Skip to main content

[facebook] [twitter]

Poetry

When the Clouds Caught Smoker’s Cough

By Christopher Soto

This life’s so small & // Sweet as a strawberry

We watched the women play harp in // The hills of grass

Reimagining Magic City

By Erika Meitner, Photography by Anna Maria Barry-Jester

Miami’s Built Environment at the Crossroads

Aubade

By Ama Codjoe

after Romare Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt (1969)

My back is turned from him again,
but this time I’m not hunched
over the quilt—his rough thumbs
gripping my waist—I’m standing

Bathers with a Turtle

By Ama Codjoe

Three nudes crudely drawn. One crouching,

back turned, right hand feeding the turtle

of the painting’s title; another sitting, as if in a chair,

head bowed, eyes downcast; and a central

Ars Poetica, 1979

By Airea D. Matthews

Digging in dregs of trash
to find the bird my father needed
to get well, I tore a vanishing
line across the length of my palm.

Mayfly

By Airea D. Matthews

The wings deceive. They do not spread
and thinly slice the air. They rest limp,
almost useless. Dragonfly shape without its dignity.

Sartana and Machete in Outer Space

By Tomás Q. Morín

for Jessica Alba & Danny Trejo

There has been so much death. So much killing.
From space, the wall along the Rio Grande
isn’t even a shadow of a shadow.

ars poetica, 2019

By Airea D. Matthews

a woman who doesn’t read many poems asks is poetry meant to be

Heaven as Olympic Spa

By Ama Codjoe

Koreatown, Los Angeles

Gwendolyn Brooks stood stark naked.
I stared into her bespectacled eyes.

Ms. Brooks showed me how
to tend to myself by scrubbing dead skin

Illustration by Denise Nestor

Reading the Bones

By Andy Eaton, Illustrations by Denise Nestor

In his response to my first letter to him, Charles Wright said of my own decision to write poems, “I hope it gives you what it has given me—a life.” I took this wide view from such a hard gazer of a poet as both balm and call.

To continue reading, please login or subscribe.

Pages