Salt
“legs wrapped like branches, / toes like roots as old as time”
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.
LOVE IS A BUNDLE OF TEACHINGS
By Moira J.
“the word for breakup sex is salt”
This Is How I Love You
By Joanne Oh
When books grow old / they turn to wood / and grow mushrooms / along the spines.
A Legacy of Torch Song
Fire’s flicker by ancient instinct has always seemed / a morsel of some good thing, some yellow promise / like a notebook patterned in sunflowers
Debt
“Taught us to levitate for a reasonable fee Fed us for a reasonable fee Gave us lung disease for a reasonable fee”
What We Carry
By Sarah Carey
“Mailboxes open, close / like gates to territory lost, or mouths of birds // our hopeful hands still feed, the gone forever get, / the passages we carry inside.”
Poetry We Admire: Fear
That time of year has arrived where we all deliberately engage with fear—communal, familial grappling with death and nightmare. For October’s PWA, our editors sought out poems that speak to such engagement, that wrestle with violence like Leila Chatti’s “After Reading…”, or consummate the scary stories we tell ourselves like Justin Phillip Reed’s “Ruthless”, or explore the paradox thrumming between pleasure and fear like Emmalee Hagarman “Our Most Cherished Terrors”.
A hundred-mile breath
“My mouth a messy mountain, a land- / mass of round-backed sounds, a bulge / of bleeding ballads.”
Aubade with Notes on DNA
By JK Anowe
to memory / memory being the sound she made when i moved / through her / like nectar through
a wrist-cut / & she was throbless as / a cursed womb