A hundred-mile breath
“My mouth a messy mountain, a land- / mass of round-backed sounds, a bulge / of bleeding ballads.”
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.
Aubade with Notes on DNA
By JK Anowe
to memory / memory being the sound she made when i moved / through her / like nectar through
a wrist-cut / & she was throbless as / a cursed womb
An Eagle’s Wing, the Leg of a Deer
“The pizza burns. Your poem gets published / in the New Yorker. No one reads it. / Everyone reads it. You eat the pizza.”
Land Line
“A man is licking my house. / An ordinary man. / Do I need to do something about it.”
Sea Boys
By Wale Ayinla
“Egbo naa… / Which of the boys is a reed?”
Night Windows 1928 & Silbers Pharmacy
“A perfect place for Hopper to window // shop, then move on, never to enter, never / to seek out Silber or his ghostly, gassy patrons.”
Ohio Cento & How To Preserve a Fistful of the Neighbor’s Tulips
By Maggie Smith
“Your body, it is yours to leave behind, // and afterward, the moon stops looking like a moon, / unpolished for months, tarnished as flatware.”
Lottery & Deciding When Enough is Enough
“She tells me her birds have come to visit her again today. / One pecked and chirped at the window where she sat. / It’s your brother, she says. I don’t disagree.”
Research on the Color White
“Swans made / beautiful endings / and moved / like slow ships. / What wedding dress / has ever lied?”