Calling poets to a greater role in public life and fostering a national network of socially engaged poets.
By Aniyah SmithAnd maybe black girl magic stemmed from our ability to become vanishing acts.
To disappear with the night
or with the turn of someones cheeks.
To go without a sound.
Without a word.
Without nobody seeing nothing.
By Kenneth Carroll IIIwe ride in on the red line
our laces coming undone as we float over fair gates
until we fall into a night
ripe
with everything our tongues have been yearning for
By Pacyinz LyfuongThe day I learned to speak my grandmother’s tongue
An Eastern wind shifted the earth
While the western walls were whisked away…
And the mountains of Laos rose on the horizon,
By Savannah SippleIn the beginning was the word and the word was FAT
in the beginning I was fat in the beginning I was lean &
long carried two weeks past due & wore preemie clothes & then I
chunked up baby fat a fat baby baby I grew big
By Emmy PérezThey are the ones who were told their children
were taken to bathe—and not returned. They
are the ones whose nursing babies and toddlers
were forced to wean and left in wet diapers.
By Sheila BlackWe come at the wrong time of year by a hair
or a week, and the brown birds flying onward,
out of reach. My son tilts his head.
By Nickole BrownWhen I press my face to the painted box,
the sound is
not buzzing, is not
a mob of wings.
By Deborah ParedezThe English translation of my surname is walls
misspelled, the original s turned to its mirrored
twin, the z the beginning of the sound for sleep.
By Shabnam Piryaeia young man desperately buries himself under damp leaves while helicopters hunt him police laugh as he tries to hide in the foliage a neighbor with a device to eavesdrop on scanners catches this tidbit
