Our girls were disappearing. Missing from back yards, bunk beds, and basketball courts. Missing on roller skates, tightropes, and milk cartons. The girls were disappearing, but not my girl, fuck no, hell no, not now, not ever. I said it over and over. I said it while I watched […]
– Hopper’s Cape Cod Evening But it seems noonish, as if a flash just burst above a photographer’s shroud, except for the firs, blue as parrotfish, with night bulging through their needles. At first, the man on the stoop, white sleeves rolled to […]
“Don’t mistake / me as a fairy tale for the other girls,” declares Saint Margaret of Antioch in Anne Champion’s stunning hagiographic poems. Champion maps out a complex terrain of desire, dominion, and cruelty, exposing the ways in which women are disenfranchised by spotlighting a variety of women saints: […]
Patron Saint of dentistry and those suffering from dental problems Keep your eyes open when you pray; scan every landscape for a sign of me—I’ll deliver you […]
I first had the pleasure of experiencing Adam Vines’ luminous work when our Associate Editor, Okla Elliott, urged me to read a few of his most recent ekphrastic poems. In the weeks that followed, Okla passed away unexpected at the age of only forty, and at the outset of […]
September; the neighbor’s children all wearing knit caps with tassels, red coats. One fits the cuff of a blue mitten over the top of the wooden crucifix planted in their back yard. Goodbye. Hello. Betsy Wheeler is the author of the poetry collection Loud Dreaming in a […]
Patron Saint of incest, runaways, and mental illness Daily, Dymphna fed the orphans: Eat, she instructed, or you won’t have the energy to name what hunts you. She gathered the children round and instructed […]
The poems of Naomi Edwards are rooted in an awareness of loss and experience of a tenderness that has persevered. The images emerge with a pared down texture and rhythmic scaffolding, thoughtful but without fuss, like the loosely bound threads of a cloth laid over a frame. They […]
The foolishness of all this living! Of all of those white things collecting on the lawn; clover and picket moss, fluttering moths, a side-belly trout! just caught! afraid of being noticed and thrown back into the stream or cleaned for dinner it does a little gentle exercise—a few casual […]
It is a privilege to introduce this new hybrid text by Cecilia Woloch. I’ve long admired her body of work for its gratifying complexity, particularly when considering the way her narrators inhabit time. In Woloch’s skilled hands, history becomes recursive, circular, elliptical. Her innovative, undoubtedly philosophical poems allow wildly […]