By Shara McCallum
Why yu always ask stupid question, ee?
The man call mango head because him head
shape like mango. What…
The man call mango head because him head
shape like mango. What…
Explore Poems: Ekphrasis
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- By Ama CodjoeWhat if, Betye, instead of a rifle or hand
grenade—I mean, what if after
the loaded gun that takes two hands
to fire, I lay down the splintered broom
and the steel so cold it wets
my cheek? What if I unclench the valleys
of my... - By Mag GabbertThe effect—for those three hundred years, while the cupid remained hidden—was a kind of silence.
Like… - By Krista FranklinThe handwriting is on the wall
a white smear across the face of the sky
a smear of white
a white chalk smear on a blackboard sky
an inky bleed that eats everything.
Come clean. In the dark
we all look alike,
right? Wing of a bald... - By Krista FranklinIndigo pool, color of the wings
of the biggest specimen captured
in glass in my second room, that one
iridescent, incandescent, a word
I wish every nigga knew. Not too far
back, my shadow embraced me so long
I thought I was Narcissus, pulled
deep into my... - By Krista FranklinEveryday some brown
woman pools into inky blue,
a madness that crawls up
from the floor of her and flows
out all around. I should
know, for months swallowed
in the bruise of myself
reaching to hold my hand.
The sun continues to brush
orange light intermittently
everywhere despite the... - By Abdulkareem AbdulkareemAll things begin from the spindle,
we say—life spun from graces.
I grew like rain from rumbles of my parents’
cloud, a dark dawn, admitting growth.
In the beginning, I squeeze into existence with a head,
white, silhouette-like—formed from
the stomach of the hard earth on... - By S.J. Fowler & Rebecca Kamen
- By Mary Jo BangThat the walls have no texture suggests that we,
the angels and I, are perfect. And we are,
the way children are until they are no longer.
I remember seeing ground and wondering
where walking might take me. Up or down?
In a landscape of... - By Victoria ChangJan.4.2022
A call is just a call. I pick it up.
Jan.6.2022
I lift blankets looking for my father.
Jan.7.2022
When I take off the patch, your eye is gone.
I spend the day in other people’s tears.
Jan.9.2022
Someone says your eyelid almost came off,
the doctors tried... - By Mary Jo BangI was living a life that was more
or less filled with misfiring synapses
inside a braincase. They said and said
and never stopped saying, “You are
that problem that can’t be undone,
a daughter that keeps becoming
what keeps her mother awake.” I was
in that... - By Mary Jo BangYou once sat on straw mats but clearly
it wasn’t enough.
It must not have been
since you lifted the mat a few inches
and added pegs at the corners.
You knew how legs worked,
you used them to look for your food.
Was the elevation meant... - By Anne SextonThe town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.
It moves. They are all... - By Elena Karina ByrneBut all dark notes are dismantled
there from the middle ear
downward. Voyaged mind, cauldron skin.
Can you claim anything is yours?
The burning salt hour
throws its black broken-glass frame skyward.
Left behind
the mum orchestra, body parts in peril
and animals dizzy for
lust past all lost
astronomy... - By Elena Karina ByrneThe aftermath always happening like an airplane falling, or a man
midair falling from a horse, and an arrow, a gun, many guns
pointing away, at us, our all bull’s-eye-on-the-mark. This is what he
sees when he sees. Maybe Wrong or not, the... - By John KeatsThou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
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- + 25 more
- By Nyla MatukThe woman sits clutching her knees
inside a short-necked bottle on a beach,
looks up smiling at a mouth above
all imagined itineraries.
We like to think she volunteered
to be lowered into the bottle.
On her own idea, even
her own craftiness, lured into being
enrobed with... - By Donald PlattI keep returning to John Constable’s Study of Clouds.
Oil on cardboard,
six by seven and a half inches, it shows purple-gray
thunderheads,
one patch of blue, above low hills and two small trees flanked by shrubs
in the left
foreground. A sketch en plein air,... - By Ange MlinkoIt is Hermes stepping off his winged sandal.
... I saw the Writing Spider sitting with aplomb
Even his caduceus, despite the scandal
dead center her creation, above the compost
of its forfeiture, lies abandoned
(sage location); what I wondered most
like an Android or iPad on... - By Keith S. Wilsoni have a red dress and no eyes.
i have a dress that is blood
red and i have eyes that don’t blink
when the balcony sucks in. my dress is a beet
swollen with thought, and hangs like a body
on my body. i...