“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.”
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.
The Language of Water
By Lee Peterson
“We cannot talk about refugees and not / talk about war or water. About the breath / into and out of the mouth and how this is union.”
Asking Why, Watching the Manta Ray Ballet at the Aquarium of the Americas
By Tobias Wray
“The stories we tell ourselves / leap and fall like fish into air, // back into the water—its quick / lip. Traffic happens by.”
After Frida Kahlo’s Sin Esperanza & the Crohn’s Diagnosis
“wheeled in on a bed three times her size. / A bouquet of rotting meats, / organs, & calaveras ensconced / between her lips.”
Five Summers
“i don’t want willingly am willful”
Sauce on the Side
By Randy James
“I come blessed like / cocolon, Caesars fresh out the barber y platos de arroz / con pollo from corner bodegas. I am part flamingo, / part Black Howler.”
On the Ohio
“The opposite of beauty is what we choose to look away from.”
Mexican Standard About a Desert
“What goddess of war / Came to me as a boy; dumb, / Summer-sweat wet child?”
Practicing How to Be in This World
“I want to be enough, but it’s still an outline / of a woman inside the outline of another woman.”