“Here in the Electric Dusk”
By Emma TrellesAfter winter rains
The hills
Are velvety beasts
We pretend
We have nothing
To worry about
Except for the usual
Minuet of dying
Scraping the corners
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Sick pastoral: a sick ecology poem
By Kay Ulanday BarrettThen how does candy spill? This way? Stare at the sky
as the MyChart results record blood levels. Peach laden,
cherry lacquer, lilac blossom marathon more at a window
sill on any almost-evening in... what month is it? When
statistics splay, when the masks are forgotten, there'll be
more of us we'll have to teach: catheters are ivy, monstera
fenestration consoles when you're on hold with the pharmacy
again.
After the George Floyd Protests, My Strange Dream
By Faylita HicksCrawling out from between the legs of a woman
with my name still wetly slathered across her chin,
I cradle the lewd silk of our venom
up against the hot swell of my caged chest, wade out
through her front door, into the murky billows
of the damned and the damnable,
The B-Sides of the Golden Records, Track Two: “Sounds of Human Labor”
By Sumita ChakrabortyWe may try to change the shape of your body, or the color of your skin,
or the kinds of sounds that your mouths make, to match how we think you should.
Provocations 1
By mónica teresa ortizI wake up sleepless inside a room overlooking giants//mist peeling over olive trees//clouds of pleasure
Apokaluptein
By Hayan ChararaThe Arab apocalypse began around the year
of my birth, give or take—
the human apocalypse,
a few thousand years earlier.
PONDEROSA PINE
By Liza SparksWhen a ponderosa pine
is over one hundred—
it sheds a layer of bark.
Of Avocados
By Juan J. MoralesLike two hands pressed
together, they are twice as large
on the island. One feeds
We
By Deborah A. MirandaThe people you cannot treat as people
Whose backs bent over your fields, your kitchens, your cattle, your children
We whose hands harvested the food we planted and cultivated for your mouth, your belly.
From “Shadow Poems”
By Jennifer FoersterThe war appeared to be coming to an end.
The no-name people not yet taken
left their crops for summer’s drought.