Clarification Card: The Spiral (“The cigarette is pretext: smoke rises from within”)
By Hari AlluriUnless you’re practiced as a lola’s wrinkles,
do not flip the lit side of the yosi in your mouth.
They developed this skill in war and carried it
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Brecksville, Ohio
By Margo TamezThe weather in Brecksville was in transition.
He was wearing a light jacket. The seasonal
change of weather variations,
Self-Portrait as Pop Culture Reference
By Natalie WeeI was born in 1993, the year Regie Cabico became the first
Asian American to win the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam.
On Teaching Poetry In A Men’s High Security Prison
By Raymond AntrobusI was searched at every edge. I wanted everyone, including me, to be innocent. One inmate squeezed my hand like a letter he’d been hoping for.
The night poetry danced with us
By Amal RanaOrlando 49
emblazoned on the back of a t-shirt
worn by a white queer
who looked through and past
our table of Latinx, Indigenous, Black, Muslim queers
Naming Things
By Zeina Hashem BeckZeina Hashem Beck performs the poem "Naming Things" at the 2016 Split This Rock Poetry Festival.
Baghdad Before the Occupation
By Amal Al-Jubouri—My solitude, to which I always returned
City that kept my secret religion in her libraries
I came back to rest my head on her shoulder
and with just one look, she saw how tired I was
The Opposite of Holding in Breath—
By Hari Allurithe tea in her glass. It glows the brocade.
Her grandmother picked that tea
on a mountain—a mountain in a war
whose shores were her bed. Steeping, the petals
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Any Given Name
By Cacayo BallesterosChapas is what cops are called
in my country
who threw the too tortured
in the lion pits
of the Military Academy zoo