All My Names Are Living
By Ezra FoxThey say I killed you,
say they can pry o pen
my / your
dead / name
like a mussel finds nothing
but the ocean's black silt.
Search Results
from UNDERGROUND
By GoldenAs in homonym,
humming with the cedars,
spitting spring
to claim a stasis, a season.
for imam khaliifah ibn rayford daniels.
By Mia S. Williswhen the state murdered a poet
none of us slept none of us deserved to
the way we stood by with pens and phones and helpless guilt
Princess Powerpuff / Chemical X
By Jasmine Reidi spread at my touch & clit
contemplating my beauty this Monday i live
the pleasure of my fingers
how i am in-the-making by hand
by pill by needle i am the perfect girl
professor, in fact, Chemical X is my love
in gradients of acidity i am
milkless except by oats, by meal made of itself
Winter Solstice
By Jonny TeklitToday, the rain comes down in icy fangs. Tomorrow, the same. Nothing here escapes the physics of American violence, not even the weather.
Spring Mix, for Ahmaud
By Opal MooreA small bird built a secret nest
beneath my balcony. There must be
hatchlings there, out of view.
She flies back and forth, small prey
in her beak.
Some kind of wren, I think.
Small, brown and quick. No time for
singing midday. Duty
is her instinct.
PARADISE
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.
Pantoum: A Spell for Our Living
By Tatiana Johnson-BoriaIn which memory were you born?
Colossal: God of an ancestor’s grieving
What dreams were whispered into your skin?
I wake, in fear of what might die with you
Q: Is there anything you miss about your life back then?
By Nathan McClainOn one of those evenings you found yourself walking back, now that much of what daylight was left had moved on, as though some argument had long been settled and nothing lay ahead but a row of muted streetlamps and the future, of course, immediate, shimmering which, let’s face it, you were always going back to despite any guilt you still carried like a flashlight
i flipped a table once.
By Roya Marshcups, plates, scattered
spaghetti massacre on laps.
all the restaurant alert
&this ga'damn tv
sayin' WE lost!
white girls vanish
the whole world grit they teeth,
but a black girl's disappearance
warrants city wide curfews;
a second silencing
60 black girls ghost //
in the nation's capital
&my phone never rang about it!