Calling poets to a greater role in public life and fostering a national network of socially engaged poets.
By Aliah Lavonne TighEveryone in Anatomy pairs up,
receives a small baby pig.
The scalpel shines like water or a mirror—if you look, you see
yourself: gloved hand pushing a blade to open
the other animal’s chest. Someone drops
a knife, shouts,
Clean it up. This is how we learn to
dissect a body.
By Cynthia ManickHow does it feel to be something man hasn’t touched? Nothing
feeds your shape – how tall you want to aim, the texture from
root to tip, or the colors you choose to shake off like makeup.
It must be nice to have no load bearing walls – nothing to hold
you down or box in all you want to be.
By Subhaga Crystal BaconThis is the anti-garden. It tends itself.
Its shine of blooms a blanket of sun.
It has its own water in hidden springs
bathing aspen, burdock and sage.
By Mandy ShunnarahWe might have told them, if they’d asked,
the poppies wouldn’t make it to their melancholy
island, no matter how swift their sails snapped
across the sea. Then again, we love our land more
than they love theirs; we long to return, not flee.
That’s why you don’t see us boarding clippers
to claim to ground not ours. With our bountiful
fertile crescent, who needs more plenty?
By Edward SalemI’d planned a sculpture called
Getting Home, built from
my land in Palestine—
soil, shrubbery, stones,
an entire olive tree
chopped and dissected
into shippable parts
and air mailed in boxes
to my home in Detroit.
By Gbenga AdesinaNorth of the country, a road led to the desert.
Dust was the first sentence. The Sahara
was a white darkness in the distance,
and beyond it the glint of a Great Lake.
We drove past fields of ginger and wild purple onions.
There was a public garden and a ring of white egrets
around still water.
By Amatan NoorLet’s inhale some fresh air
Its botanical river wafting into our nostrils
Alas, the sky has been seething crimson
for half a century
By Angela María SpringThough the jam did not set, great chunks of purple-black in jars
placed as offerings behind the kitchen counter butcher block
homemade experiment by my Central American-born mamá, who warned
us to keep a stern eye out, said you invade, take over swiftly
and she was right as our desert—so unlike the humid, temperate climes from which
you first emerged—urges you grow fast to claim any water to be found,
yet as a tree you are migrant/immigrant like us so of course Tucson
banned your presence as Arizona pulled Latinx books from schools
By Ariana Bensona week before I left the sinking city, I read
about a fruit fly with decoy ants on its wings—
an evolutionary adaptation, bred
evidence of what happens when a species clings
so desperately to life that it makes for itself
