Poem

Leaving the Party

Death was all around him. Maybe you know what this is like, hearing music overlaid with rain. They stop competing after a while.

  • D. S. Waldman

For the Missing

So many simply leaving.

  • Daniel Halpern

Two Poems

Don’t stuff your fingers
in your ears or count the Pentecost.
Don’t ask if that grammar has a rosary
or recipe written in cornrows on her head.

  • Joel Dias-Porter

Three Poems

Before I left him /
on his deathbed, my father used to say 
the ice is breathing: this quivering song 
of things once-broken, mending. /
This song of them breaking again.

  • Nick Martino

Three Poems

You can say my mother didn’t know jack
           about no line breaks, but she’ll tell you
that one thing leads to another; and violence
           and love can happen all at once.

  • Eugene Gloria

In which Refaat Alareer is dying as an old man & Henry Kissinger has died young

In the parallel world in which gesture is followed /
by recompense

  • Suzanne Gardinier

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Two Poems

I wanted time / to come to me

  • Camonghne Felix

I Pass Women Sewing at their Singers and a Blind Albino Child

I once wrote letters to a prisoner at Guantánamo. The letters always came back / opened.

  • Spring Ulmer

Two Photographs

The first capturing your gaze into nowhere
the other when you covered your face with your hands
so you were not anonymous, only unseen

  • Michael Ondaatje

Three Poems

a sunset makes a sound doesn’t it
I learned    too late

  • James Fujinami Moore

Two Poems

From time to time, language dies. / It is dying now. / Who is alive to speak it?

  • Fady Joudah

It gets better, by halves

Who did this to you?

  • Sean Patrick Mulroy

Impenetrable

in 1989 you walk the main road to /
Tiananmen when the inexplicable /
hits

  • Joseph Cuomo

Esprit de l’escalier

Why didn’t I just say / people like us here / at this table / should not just talk about politics

  • Peter Dale Scott

Three Poems

Relying a little less on the odd language we’d been left inside /
we turned back to feeling: — / more moan, more mumble.

  • Joy Priest

Unlucky

Drowning is something that happens to others, not to them.

  • Hannah Liberman

I Can’t Believe We’re Returning to the Garden

trudging back to Eden.

  • Alfredo Véa Jr.

Two Poems

Your lone question —
What happens when you ignore a part of someone? —
Would flood me, and in time, knock down
Every structure.

  • Wesley Rothman

Two Poems

most days, during some mid-day hour, / I close my eyes and say the Sh’ma. / But it’s always the wrong time of day, / and it’s the only prayer I know

  • Matthew Lippman

Transcolonial Poem, or while contemplating double mastectomy I remember Columbus believed the world was shaped like a boob

they’re building roads and military bases, churches and missionary / encampments and call centers and textile factories they’re digging and / fracking and separating metal from the earth

  • hanta t. samsa

Poem for Tamir Rice’s Eighteenth Birthday

I’m not sure anymore / how far joy gets us

  • Aaron Magloire

Uncensored Footage of the Cyborg at the U.S. Embassy 

a presenter / interrupts a program to break the news of migrants / found dead on the shores of river niger. i look down / the streets through my window.

  • Abu Bakr Sadiq

Two Poems

My life too has ended
many times over. Now I’m
doing all I can to return

  • Tadeusz Dąbrowski

Footage of Benjamin, the Last Living Tasmanian Tiger—1935, Colorized

even the long-gone
once knew tenderness.

  • Kristin Emanuel
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