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Terror

Kimiko Hahn

‘The lemon shark / who returns to the same mangrove-lined shallows / every year to give birth.’

Pyjamas

Rodney Koeneke

‘Lover, does it matter / how the river spends its glitter’

Two Poems

Hoa Nguyen

‘I wrote ‘valley’ when I meant ‘longing’ / Your laugh a river A trout kind of green.’

The Common Cold

Laura Kasischke

‘But here we are again, you and I, the / two of us, tangled / up and biological.’

Demeter

Fiona Benson

‘I head down the path hoping she’ll come / but when I look back she’s gone and my own voice / snags at her name like barbed wire on skin.’

Cooley High: 1991

Aracelis Girmay

‘Please stay with me as I / replay the last touch.’

Two Poems

Kimiko Hahn

‘Certainly the tide or the dog striding along the sluff of seaweed, / this afternoon – brown, light green, black green, white and red.’

A Meeting of Minds with Henry David Thoreau

Andrew Motion

‘What am I doing here more than looking – / which I would stop / only to help things through their vanishing’

Silver Threads

Greg Alan Brownderville & Zach Savich

‘Time trapped me in this canyon, this dark jar — / jabbed holes in the sky to spare me light and air.’

Beyond Sunset

Mary Ruefle

‘Red sadness never appears sad . . . it appears in flashes of passion, anger, fear, inspiration and courage, in dark unsellable visions; it is an upside down penny concealed beneath a tea cosy.’

Three Poems

Sakutarō Hagiwara

‘What I do not have is Everything: / how is it that I won’t bear this neediness?’

Advice Column

Kazim Ali

‘Me always untorn and enslaved / Weird notions of gender and ground / Nothing but you between me and god.’

Toboggan Run

Fiona Benson

‘What would I give / to be one of those swimmers in all this snow, / swallowed by the cold and the night’s strange radiance?’