Kazim Ali

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

Issue 124

Rachael Boast

Issue 129

Mark Doty

‘an orange plastic basket of compost / down from the top of the garden – sweet dark, / fibrous rot, promising’

Issue 122

John Burnside

'the trees / are slender in the way that things / are almost, though not quite / absent'

Issue 130

Tishani Doshi

‘Rain at three splits the bed in half, / cracks at windows like horsemen blistering / through a century of hibernation.’

Diego Báez

‘But really, your disappearance / has never been a question of whether.’

Michael Dickman

‘A cloudless sky and I’m back / an ice-cold sky-blue rag / for my eyes’

Emily Berry

‘And I'm / cranking out oodles of love the way an old spaghetti machine / cranks out spaghetti.’

John Balaban

‘Her mother planted a garden in Manhattan. / In that garden is a tree. Some look on it and feel restored. / Others, when the wind lifts its leaves, want to scream.’

Jean-Paul de Dadelsen

‘Or otherwise, leaving the shore of the intermediate sea, / has it been a while since they’ve gone ahead / into the interior of lands of the spirit?’

John Burnside

‘Shoeboxes lined with eggs and empty / pomegranates drying in a bowl, / mousebones and wicker, chess pieces, muddled coats.’

Issue 125

Christopher DeWeese

‘When the oxygen thins, / the world gets less reciprocal.’

Issue 25

Raymond Carver

‘He said are you a religious man do you kneel down / in forest groves and let yourself ask for help.’

Mary Jo Bang

‘It’s a simple truth that one can occupy two / places at one time while sitting in a chair—the same way a / poseable doll can be divided from her dress.’