark Stuffy, complex not like-me words Redundant Maddening Screaming in capitals Calling people that not who No clarity...

Dominik Parisien Literature Poetry

bilingual insomniac at the witching hour

the world sleeps while i listen. the faucet sings frère jacques frère jacques dormez-vous dormez-vous. what language would i be dreaming if i were. i ask the pillow to consider how in its breaking legacy leads to sitting. leg assis. assis one of many words rooted in my tongue. the pillow says it...

Lisa Comeau Literature Poetry

Cheers

Dogwood blossoms return men materialize down by the tracks one slumped over a shopping cart says he will make some graffiti drink some beer holds up a Bud can—cheers a guy in the alders with a flip phone gingerly raises his hand says hi hi hi by the flattened Coors cases Absolut bottles soot from...

Literature Nathan Mader Poetry

To The Mirror

I was as an orchid wearing nothing but the light. You hammered an I into me like a nail, taught me the language of glass as you forged my eyes from the surfaces of sight. You’ve seen it all: the feral child putting on his Halloween werewolf suit, the teenaged boy kissing his breath-fogged...

Amber Dawn Literature Poetry

Unnamed Service Road

It’s 2:56 and you are awake. The pulse under your jaw throbs. Carotid arteries throng your brain. The senses reside here, below your jawline, so does speech. You say “service” aloud like a wish. Go to the road, again. Go. It’s 3:12 and you are awake. You paddle your feet under the covers. Your...

Cale Plett Literature Poetry

Curtain

Begin by noting that there’s no path to      the other side of rain.The only way is perpetually through.      A bicycle on two wheels forthe first time. At the viewing, only the mourners       keep the emptiness at bay. Before and after,            a room of objects. If youreached across, it would...

Lee Thomas Literature Poetry

[nectar names] / [white stripe]

seafoam sours beneath my tongue spills over in the speaking of a name a tide in my throat, a surge of syllables the gravity of the words i swallow turns my body inside out tears my teeth from my mouth. secrets dissolve in my mouth drops of nectar spear my tongue to my jaw, i speak without saying...

Literature Maureen Hynes Poetry

The Juggler

After the painting, The Juggler, by Spanish surrealist, Remedios Varo (1908-1963) Yesterday a great many pellets of graupel shot out of the low grey sky— bouncing ice-balls! Spring’s thunderous shout muffled by its cloudy facemask. We have been too knotted into death counts & pollen counts...

Ashley Van Elswyk Literature Poetry

Garden Party

Pear trees line the grove, netting the sun, sheltering the predators encroached behind the thick green leaves and bodies fat and round. You pass me a knife and ask if I would carve a feast for you, a garden under golden skies and pear skin peels as cries of insects pitch the air. Fireweed...

Literature Poetry Shanai Tanwar

Tulips

“The one you would choose: Were you led then by him?” “What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time?” —Agha Shahid Ali (Ghazal) i dreamt of tulips today they opened their mouths in a yawn the kind that engulfs the sun in its vacuous mouth like a little hurricane; the sort of yawn that could...

Literature Pamela Mosher Poetry

You Hope This Message Finds Me Well

But how could it not, when you used the precise alphanumeric sequence needed to land your words in my inbox? Not what you meant? Let’s begin again. Sarcasm arrives too easily when I’m nervous. Yes, I am well. As in I am doing well. As in I remember to steady myself with deep breathing when...

Literature Louie Leyson Poetry

crying at the jay som concert

before lockdown i dreamt that a serpent tried to kill me. so i tattooed it to my forearm in the place of my neck, a vision of black scales & black eyes blazed alight beneath the red of an imaginary sun. when an alien summer leaves you hypomanic it makes perfect sense to carve nightmare...

Literature Manahil Bandukwala Poetry

I love you, kiss me

I am you in your jewel-domed reading room, I am you in your kayak skimming. —Phyllis Webb The sky was inverted. I called you in the bare yellow night. I am you against the river of clouds, I am you in an energy current shaking down the kitchen walls, you in the contrapuntal stream of two trees...

Khashayar Mohammadi Literature Poetry

Dispatches from a Harmonious Armageddon

In Loving Memory of Simon (1992-2022) * in the city that screams beauty occurred to me between the city and the city there’s a body of water and a ferry * we have found in ourselves a great proximity to danger we are born of fire and blissful taste of forget I forget how many Is I have written into...

Kate Cayley Literature Poetry

Of Rats and Floods

There are rats in the house. They gnaw basket-straws, the cardboard edges of things. Their shit, softening in repeated washings, hidden in the fingers of a glove. Grey stains along the baseboard. They track each other, smelling. Eyes dried berries, swiveling. The intelligence of their tails...

Literature Poetry Sean O'Connell

the core empties

i fear the deluge of careerists tapping concrete in oxfords & ballet flats chic folx in Barbour & Burberry coats released from desks to trains or after hours off king west dead ass with pretty young things, all beauties and good vibes only—so kalos kagathos—made flaccid by business manz...

Literature Poetry Shannan Mann

The Past

Read to me in tongues aflame in blame, I asked the past. My prayers burnt to accusations, I cannot get past the past. Killing, not violence if you believe a killer rearranges a body’s time. Rubble of muscle, not soul. All have killed before—so vast the past. I bathed my shadow in a rainstorm...

Juli Kagiwada Literature Poetry

Balancing

A flying woman, balances between the cruel heat-drafts of mid July She hovers, between tin-can house-music and picnic-fattened ants whose licorice-backs gleam in the merciless summer heat Her support? The co-conspirator to this rebellion against gravity? Perhaps she’s a childhood friend, a lover...

Frank Klaassen Literature Poetry

Pink Fog, Black Dress

It’s just fabric, but the shape is everything. Like a boat made of steel, it’s all about how you mould yourself into the world. Like how the body is mostly water but still walks, doesn’t pool and run into the sand, or turn to droplets suspended in the air. Like how even a disjointed sentence makes...

Literature Poetry R/B Mertz

Supercuts

I beg for it short like a boy, Boy-short, please. I come out with a pageboy: gymnast, figure skater. Still a girl. I swallow red. I hate myself. I didn’t know how to quit cutting my teeth/brain on my culture, sweet carts & cameras, cutting through me like a parking lot, making everybody look...

Literature Nofel Poetry

Cloudy Dispatches

for Kasem Last night I saw clouds turn into paper Stars waning in your eyes’ unuttered anger. How do we speak of love, my brother When tongues are as stagnant as tears?Remember the lonely tree of our childhoodThe inodorous sand, the clouds that turned into cinder? I try to forget my first memories...

Literature Poetry Stacy Thomas

glacier

cooling my burned thumb at the kitchen tap I’d grasped the roasting stick too high up cold water rushing over the raw spot farther down the stream rinsing yellow plum the neighbour brought over tasting the sour water eye always wander out I kept this in a box, snug I pull the lid off and it rises...

Literature Poetry Trenton Pollard

To Dream of Flight

When I say strangle I don’t mean the hands that crush the throat, but the body that won’t resist, confident in its ability to hold its breath, or not. There are nights when I wake up choking because my body wills itself to stop breathing. Tolerates few terrors of murderers or other lovers— silent...

kit mckeown Literature Poetry

My Girlfriend and I Are Gay On Main Street

and i’ve killed my tomatoes. their long arms crack, despite the butchness of my shoulders. they insist on death with unrelenting life. my girlfriend and i are gay on main street, in the vintage shop where i bought my first men’s shirt, the one i wore to my second pride, when i blacked out in a west...

Hazim Ismail Literature Poetry

summer evening at Tommy Thompson Park

shore nursing rubble water scraping brick teeth carmines, umbers urban abscess, coaxed into gaze by strings of 8 o’clock light an invitation to squint. ombak, waves me sand-laden, dragging teenage feet through coast, dark and happy grinning at the sight of Makku, my mother always perched on a...

Kate Cayley Literature Poetry

Morecambe Beach

I am told these are among the most dangerous tides in the world. I come from a country with dangerous tides, but only in theory: I am not familiar with that pull. I would not know what to avoid, so I pick my way across, nearest the shore, my soles sucked down, thinking of opaque glass and broken...

Literature Mikaela Lucido Poetry

moles cannot see the sky

just north of the texan blackland is a home with a stale teapot. an abandoned rain boot is the perfect centerpiece for the bottle cap table. and when it rains, it’s where to keep all the petals she’d stuffed in the tissue box. candy wrappers keep us warm. it helps, the crinkling they make...

Griffin Epstein Literature Poetry

nothing holy

someday there will be more doors someday we with ambiguous accidental bodies who carry the debt of shame in the thread of our bones will no longer need to be divine someday we will learn to see the shadows on our faces   rivered impressions at the spill of our hips for what they are marks from...

Jane Shi Literature Poetry

encrypted bug / first attempt in learning

hide her inside a ruby. use every pronoun so they can’t pry program from machine. bury him in the left pocket of your bathrobe. lay yr tenderness out to dry on the rails. no one will suspect a thing & even you sometimes will forget it’s there. when you remember her again, they will come...

Literature Poetry Tosh Sherkat

My mind is a car wreck

my parents die in. I do not pray to the sun before it buries s- in the pane of my apartment window then leaks and pools over the pavement sky. Rain traffics my apartment window and dries like vitreous cells, like siren prayers and the river of cars stops. Dies. Sin slows, stops, on the kneeler of...

Leila Lois Literature Poetry

A Beautiful Hesitation

after Fiona Pardington It is between pest and cholera, she says the world, this state of affairs, down her long, straight lashes she stares, describing the falling of her thoughts on the great indifference of many, thoughts that are weighty like sand in the bottom of an hourglass as we drift past...

Literature Poetry Triny Finlay

#PlantMetaphors

Not that it’s enough, simply to adore a person But I adore her The way sansevieria reaches for the perfect ceiling The way hypoestes develops its pink spots like dark room photographs The way arthurium sucks on ice cubes The way golden pothos rests in a trail on the hardwood floor The way aloe...

Atma Frans Literature Poetry

Sisters

My sister and I stand barefoot on the radiator, our lacy night dress scratchy against our shins. Delicious jitters as we clutch the high window sill. Night touches our bodies freed from sheets tucked in too taut. A flash of light splits the dark, spiders down electric blue. Thunder shakes the room...

Erin Kirsh Literature Poetry

LG_TQ

She _ites my lip just a nip a fizzing on my skin we wait at the _us station under zeeting streetlights they crackle like a chip _ag I envy the susurration from the am_er halo, want to tell her “see, that is what is generating the electricity not your z axis cheek_ones or the _atting of your...

Literature Poetry ViNa Nguyễn

missing

i’m from here, drifted in from there, waterlogged, kelped, the sway of the sea still in my knees, where my motion sickness pulls from. like Bà Ngọai, i’m walking as i’m balancing a fishbowl upon my neck, my eyes convexed behind an unseeing lens as clouded as her mung bean yellow cataracts. i miss...

Literature Poetry Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin

Selia

terra nullius: the inverted disposition of thingsin ordinary flux, logging roads and peri-urbanlawn ornaments replicated on the clouds’ nuclearpetals, I watch the patterns on her dress orbit myeyes, my face, my mouth, overlap with auxiliary species of our scape, a cosmic bodice, feminised and...

Julia DaSilva Literature Poetry

Wheremaid

She lives in one place and one place only: the entrance to a bakery where she has conjured a swirling rainbow display of cupcakes she pictures herself at the counter her voice sweetens an octave for “two please” wheremid she conjures in the cashier’s fingers that plant the sticker on the box the...

Joe Bishop Literature Poetry

Inherited Thumbnail

The major sin is the sin of being born. —Samuel Beckett Hominid-handled bovine bone hammered Kindred skull. No dragging knuckles stopped Him looting dark markets, the self helped To fat figs, muted chops of choice tapir. Early man made primal maul, hammered Raft and drifted. Shrooming troglodyte...

Liselle Yorke Literature Poetry

we-ness

it used to be the world, singularsitting on your shouldersnow it’s each of youwe’ve become so individualized the frayed end of a tasseli don’t know who or what is the single thread holding ustogether at the top but it’s precarious, no i want to weave around younot the finesse of a...