Rae Armantrout

‘Music needs silence / more than silence needs music.’ New poetry by Rae Armantrout.

Feng Sun Chen

‘Every day, I see a monstrosity in the kissing hole.’

Kelly Schirmann

‘I have never been in love / with so many variants of nothing.’

Javier Zamora

‘I will etch visas on toilet paper and throw them from a lighthouse.’

Will Alexander

‘how can all the pressures of surveillance / fail to describe me?’

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

‘Syllables are excised by / X-Acto, fed into a shredder / for good measure.’

Jane Yeh

‘Her / Secrets play on continuous loop, // Like a B-movie.’

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.

Renee Gladman

Garrett Caples

‘light plays on the planet / long enough to tell time’

Sylvia Legris

‘Narcotic, / unworldly, a toxic doctrine / of undivine retribution.’

Jaan Kaplinski

‘Things didn’t remember their names and I have begun to forget them’

J.V. Foix

‘all in black, her arms raised in the air, their shadow sketching some malign bird I couldn’t recognize’

Grzegorz Wróblewski

‘Do you think I can get to heaven / with zero balance and a virus?’

Ahren Warner

‘Your promise has been extracted like the cow-horned remains of molars long-soused in a Diet Coke marinade.’

Hoa Nguyen

‘ “I got lost in my life” / which may or may not be / misheard.’

Vahni Capildeo

‘Haven’t you noticed people / are different since then?’

Melissa Lee-Houghton

‘I walk away from you / without glancing back, in case you see in me something I don’t.’

Sylvia Legris

‘noce, the heart—the nut that gestates the tree of veins.’

Leontia Flynn

‘a look I’d managed to accessorize / with raw dermatological distress.’

Stephen Sexton

‘My celebrity accumulated like a kidney stone: / children, pets, even some corvids recognised me’

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

‘the bell / was ringing from the chapel, they were there / expecting her.’

Leontia Flynn

‘The opposite of simply sitting about / in your head, like an egg in eggshell.’

Tara Bergin

‘So the young girls, / cast as naughty young girls from the Acropolis, / left – / just with some things missing.’

Stephen Sexton

‘Outside deer are nowhere to be seen and inside / the radio spectrum fills up with sorrowful little packets of data.’

Rae Armantrout

‘Your dad told me to tell you / how good you look to him right now.’ Rae Armantrout revisits Shakespeare’s sonnet 3.

Sandra Simonds

‘Police brutality makes me want to starve / myself to death and loneliness / is a drag’

Daniel Poppick

‘Over an exit, and deeply dreaming / A guard brutally splayed’

Astrid Alben

‘High up in atmosphere, vertigo intact inside Vodka & Lime’

Solmaz Sharif

‘To step out of my door and hope to see something like a life, something passably me.’

Tyehimba Jess

‘Let me tell you how / white hands kilned me / in the moonless middle / of night.’

Rae Armantrout

‘Because children suspect that objects conceal their powers and intentions, animators make an alarm clock run, screaming, in circles.’

Jaan Kaplinski

‘I don’t remember whether I believed that I could just / abandon one life to begin another’

Eliza Griswold

Solmaz Sharif

‘Full or empty / was impossible to see.’

Matthew Welton

‘what it is about the earth / that it won’t absorb the stream’