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Two Poems

James Tate

‘I wanted to go for a walk, but I was afraid / of missing a phone call.’

Two Poems

Pascale Petit

‘His sheets smell of formalin. / She feels as if her insides // are outside her, in a freezer.’

Two Poems

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

‘It was a cruelty I first tried to blame on nature, / Then on growing up, on falling off, on it being / Just an old myth.’

Two Poems

Rebecca Tamás

‘that huge cobalt industrial complex eye / how can anything be that big’

Two Poems

Caitlin Scarano

‘didn’t antlers grow from his head / whenever my mother’s back was turned?’

Two Poems

Sandra Simonds

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

Two Poems

Jana Prikryl

‘his balance / between person and / abstraction’s so stirring I want no other token for anything can happen’

Undo it

Carl Phillips

‘I can almost see again: we’ll drown anyway’

Vinod Kumar Shukla: Two Poems

Vinod Kumar Shukla

‘The truth is, though no one says it, / They’re all worried about their children.’

Walk Laramidia

Swati Rana

‘Imagine all the prodigal / People, hoping only to / Escape every human mistake.’

Wallace Stevens’s Memory

Armand Garnet Ruffo

‘It was / a line that signaled absolute forgetting / and it made me want to weep into my drink’

we are seen by the world / what must be seen

Nisha Ramayya

‘oh dirty feet blood-clotter / oh grease monkey clod-hopper / oh cloud-devourer spit’

Why A Colored Girl Will Slice You If You Talk Wrong About Motown

Patricia Smith

‘Their newborn children grew / like streetlights. We grew like insurance payments. / We grew like resentment.’

Your Youth

Kelly Schirmann

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