Cynthia Dewi Oka
Poem As Attempt To Function As American Progress
As in, a locked cupboard of grudges
shimmering like freshly mined cobalt.
As in, a tail wagging in pursuit
of the pantsuit ironed to perfection.
I’ve missed the deadline for critical
feedback to make my rockets
come true. So, nowhere but here…
Debra Allbery
Provenance
I’m in a row of sunflowers, looking up
at the cutaway sky. Then walking a talc-dust path
between beds of pansies, their piebald faces turned toward me.
To the left a swaybacked shed, iron-hinged.
Burl’s tool chest within, leather straps, neat trays stacked…
Katelyn Grimes
[PALMISTRY]
I am doing everything
but processing the Sunday sermon
given from the Zoom pulpit.
I am thinking about how someday,
this era will feel so impossibly
long ago. Then I am thinking
about how that day feels so impossibly
far away. I catch words…
Bridgette James
A Montage of my Abscission.
My cameo was on a gardening show.
A self-seeding Sea Holly half-way into my autumn
changing into the other category in an exposé
on ethnicity data. Reborn a Pidgin-speaker – in a hair-extension shop
in the London News, I replied in English to How you day?…
Michael Lauchlan
Plot Device
Turning into an alley behind a church
I get smacked by a van flying past
in the parking lane and spin to a stop
at the curb and before I can undo my seatbelt
the crazed driver is calling on God and neighbors
(neither respond), threatening to beat my ass…
Hayley Phillips
Bloom
I notice it early one fevered morning,
a cup of green no larger than a pearl pressing
past the crowded mother leaves –
the young violet’s first answer to my tending
and to Louisiana’s heavy, wet spring breath.
This took much orchestration.
A severed leaf cut at an angle to encourage roots
in the correct direction, weeks spent watching…
Joemario Umana
Boy With a List in His Pocket
the road to the market bends like an old man’s back & i am running
with a boy’s knees, new to ache, new to the idea that a list
is a kind of oath—salt, matches, crayfish, onions—things
that hold a house together like silence in a father’s mouth.
my mother says remember, & it sounds like a test,
so i carry her voice the way men carry names—clumsy,
heavy, unwilling to ask what they mean…
Jonathan Fletcher
The First Nude Female I Saw
Not in Playboy or Hustler,
not in my ex’s bed.
Instead, the colored page
I ripped out from my mother’s issue
of National Geographic:
a young woman
as dark as me, hair also black…
Paul Ilechko
Scenario for Intercontinental Travel
Remembering flying in the last row
of the non-smoking section all the way
to Tokyo which made the next flight
pure heaven with not even the slightest
hint of pollution beyond the stink of
the one cooked meal that you would get
on a seven hour flight to Singapore…
Dara Laine
The Mermaids
He held the mermaids behind his back,
peering in just over the edge of the bathroom door
during their Mufasa duet.
Raised his eyebrows at me.
The girls were in the bath,
splashing and singing.
He said,
Should I give them now?…
Grace Lynn
You Can Convince Yourself of Anything
It’s all true. These lies. Isn’t that how
we keep going? The carob you handed me is fake
chocolate like the laughter of sitcoms and the hooves
of a thousand horses thumping in our hearts.
Cut me some slack. You call this love?
Above the sky is white, not blue, and the one
man who calls me is from United Healthcare…
Cecilia Savala
Evolution Ghazal
He has a front row ticket to her regression:
She hasn’t had a drink in six years.
Twice this week she threw her shoulders back
to speak frankly about the ways her weight affects her life.
His long distance empathy, almost as good as an embrace,
vodka-laden, dissolves what’s not supposed to be said….
Debra Allbery
Plain Style, an essay
I had an instinctive sense of a foundational aesthetic from the time I began to write seriously, though I would never have presumed to call it a style. It issued from a belief that pure lyric infused the words that we use daily—that simplicity can honor complexity, that poetry should speak to any reader…