Poetry

When we first moved in together, there was somewherea dull blade of moon and expansive fields like inland seas.And surely clouds were visible to many, a distant carapace of sky, and snow tapered along fences into sharpness.And what of the honking horns in cities and bus doors whooshing open then closed? And lovers gazing at …

Nothing better to do than watch each drop of Cytoxan shimmydown a see-through tube to anoint the chosen vein.You could turn to the window’s maple, smoldering in autumn sun,to catch the precise nanosecond when leaf detaches from limb—stare down a likely candidate, curled and tinged with brown.A nudge from the windmight encourage the scene along,but …

Alva sits under the tree. The leaves make a second sky if you look up at the right angle, and pretend you have forgotten how you came to be there.Alva is and is not me. Sometimes I’m tired of walking around in the same ole body, under the samefoam-ceilinged sky or the too-blue August onewith …

Summer Assistant Editor Arah Ko: I am enchanted by the way poetry can make meaning so beautifully out of lists, and Lubar’s poem does this extremely well. With the charm of a fairytale and the ghostly quality of a haunting, this poem outlines what a grandfather abandoned, starting with the speaker of the poem themself—“and …

I hear the damp thud, the rustle of grass. Glass packed in skin like both arms barbedin pure light, and I imagine that, the girl’s hum wound around a throat mired with soil.Choir of car horn and crickets chirp an elegy I’ve revised from every wrecked angle, one sidemessed with antifreeze, another folded delicate as …

Beneath the hazed moon, this hazed absence of stars,how the hearts of the frogs are breaking!How they stretch and bloat the fine elasticof their chests, and how their bloated heartsare so greatly breaking! This night of camp-tent swelter belongs to the frogs; the distant car rattling slowly home and the nameless, distant dog knownothing of …

A century ago, our skies were rife with Ectopistes migratorius— wild passenger pigeons—doves. A boy could shoot up in the air, and thundering flocks would rainon his face, on his shoulders—a miraculous abundance of quail in this desert.Ruthlessly, we shot bird after bird darkening the noons with migrations for miles on miles. Why, in the …