Two Poems

it’s happening / again. everything / outside me / get to switching  / channels. brown black / carbon black / black cat black

parking lot

shouting / the same words but in different languages

Two Poems

there is nothing but performance; the language that stretches to capture us all

Little Rock Squawk or Perseverance at the Pond

I begin to feel my body rise / and I can believe / in what freedom must feel like.

Cassandra Data

To not have had the luxury to think “the world is over,” but to feel it instead.

Saint Lillie

My grandmother tells me she loved you fiercely
in the way she reaches for me when your name
is spoken.

Two Poems

The stones are endlessly weeping in the dark. Or is it
the bird-chatter of rain. O darling, are you writing
another poem about trees? No, not trees but ghosts
that live on trees and their legend of never-let-gos.

Henry on Birth Day

When you were / in the Everglades we canoed from Flamingo and through the canals.

It’s Time

My feet moved down another street / and I saw the shape they would draw / on the map in my mind.

A Day That Was Mine

Look at my heartbeat / and its consequence, / that cup warm on my palm

Imago

How would I know / when I’m empty and quiet like breath?

Two poems by Hannah Craig

But I do miss the hymns, / the small, hard apples with their dimpled skin. I do miss / things.

Wounded Surgeon

As a student, I stitched / a cadaver together / while my professor / said you must / be a predator . . .

Unmartydom

I ain’t dead and in this form, / I can matrix my way out of your bullet.

My grandfather was a virus

I was also spat across an ocean

and clung to the edge of an unwilling continent.

Two poems by Simone Person

Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest

How long have you gone without seeing a tree?

I ask my brother if he can hear cicadas where he is. My brother doesn’t know what cicadas are. He is 40 years old. He asks me to repeat it.

Two poems by Adebe DeRango-Adem

Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest

Two poems by Raisa Tolchinsky

in your carpeted office you lay my life down / and say open up to that small room in my sternum.

Three poems by Porsha Olayiwola

a slave ship hauls / bodies as cargo and / both the surface and ocean floor / rifts. even the clouds break / open in sobs.

When I Stutter My Name

loving mother, come watch me be patient, / watch how i describe things that never leave my mouth

Two poems by Willie Lee Kinard III

Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a finalist for the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest

Three poems by Lolita Stewart-White

Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a finalist for the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest

Two poems by Maya Marshall

An Abortion Ban

is a body snatcher,
is an ethnic cleansing.

The uterus is a cave,
is an incubator, is a vault,

is a self-destructing bomb,
is a thoroughfare.