Poetry We Admire: Dog Days of Summer
By Kim Harvey
To help get us all through this swelter, our editors have scoped out some of the hottest new not-to-be-missed poems of the season. And, yes, there will be dogs.
Blog
Breathwork
By Rex Wilder
“Liquid into a vein like I’m not a patient / But a receptacle, some alien’s urinal.”
The Great Cosmic Hum
“the hum you could never / obliterate, molecules buzzing, hum of 87 floors of refrigerators cooling, / hum that keeps the building in the sky”
Community Feedback: torrin a. greathouse reads Rebecca Ruth Gould
Community Feedback is our recurring column that provides an opportunity for our audience to get some quick, free & exceptional feedback on a new poem.
Lullaby
“The others are fiction today, / pages I turn leaf by leaf. But not / you. Your heart thrums across / the sharp wire. I hear it sing.”
House of Prayer
“I praise once again, I symmetry / like the wings of a migrating bird, I repeat alhamdulillah / and rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat, like the rokrok / of an egret.”
The Theory of Sinking
By Márton Simon (Translated by Timea Balogh)
“I smear the makeup you left behind / on my face in an effort to love myself. / And I think I’ll eventually drink these two bottles / of perfume that have been here since— / what else could I do with them?”
Periodic #6
By Franny Choi
“Periodic” is a monthly column by poet Franny Choi. Every month, she writes a short column on the first day of her period—a check-in that might cover issues of gender, queerness, writing, health, and/or love.
BRAIN HEMORRHAGE, EARLY FALL
By Madhur Anand
“Found a dead bird on the rented back porch on Rice Lake. / Found it. Not encountered it. More like: glad we did not / not see it.”