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.

First Date

“I’m the ultimate possibility, by which / I mean I wither beside my family tree.”

“There’s a slot machine in the corner that speaks / in bible verses. A serpent loops itself around my ankle.”

“The cans with exit wounds // made of summer and twisted aluminum. Sky the color of aluminum, / bright body ready to tread its knots.”

I had not been seventeen so long when Patter was published and Douglas Kearney came to town. In …

“The topology of your hands / maps your mother’s wounds, withstands / the force against cheeks, flushed.”

“The eyes of injustice strike deep as a bullet. The eyes of a revolutionary strike deeper through eternity.”

“A is antecedent, anterior, the abscess from which all else / arises. The atrocity in the attic, but also the attic’s architecture.”

“There was ugliness, too, in the gallery, though the audioguide / steered me meticulously away.”

“Hands pulsing, demands I eat / myself golden, the gentlest curves of mango, / she still carves me.”