Calling poets to a greater role in public life and fostering a national network of socially engaged poets.
By Janice Lobo Sapigaowe don’t know how to pay the bills on time
and we don’t know the password to your bank account
& in all of our languages I understand why you stacked
linens and face towels and rubber bands and plastic bags
in drawers and hallway closets
everything filled to the brim
By Trevino L. Brings PlentyArms, face, scrotum – dark brown.
The kind of brown to drive
monsters to exterminate
bison to starve
a people.
By Azia ArmsteadWe wait for the show to begin in an open field on a blazing summer night.
Fireworks are most lucent in the blackness of a sky with no sun which
makes me think of blackness as a metaphor, how colors shine brightest
when contrasted against it.
By Daria-Ann MartineauI find myself noticing you again
eight years later,
you coming out of the earth, pale,
erect, shadow over men.
You can’t be buried.
By Safia Elhilloi sat by the lake & ate five tiny oranges & every strand
of flesh & pith was my teacher
i grew warm & soft in the sun & from this ripening
made a poem to search for my teacher
By Natalie WeeI was born in 1993, the year Regie Cabico became the first
Asian American to win the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam.
By Azura TyabjiIf the meaning of the prayer was not passed down to you,
find it through holier means than translation.
Cling to the rhythm instead.
By Maren Lovey Wright-Kerrwhen the makeup aisle stops at “caramel”
it means
the makeup industry just thinks you already too pretty to need they products
By Kimberly BlaeserYes, it’s true I speak ill of the living
in coded ways divorced from the dead.
Why Lyla June fasts on capitol steps.
By Kyle Dargan“Man-law” I first violate at age ten—
my wandering fingers not appeased by picking
through my cousin’s video
game cartridges, Sports Illustrateds.