Poetry
by Dannye Romine Powell.
“You come back, / bent over my things / like a collector, hunched, / touching, wanting to lay claim / to everything.”
by Ricardo Pau-Llosa.
“of ailment breeds / a new season in
flesh. / As if snow were suddenly / caking subtropical thatch roofs, / or the desert sogged up / with bitter rain.”
by Anya Silver.
“Belief comes too easily to the ill. / Miracles fall from their lips like gems, / are worn like secret amulets.”
by Monique Ferrell.
“perhaps there should be another word for depression / we’ve become too accustomed to the sound…”
by Subhaga Crystal Bacon.
“Cancer came and took a lung, / then came and took the rest / of him. And I wasn’t there…”
by Birch Rosen.
“You do not have to stagger around the house, / unaided and weak, / as the meds wear off or kick in.”
by Cynthia Parker-Ohene.
“The macabre moon / Once lunged at me / It hisses red / Hangs voyeuristically / Wants me to stand in its balkanized light.”
by Caroline Harper New.
“Love, / from Germanic lufu, is intestinal and milky / like undug onions squeezed from mothers.”
by Sandra Giedeman.
“We watch the gardener arc the hose / carelessly washing away the work / of mud sparrows, hornets and wasps.”