Poetry

Category

All You Remember by Rose Strode

Climb the stairs. Take the call. Stand by the old green chair. Don’t sit down. Hear your mother say It’s cancer. Don’t answer right away. Clamp down your fear before you...

Longitude by Ann Wrayburn

In August heat, the urge to be misplaced can find you standing on the sidewalk, disoriented, holding someone else’s photos by mistake. Trying to place that cottage,...

Refugee, 15 by Naomi Thiers

Fear is in your bread and you must choke it down. To think of home— the courtyard with its red filigreed rug, the peel-paint walls, how the breeze...

The Story of My Father by Holly Karapetkova

He spoke seven languages and was never allowed to leave the country. He’d gone to school in Paris, which made him an enemy of the...

Patriotism Reconsidered by Lucinda Marshall

Ed. Note: Another in our series of poems by writers who participated in Arlington Writers Resist. My anthem is the serenade of birds, sung without regard...

Dark Energy by Susan Mockler

Ed. Note: Another in our series of poems from poets who participated in Arlington Writers Resist on January 15, 2017 —for the parents of the...

Driving to Juniata by Katherine E. Young

for David Hutto Up there’s the interstate, peeping through trees. Down here among hollows, satellite dishes, a man on his deck guzzles beer, wishes he were driving that...

Soul Vision by Lori Levy

We can’t hide here—the only two white women in the front row of the Crossroads Theater in south L.A., where Isaac, the black man, stands on...

The Cancer Fairy by Judith Swann

It was a small dark body, like a mouse. Unemployed, it still drove the car, pushing the TV out the passenger-side door, yellow chyme and bile the...

Nuts by Melanie Bilkowski

Today is just another Peanut Butter and Jelly day. 0.75 cents per sandwich retail. But by the time My daughter is 35, I am sure that it’ll be triple...

Must-read

Two Poems by Bill Ratner

They Send Me to the City to Stay with My Auntie I hang my jacket in the hallwayher apartment is oldmade from shoestring potatoesit smells...

 IF FREEDOM DIES by Alan Abrams

IF FREEDOM DIES What’s next for us, if freedom dies–For those of us, they smear as woken—must we wear their yoke of lies? They seal their...

Three Poems by Lesley Younge

Rock Paper Scissors Water. water to rub rock smooth water to rust scissors shutwater to dissolve paper into nothingnessthen return it to the cannibal trees waterwaterwaterwaterwaterwaterwater water to...