Leaving My Childhood Home
By Zeina AzzamOn our last day in Beirut
with my ten years packed in a suitcase,
my best friend asked for a keepsake.
I found a little tin box
Calling poets to a greater role in public life and fostering a national network of socially engaged poets.
By Zeina AzzamOn our last day in Beirut
with my ten years packed in a suitcase,
my best friend asked for a keepsake.
I found a little tin box
By Elexia AlleyneMaybe it’s the Spanish running through my veins
That’s the only way I know how to explain it
Maybe it’s the r’s rrrolling off my tongue
See,
By Darrel Alejandro HolnesIn the film, both parents are Mexicans as white as
a Gitano’s bolero sung by an indigena accompanied by the Moor’s guitar
bleached by this American continent’s celluloid in 1948
when in America the world’s colors were polarized into black & blanco.
By Fatimah Asgharam I not your baby?
brown & not allowed
my own language?
my teeth pulled
By Fady JoudahDoes consciousness exist only when
you name it? Was the double helix a
stranger, the nucleus the first brain?
I feel therefore I am. This is more
By Heidi Andrea Restrepo RhodesWake. Wake.
These the nights we sing. These the folds,
unborn reverie, ambition marbled mud & shine,
raging anthem born like diamonds out darkest ash & rain
By Katy Richeymust be tight
spiral wound
corset of rope
be body and
undertaker be
By E. Ethelbert MillerIf I was tree green instead of black
they would come and cut my branches,
destroy my roots, transport my
life and turn me into paper pulp.
By Jennifer Bartlettto walk means to fall
to thrust forward
to fall and catch
the seemingly random
is its own system of gestures
By Craig Santos Perezkaikainaliʻi wakes from her late afternoon nap
and reaches for nālani with small open hands—
count how many papuan children
still reach for their disappeared parents—