The Luster of Everything I’m Already Forgetting
“I press my mouth to my son’s warm back, cowbells distant. This wild / longing to keep my body between his & any kind of desolation.”
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.
PSALM WITH PASSING TRAIN
“I held my own arms out / like a cross, wanting // to hold her back, to pull her / closer.”
What Will Happen
By Leila Chatti
“There will be in your life an absence so big / you will not believe it. You will say Show me / the body, and they will not show you the body.”
A small bodied thing
“Ayo abaratintin —Joy, / so small-bodied.”
America’s First Female Muslim Judge Found Floating in a River
“In April we will find her body. / It is March. New York is gray, in between / seasons like a heart undecided / between new love and loss.”
Circle of Stones
“My mother masks my face. / Sharp lungful of lemon. / It’s like the trees have arms / that ask, that are asking”
self-exam
“before my exam i am in the waiting room / the windows yawn open like mouths”
For a long time
for a long time I think about isolated things like neighbors
“Cathedral Theory” & “Crawdad Theory”
“Dear priests in drag, dear builders of mazes, / dear anti-smoking billboards, I don’t know / exactly how to be good.”