Poetry

We are so grateful to all of our partner-poets for sharing their work with us—please enjoy their beautiful words in our Featured Poetry catalogue.

My Father

“the wound across his back becomes / a mouth wide open, filled with blood, and me, / his child standing next to the body. / newly awakened”

“Our neighborhood drowns // in the violet hue of summer stolen, while evening arrives / like blueberries to concrete,”

“who am I to bring the world / into our bed? If the nest comes under attack, let me / lose a feather or two in defense of what I know is true:”

“and only men can brush their hands across the / cages by the altar as the schoolchildren’s feet are clanking on the marble ceiling”

“Satisfied bodies bloom green. / I othered art, / marketing my past.”

“the baby could have a family name, but spoken aloud, / he would be entirely American. John Paul, precious John Paul.”

“That Door – Don’t Shut. / Just Cause – Your Birds Flew. / This Still – Our Home.”

“grasping claws of tensile yellow / below skeleton blues whose delicate / tracery wafts into thin witnessed air—”

“I become the client as I hand over a few hundreds to the jaw specialist / recognizing the irony of how quickly this money comes and goes”