TagPoetry

pick up
your roots run while there’s
still time they’re coming
hungry armed with axes […]

Please Don’t Tell My Mother I Wrote This Poem Poem by Keagan Perlette My mother’s father fathered six but fathering wasn’t his strong suit so when my mother had three she loved us double to make up for the six loves that my mother’s father lost, and for the time my mother’s sister shat under my

Pakistan. 2005 Poem by Kate Reilly I am sitting on the edge of a red Persian carpet. I watch Noor’s soft brown feet glide against the ground; her thick layer of anklets clang with each beat. She looks in the corner and addresses an imagined audience: her long lost lover. Sometimes he’s dead, sometimes he’s fallen in love

image by Andrea Garza Fields Beyond Warszawa Poem by Ania Jedrzejczyk A city, a mermaid-fisherman love affair, a burial ground: Warsaw pales into summer dusk. She picks herself up from rye, barley, poppy fields, peels her steel spine from the horizon. Like a paper cut-out, Pałac Kultury towers over the sky: a sandstone giant, a soviet

Illustration by Simone Williamson Do you want to watch a documentary? Poem by Katie Selbee Our days slip in to each other’s. Smooth like you, they lean forward, hesitate a moment and fold in to themselves like wet paper coffee filters and closing newspapers; we can’t tell whose day is whose anymore and I am here

On the Way Poetry by Afeed Areifiz You know what I grew up on? Fish, rice, curry, and the stories of a generation that had to beg for them I grew up on badly-paved streets, faulty drainage and whispers of electricity, and the lives of the people who had fallen in love with them I

Illustration by Mormei Zanke Angle of repose Poem by Michael Pendreigh Foreshocks ignored: reliving her soft temples against my thumbs kiss her forehead. Now she is a foot away a canyon between us, paralyzed on the fringe in a frozen state seized by the seventh Hades. A gust of wind beckons her body to mine: let

I Open My Mouth Poem by Rachel Kim I open my mouth to speak and blossoms tumble off my tongue— thin wet petals wrinkled, ripped, stemless, so they wither before they’re dried and hung on someone’s wall. I open my mouth to speak and a cactus anchors itself in my throat with needles full of

A house named history Poem by Maneo Mohale The house that I inhabit is dimly lit In the evening, windows glow like amber from where I stand outside The short shards of conversation and sharp barks of laughter burst behind me on the dusty street My hand grips the black metal gate, wanting to pull

A Rabbit on the Way Home Poem by Ming Wong “not gonna lie I hit a rabbit on the way home tonight so I was coming home from the bar had a couple whole bunch of trees and its dark and it ran out in front of my car like it had a death wish

That river’ll suck you up and spit you out Poem by Steph Airth At Thanksgiving and Christmas, my dad’s company truck trundles up under a patina of Mary Hill grit to take me back to where I’m from. Where I’m from is oh, just an hour or so east. You probably haven’t heard of it.

Ladybug Girls Poem by Charmaine Li In third grade, when the bell rings at 12:10, we dash out–– in our green tunic dresses of Scottish plaid, worn blue sweaters, and untucked shirts.   It’s the first warm sigh of spring and the big, big tree that stands behind the playground has arms and fingers that

Dreams of Perelman Poem by Quincy Arthur Planes of white, horizonless, like the muted orange of sunlight with eyes closed. The bedraggled Russian Grisha perched on the pointilist surface of a straight line extending forever that way towards the East if where I’m facing is North. Squinting doesn’t help. I’m drawn back to the tangible

Thinking of You on the way from German to 19th Century Lit. Poem by Katie Selbee We oldes Soules are, my dear; old as coverless volumes and bronze lamps with chain pulls, button-tufted arm-chairs with embroidered floral patterns and monstrous glass cabinets housing curious objects but o, o when we kiss you grip meine Haare

  14 poem by Haley Whishaw It’s Sunday. It’s Sunday because through the window, past the half-bloom rhododendrons and before the forest filled with bee-eating birds, the car doors of the Baptists, or the Jehovah’s witnesses, or the Unitarians are slamming and popping like the rain that has crept across the white ceiling paint as