Photo by Megan (Markham) Bucknall / Unsplash It is easy to be a mother. Childbirth was nothing. Marriage and divorce only crack the plaster a little like when the S-train goes by. It i…

Photo by Basetrack 18 / Flickr The trees outside my balcony, Remind me of the trees of Afghanistan They are big green clouds that land on the ground to lift our spirits and take them for a…

Photo by michael_swan / Flickr Alternatives could or should be basin or lagoon or pool or puddle or small body or was there a motive or I got here by myself iterating through conversions or…

Photo by Sylvie Mazerolle / Unsplash Assembly Dear fellow carpenters and woodworkers, I come with greetings of solidarity from the metaphysicians. Among us the situation h…

Photo by Alexander Sinn / Unsplash The hour of hooded crows when cleaners fly for the night all carrion is eaten all bones picked and all skins farewell you unlucky trail explorers! only…

Birds over Jerash / Photo by Omar Chatriwala / Flickr The poets’ voices sing in my head across distance, sing to reconcile to make peace through counterpoint but can’t work as they should.…

Photo by NCinDC / Flickr He said: Why must they destroy and destroy again? Why must they forget my face my gestures my voice? Why must they believe in my absence even as I stand in front o…

“A Fisherman at Lake Dian.” Photo by Yu Jian. Reading Glasses I am no longer young, a half-blind Homer, wearing reading glasses to see the world. The calendar shows t…

On the Yangtze River, through the Wu Gorge / Photo by Perfect Zero / Flickr Summer Elegy               …

Photo by Russ Morris / Flickr Some may live just a block away, even nearer: the Walmart clerk who’d coolly hook a hot wire to your gonads, the grease monkey keen on beheading, the cleanin…

The seacoast at Mykonos / Photo by the author In Andros, I Watch a Goat Run to and away from My Father’s Hands He opens his eyes. His eyes      …

Photo by Jes Timms / Unsplash for Vishnu Khare How to convey one’s well-being over the phone, It’s going all right, All that is there is good or nothing is good. The main th…

Photo by Matt Artz / Unsplash I write with words that have shadow but don’t shelter no sooner do I start this page insomnia burns it not the words but what they consume is what reality star…

Photo by George Kourounis / Unsplash [I ask everybody] I ask everybody have you noticed today when the time passed with its voice of silence with its common appearance…

Photo by Patrick Robert Doyle / Unsplash Four Scars for a Nameless Town 1 I come from a town with no name, no smiles of children under the trees. My town…

Tonalmeyotl is from Atzacoaloya, Chilapa de Álvarez, in the Mexican state of Guerrero / Photos courtesy of the author   My Náhuatl They say my tongue Náhuatl has had her head…

Detail of Robert Aitken’s Samuel Gompers Memorial, 1933, Washington, DC / Photo by takomabibelot / Flickr What book he was reading – we still don’t know, For Shakespeare doesn’t tell us. Jus…

Käthe Kollwitz, Pietà (Mother with Dead Son), 1937 (enlarged by Harald Haake in 1993), Neue Wache, Unter den Linden, Berlin / Photo by deadmanjones / Flickr / Original sculpture in the K…

Photo by Dave Phillips / Unsplash We heard the trucks pull up, the barking voices, a woman in the street –Irina? – putting up a fight. Each night, the bell’s insistent buzz, the foot-stomp…

Sheep’s Head Lighthouse / Photo by John Finn / Flickr Author’s note: For about seven years now, Kwame Dawes and I have been writing long poem-dialogues that have so far appeared as f…

Photo by Kawan Nahaee Both a poet and novelist in Kurdish and Persian, Kawan Nahaee has a significant audience on social media, where the poems he posts often engage wit…

Photo by Richard Lee / Unsplash [A flock of cranes] A flock of cranes crosses an ashen sky             the prophet…

Photo courtesy of the author for Rachelle 4/27/2020 Our moms were widows before they met our fathers. Their hair blue-black, their hands already chapped, caressed by Inglis die-ca…

Photo by Marco Arment / Flickr Sunday morning on the parquet Sunday morning on horseback Sunday morning picking lice from her hair                …

Carlos Estévez, Self-Fishing, 2006, collage on paper, 39½ x 27½ inches / Courtesy of the artist Now the beat (there is always a beat). Now the drums and the darkness within. Now the danc…