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Rae Armantrout
‘Music needs silence / more than silence needs music.’ New poetry by Rae Armantrout.
Enjaracon Sponaeda
Will Alexander
‘how can all the pressures of surveillance / fail to describe me?’
Heavily Redacted
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett
‘Syllables are excised by / X-Acto, fed into a shredder / for good measure.’
The Adventures of Amit Majmudar
Amit Majmudar
‘Never laid a snare for nothin. / Never caught a bullfrog. Broke / my slingshot wishbone, wishin. / Never had a smoke.’ New poetry from Amit Majmudar.
I’ll Come Later Tomorrow
J.V. Foix
‘all in black, her arms raised in the air, their shadow sketching some malign bird I couldn’t recognize’
Three Poems
Ahren Warner
‘Your promise has been extracted like the cow-horned remains of molars long-soused in a Diet Coke marinade.’
Stripes on My Shirt Like Migratory Birds
Hoa Nguyen
‘ “I got lost in my life” / which may or may not be / misheard.’
The Price You See Reflects the Poor Quality of the Item and Your Lack of Desire for It
Melissa Lee-Houghton
‘I walk away from you / without glancing back, in case you see in me something I don’t.’
The Heart Compared to a Seed, c.1508 (after Leonardo da Vinci)
Sylvia Legris
‘noce, the heart—the nut that gestates the tree of veins.’
Black Rot and Mildew
Leontia Flynn
‘a look I’d managed to accessorize / with raw dermatological distress.’
I Used to Go for Long Walks in the Evenings
Stephen Sexton
‘My celebrity accumulated like a kidney stone: / children, pets, even some corvids recognised me’
Inside the house
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
‘the bell / was ringing from the chapel, they were there / expecting her.’
Drama Lessons for Young Girls
Tara Bergin
‘So the young girls, / cast as naughty young girls from the Acropolis, / left – / just with some things missing.’
The Butcher
Stephen Sexton
‘Outside deer are nowhere to be seen and inside / the radio spectrum fills up with sorrowful little packets of data.’
Sonnet 3
Rae Armantrout
‘Your dad told me to tell you / how good you look to him right now.’ Rae Armantrout revisits Shakespeare’s sonnet 3.
Two Poems
Sandra Simonds
‘Police brutality makes me want to starve / myself to death and loneliness / is a drag’
Civilization Spurns the Leopard
Solmaz Sharif
‘To step out of my door and hope to see something like a life, something passably me.’
Two Poems
Tyehimba Jess
‘Let me tell you how / white hands kilned me / in the moonless middle / of night.’
Reception and Openings
Rae Armantrout
‘Because children suspect that objects conceal their powers and intentions, animators make an alarm clock run, screaming, in circles.’
from White Butterflies of Night
Jaan Kaplinski
‘I don’t remember whether I believed that I could just / abandon one life to begin another’
