What We Carry
By Sarah Carey
“Mailboxes open, close / like gates to territory lost, or mouths of birds // our hopeful hands still feed, the gone forever get, / the passages we carry inside.”
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.
Poetry We Admire: Fear
That time of year has arrived where we all deliberately engage with fear—communal, familial grappling with death and nightmare. For October’s PWA, our editors sought out poems that speak to such engagement, that wrestle with violence like Leila Chatti’s “After Reading…”, or consummate the scary stories we tell ourselves like Justin Phillip Reed’s “Ruthless”, or explore the paradox thrumming between pleasure and fear like Emmalee Hagarman “Our Most Cherished Terrors”.
A hundred-mile breath
“My mouth a messy mountain, a land- / mass of round-backed sounds, a bulge / of bleeding ballads.”
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.”
Poetry We Admire: Rejections
With last month’s #shareyourrejection trend on Twitter, we set out to collect some of the best, most recent work centering on the theme of rejection.
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.”