Our Father, Who Art
By Gale Acuff
“after Sunday School this morning I / expressed my concern to my teacher and / her answer was tears and a silent weeping”
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.
X-Ray Diptych in Ben Gurion Airport
By Tarik Dobbs
“The body compounds / lack: when the mother lacks light, does her child / inherit absence? Today, / I sleep in a room with no / blinds. Do I carry radiation/ like a sadness? Do I irradiate generations?”
Schizo Plays a Werewolf in a Black and White Film
By Jake Bailey
“I’ve heard / that water makes up most / of an argument / I’ll drink whatever / someone gives / this body is a sponge”
Hippocampus
“I couldn’t breathe. No one was to blame. / It was spring. Buds were busy / mocking me, proving we could live / through many deaths.”
Planting Tulips
“we reenact old rites, rise as supplicants / on the cold ground of November, plant / our small intentions which will in time // become silken frame, ruffled apricot”
Poem for the God of Small Mercies
“Now, as usual, it is 3 a.m, and I am making / chokeberry jam. The ingredients: chokeberries, / pectin, sugar. The approximation of a prayer: any / violence made sweet.”
Poetry We Admire: Ars Poetica
By Kim Harvey
For April’s Poetry We Admire, we’ve picked some beauties that honor the art of poetry and what it may offer us in these uncertain times. Enjoy some incredible (mostly) new Ars Poetica from around the net.
In It
“That is what poems do they call everything by a name and suddenly little pieces of metal scraping / against metal. Gutshot. Name it.”
IF I COULD WRITE YOU A HAPPIER ENDING
By Mary Foulk
“my squinting eyes search / any compass point / to return to / after your death—my own body / crawling towards that blue black”