Where lyric meets narrative
Why has a kind of prosaic poetry suddenly become so appealing?
Aria Aber
Hunger borders this land, while snow turns all to immigrants …
Lately I’ve been moved by how the skeletons were found …
Where did he go? I asked. Where do the missing ever go?
Kevin Young
For now, the sting of being—
like an ambulance playing the tune you cannot name…
Margaret Ross
People withoutanger are more developed.
There were too many doors; there weretwo right in the middle of a hallway. Some you couldn’t open without closing others facing them.
Thirty white people wearing white and posing by the sea. Actually, two of themwear blue…
Sandra Lim
The pigeons ran around in berserk patterns outside.Our warm, clandestine complicity had the force of a new actuality.
With me, life becomes sweeter, so she loses some ofthe ability to defend herself.
When we met later in the alley to take out the trash, we would reliably turn into two lumps of fear.
Sasha Debevec-McKenney
I hate Lyndon Johnson until I love Lyndon Johnson…
Gather the video girls. Tell them to twerk to this …
Daniel Poppick
I had been raised as a Reform Jew—in other words, an agnostic worshipper of narrative …
Sarah Trudgeon
My husband says he doesn’t really likeshort stories, says only novelscapture the human experience.
Anaïs Duplan
I missed my father. I ate wax in my impatience.
Robyn Schiff
You are an American Girl. Here you are in an American Poem …
Vidyan Ravinthiran
His father’s fists turned him mild as a Jainto his son, me.
your phone is flashing with a work email; our jobs aren’t safe and we still rent.
Monica Youn
She said it was an Asian thing and then they stopped asking.
Cornelius Eady
Since it didn’t happen the evening Of whatever the hell Emmett Till did;
These mother-fuckers, These mother-fuckers Won’t let me sing.
William Virgil Davis
Tonight, there are no stars. This huge hooded dark is like a deep sleep
Garrett Hongo
Lunch breaks, summer I was 20 clerking for the City, I’d sit on marble benches across from the glass palace of DWP, over at the Mark Taper,
Warren Slesinger
The water worried me when the gray face that floated over it in lines and patches to the shore
Constantine Contogenis
I give her chances all the time — not to make her the mom for me. But I’m just passing through her stop, on a middle track, seeing her go left across my window while she stands on the platform,
Richard Kenney
So, Love, when that celebrated clarifier, Chemotherapy, calls back—for us,
On time to the strike of a silent bell inside the chapel of the cell
Ioanna Carlsen
It’s true and it’s not true, it’s partly the light that makes the bone-colored clouds seem to web in shadows down the mountains,
