Illustration by Karenna Brown
Conversation with a Postman
I get used to loneliness, she says.
Autumn is utterly close; politics distant. The cat’s
a refined soul, but pisses all over the flowers.…
Poetry
Painting by Karenna Brown The day moon sits like a crooked smile just above the horizon, spins in a sky as blue as Mary’s robe and travels to Afghanistan to buy lapis lazuli like the masters of t…
I’m terrified of my migrant parents, always with their eyes set on flight. Is that how you solve everything, Papá? Are you going to once more do what he tells you, Mamá? I’m more ter…
Landscape at the Third Stage of Grief by Alexandra Lytton Regalado I This year my knees are having a hard kneel. This candle’s fire has two hard eyes.…
At the said-to-be bottomless pond at the sand pit, the raft we discovered was a heavy barn door, maybe ten feet by twelve, halfway in, halfway out of the water where others had left it, probabl…
Photo by Paul Domenick / Flickr This shadowed morning you write thought and read the garden You readjust the graded papers in your briefcase and wait for the enemies of knowledg…
Photo by Persis Karim Shadow and Light was instigated by San Francisco Bay Area poet and activist Beau Beausoleil as part of a recent ancillary project of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts…
Oregon Trail Ruts State Historic Site. On my right metatarsus you can see the swale caused by wet wagon wheels coming out of the Big Blue River, heaving their sodden burdens over the top…
In your living room was a bone-colored piano. In boredom we pressed a key. We even sang. Do you remember? You know, just so something fills your rented apartment in Buda, and recovers its m…
Only I never came back I was not going to be long —W. S. Merwin 1 I live where Lady Gaga files her taxes where the police do as they please where this paleface multi…
Tonight she asks for enchiladas, and my sister suggests pizza. I think they must want to die. I’m ashamed to feel this. I roll the shade of blame down the living room wall, screening their lives…
The girls who were talking in the corner not long ago are just now starting to get up (grabbing jackets from the coatrack) taking up their umbrellas again and a forgotten wallet that the tallest…
Anna 1 “Now I know how faces disappear, how terror nests under eyelids,” wrote Anna, Anna Akhmatova. Can you understand such suffering? While I read her, I lie stiff on the bed. She,…
“I Have Nothing but Exhaustion the Size of a Forest” after Sirkka Turkka I have nothing but exhaustion the size of my daughter’s pupils, when she brings her face close to…
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash The Bread of Letters I Who will blame the trees when they loose their leaves? who will accuse the sea of abandoning shells on the sand…
Ch’ol embroidered shirts / Photo by Diana Laura Montejo I Am the Alphabet They say, grass born in the forest, my body holds the freshness of mountains. I have absorbed the garden’s blossom…
Don’t just aim the telescope at the night sky’s swarming to discover one more planet. Turn it also toward the earth, toward the bottom of the sea, see the fish in between the rocks, a flicker…
Poetry is not solace, it is not a song of joy and of sadness, it is not a haven in the mouth of a bl…
Photo by Nathan Bang on Unsplash I brought mum and dad an old quilt – It’s nice, only it came out of the wash with funny splodges on it. They can stick it on the sofa bed out at the allotme…
Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash On the hilltop A woman said to me This fruit is called kam Kam I take the word as it comes I write it in my memory Like the three letters in th…
Photo by Marcel Ardivan on Unsplash I propose, my love, to be for you the surface to be but body for your eyes to be but rhythm for your tongue and information for your net. – Myriam…
The children see trees bending bending and then they are broken coconutless frondless. The children see roofs in various states of disarray metal sheets lifting eaves pulled away. There’s Takaro’s h…
Last Tuesday I wasn’t enough of a poet to note how the falling rain would split the sky It doused the fires in my heart till its casing cracked It hammered the pyramids of my mind and washed…
Because all the fathers and mothers of my parents, all the time past, are earth. But also language, words like Spanish, gypsy…
Photo by Ajeet Mestry on Unsplash The Alarm The television had announced the imminence of an attack. Would it be a bomb? Bacteria? A weapon previously unheard of? Everyo…