Acolyte Theater
“O animal, held / at tongue-point // I always cried during / mass, dreaming of dirt // & hands made / useful”
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.
An Autumn Infinite
By Akif Kichloo
“youth a ceremony of rebellion everything washed / ashore”
Diagnosis: a Still Life
“A cigarette burn on a bathing nude. / A raven under palm fronds. / What we call a bruise as if / fruit could heal.”
Poetry We Admire: Death
By Kim Harvey
This month’s Poetry We Admire features work published in the last quarter exploring the idea of Death in all its myriad expressions. We’ve rounded up eight of the best new poems of the season from The Nation, The Rumpus, POETRY Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, Juxtaprose Magazine, Rust + Moth, and Wraparound South.
Pantoum by Charles Mingus
“Music, look at your history. Man / sounds sharp to me. Sounds like / someone has been escaping reality / on his hands and knees.”
Report*
“I grind my teeth. / I bite my nails. / As of this morning / I’ve accrued / thirteen hundred / american weeks.”
An Excommunicated Nun Gave Me The Sand Dollar She Kept With Her Worry Dolls
“These chambers are filled with salt / stalactites—all yours. I would give this back / to you on your tongue. If that / would heal you.”
LOVE, COMMITMENT, ETC.
By Sam Zafris
“Someday, the horn of the train / will cease. Our bodies, / like bodies, will drown / in a great rain.”
Poetry We Admire: Labor
By Kim Harvey
In the vein of Levine celebrating his blue-collar roots, for September we rounded up some terrific new poems honoring workers — bringing attention to labor of all kinds, including often forgotten or unsung labor done with little or no pay – like mothers, cider-pressers, trench-diggers, coal miners, Taco Bell drive-through workers, and poets.