There is a music that moves us through the summer months. You can feel it in your bones, as you pound foot to pavement. We, your editors, are children of the sun, and so we couldn’t help ourselves. While you’ve been gone, we ran around and swayed under the suns of foreign countries (like Queens) and southern states lulled by the music in the poems of Bushra Rehman and Bianca Spriggs. We hummed lines by...
When I read Chris Abani’s new book of poetry, Sanctificum, on a train, It was all I could do to stay in my seat, my inside on fire. As a person who navigates multiple cultures, the female body, and spirituality in an often brutal world, this book spoke directly to my obsessions. As the Library Journal wrote, “Abani . . . explores place and humor, exile and freedom with poems of experience and...
Masjid Alfalah
The minar and dome of our masjid
took longer to grow than trees.
Our fathers bought the land, then tilled it.
Before that, it was a parking lot
for the Jehovah’s Witness.
They sold it when the door to door
wasn’t bringing in the donations.
Our fathers sowed the seeds then
Qurans and janamazes. In all my years
from when I was four to sixteen,
the walls went up, and then the dome...
Metropolis
A woman tattoos Rashid’s name above her breast
& talks about the conspiracy to destroy blacks.
As if this cancer of handcuffs equals people
leaving their homes holding red carnations,
& not Timbs scuffed & leaning from night’s
grinding. A life sentence begins with Rashid’s
name & an old quarrel: crimson against
the concrete. Someone says the people need
to stand up,...
Track 1: If Birds Gather You Hair For Nesting by Anna Journey
The title of Anna Journey’s debut poetry collection comes from an Appalachian folk myth: if birds gather your hair for nesting, you’ll go crazy. The beauty and threat of that statement runs throughout Journey’s work. In “Adorable Siren, Do You Love the Damned?” which opens the book, a speaker walks through a rather interesting...
LA GALLERA
What you need to be aware of before you go to a Nicaraguan cockfight is that the two roosters placed in front of each other in the center of the ring will fight until one of them can no longer stand. Spectators will be calling for blood and cheer when they inevitably see it. It’s surprising how well regulated the system is. Roosters are weighed and pitted against others in their own weight...
Oceanography
There are seven layers to the ocean.
The top one is clear, cellophane or wax paper, moves
like oil with no respect for irony.
The second layer is ocean wax, which liquefies
as it gets cold instead of hot, so ocean wax
is thinnest near the ice caps.
Layer three is made up of animals. Squid arms drift
through a sideshow of fish. Where you look, you see eyes.
Layer four is akin to hypnosis....
Stephyn Dobyns refers to Jack McCarthy as “one of the wonders of contemporary poetry.” Anyone who has had the opportunity to be hypnotized by one of Jack’s poetic spells knows what Mr. Dobyns is referring to. I first saw him read in 2008 at Bar 13 in Manhattan, and was absolutely dumb struck. It only got better when I went home with two of his poetry collections. Each subsequent interaction with...
OMEN
And then there was the time we found a sorry gray cat
that had been hit outside ______’s house right down the street
from the cafe. The animal was so pitiful, our bleeding hearts
couldn’t stand to leave it, so we found many newspapers,
our hands never once touching any parasites, to maneuver it
off the pavement and the threat of more mangling tires.
The flies hadn’t gotten to be very thick yet,...
“Jessie”
I wasn’t the sort of kid who told the other children where babies came from. Those messengers were most often the kind of pale, sneering boys who loitered in the back of the second grade classroom with a crusty ring of snot dried around their nostrils. These were the boys who licked their lips till they chapped, and lifted the lids of their desks when the teacher wasn’t looking...
Charter for the over-sung country
Live in me like blood,
like my name, like the numbers
tattooed on my grandmother’s arm,
like my mother’s milk and her slow
disease. I’ve tried to run away;
You are not a place.
I’ve built a house of bricks
to keep out heavy weather.
The house falls down,
your smell comes in:
eucalyptus, salt, the goat on the altar.
I’ve barely undone your strap.
How long like...
Room 31
Cigarette smoke
is the smell of the last couple here,
the ghost of their stains
still
on the sheets,
and the bed aches
with the weight
of my waiting.
I’ve left
the door ajar, enough
for night to push
its tongue into the room.
(Are you on your way?
Where did you tell your wife
you were going?)
Another hour –
A couple argues
in the next room;
Now, moans. I want
to see their faces.
I want to be...
hindsight
the potted lily was a horrible gift
but you should have seen your face, excited you
had found a keepsake, something
to root my name, keep the delicate coo
when we made love, living. it was easy
in the beginning, to coddle each bud, swell
with each drop that found its way to the top
through the rich earth. months passed
we pretended we could make ourselves familiar,
ignored the wounds, their...
