You have yet to hear a voice like Essy Stone’s. It’s a voice that suffers no fools, is serrated, discerning, contrary, and consummate ... a gutting, questioning, exploratory voice with the hiss of backwater ballads, several cups of the blues, an almanac of prayers and hexes, a hint of duende, […]
Henneh Kyereh Kwaku has poems, micro-prose and essays published or forthcoming in New South Journal, Three Drops Press, Ghana Writes, Lunaris Review, Kalahari Review, Praxis Magazine, Agbowó and elsewhere. His chapbook Revolution of the Scavengers is coming out next year in the boxset New-Generation African Poets, published […]
Wayne Miller’s associative and elliptical narratives suggest that consciousness itself is fragmentary, that memory represents only our efforts to lend a sense of continuity to a gorgeously fractured experience of the world around us. “We were together / in that daze of arrival,” he writes, evoking the uncanniness inherent […]
Erin Elizabeth Smith’s “Like the Wolf / Deployment Day 220” brims with allusions to pop culture, fable, and fairy tale. Immediately, readers see Duran Duran’s synthpop hit of the 80s, “Hungry Like the Wolf,” referenced in the title. Then, as we read the poem, we hear echoes […]
The gun bothered June. The woman had tucked it between the waistline of her denim cutoffs and her bare back, so when she bent over or stood straight or leaned to the side with her hip stuck out, the gun moved with her. June thought the woman might shoot her […]
WAYNE MILLER is the author of four poetry collections—most recently Post- (Milkweed, 2016), which won the UNT Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award—and his fifth collection, We the Jury, is forthcoming from Milkweed in 2021. He has co-translated two books by the Albanian poet Moikom Zeqo, most […]
Alyssa Jewell’s poetry carves a space for awe within what might otherwise be conceived of as a narrative’s most difficult, and most vulnerable, moments. “This lust gives more than it takes,” she warns the reader in “Love Poems to Accompany the Photographer’s Posthumous Exhibit.” Yet it is this […]
after WRS 1. Your blue heart was a crutch, a blizzard, a snow day excuse if we’re going to be honest, so here, my love, is the red-brown besotted burst ground into the grass–all the wasted fruit pulp and pit from July’s hot pith: take and eat from […]
New York mugginess clings to pores. It investigates the crevices and peaks of the skin and bone. It encourages the body to pour out undue amounts of fluid. Once caught by fabric, whether cheap or expensive, the humidity reveals its nature – opportunistic in its waiting for moments of embarrassment […]
I’ve been controlling my dreams again: the kind where unnamed flowers grow from the earth like shards of glass, but I can change the colors of their brittle stems, the jagged blooms, and so too, the night. Casting out the dark is easy when the heaviness of not […]