Provenance
“My great great grandfather’s head / looks nothing like my great great grandfather. / It’s placed on its side, in the Wallace exhibit, / in a museum in London.”
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.
Elegy for Ana Mendieta
By Rachel Smith
“vaginal and then, / frame by frame, erupting.”
If Covid-19 Wasn’t a Stain in the Wind, Would the Earth Bleed Any Less?
“Like I say, your body — a product of salt & / music — takes the circumference of a circle, so there is no / wildfire sitting in your throat.”
Autotroph, My Autotroph
“The moon is not a star, not even a minor one / to some other planet. No one will love the moon / like we do here, so far from all the more interesting bodies.”
Ouroboros
“Happiness is a sick old thing– / not the chemical response of the body, / but the way I hunger for it, lost / in my own madness like a dog”
Poetry We Admire: Praise
By Kim Harvey
For July’s Poetry We Admire on Praise, we continue to #amplifymelanatedvoices. Again this month, we choose to let these extraordinary poems speak for themselves. All praise goes to the amazing Angelo Geter in Poem-a-Day, Sanam Sheriff in The Offing, Ina Cariño in Waxwing, Nikky Finney in Blood Orange Review, and Assétou Xango in Poem-a-Day.
How to Identify Yourself with a Wound (2018)
By K B
“Who am I kidding; / I’ve only ever been a question. Laugh? Womb? Wound? Sure.”
Two Poems
“Do you think you / could recite the narrative lies / of my life? Like jewels lining / the vertebrae. Like architecture.”
When the river at last has fled its bed
“we parse the difference between / jealousy and envy / & carry curved sticks / pointing nowhere.”