Three 
by Victoria Chang

A wooden door in front of everything. A door / on my country. A door on the lake. My poems / prefer wooden hunting dogs. If I say there is a / door on my heart in the poem, then there is ...
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Four
by Gary Geddes

How can there be laughter, / how can there be pleasure, when / the whole world is burning? / I found these words in a book / called Buddha’s Teachings ...
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Two
by Eric Pankey

Between things, I ponder / The linkage between things: / Fog up to the gorge brim, / The alignment of seasons ...
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Sehnsucht
by Keetje Kuipers

Taking all my clothes off, / as my therapist reminds me, / is my specialty. Exposed, yes ...
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Autobiography
by rob mclennan

An archaeology of human contact. The map / has been scaled / or whittled down. A jumpy sentence ...
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Two
by Andrea Carter

What profusion was I before? / In the brack of sand and mulch, farm / compost, rising above the North Sea, far ... 
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Two
by Amy Gordon

​As a boy, my uncle loved the woods, knew every bird, /
but war broke out, and he found himself at sea, / trading song for sonar, flock for fleet ...
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Fantasy 
by Genevieve Stevens

Tap the wall to begin now follow their scratch. / Step forward now touch the cold paint with your lips ...
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Trompe    L'Oeil
by Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer

Men arrived on horseback and held / their heads So much to behold / in the world that wasn’t theirs was theirs in their eyes ...
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Awaiting    Praise
by Heikki Huotari

There are windows that won't open. Royalty in my ancestry, are you now or have / you ever been a hallucinogenic frog ...
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Birthday    Poem
by Aaron Magloire

Once the rain let up I was sure / the East River’d have a new tributary / to show for it. Instead, more of the same, ​/ and a new subspecies of kingfisher ...
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Two
by Aza Pace

With the nightjars, I always intrude / on some top-secret discussion. / One speckled Chuck-wills-widow / 
eyes me sideways as if to say, / You don’t belong in the night ...
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Two
by Sveta Yefimenko

Then how do tyrants kiss, he wonders, / Weakly or persuasively? / What bright arms will they possess ...
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In    some    gelatinous    ether
by Megan McDermott

where God crafts bodies, / I was made, / and am still, every / instantiation a choice / from infancy upwards ...
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Jar    of    Wishes
by Peter Mladinic

The inner woman, / the woman within the woman is made up, / a dream on a hilltop, someone distant, /
imagined on a cloudy afternoon ...
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Some   think   love   can   be   measured by   the   amount   of   butterflies 
by Puneet Dutt

—but for how long    will they survive / the jar, before transforming? / Before placing their tarsomeres, thirsty of nectar ...
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Bead
by John Howard

Each bead a link, each link a chain, each chain to hold / 
close what is so distant: flesh & bone & earth & faith ...
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Two
by Robin Lindsay Wilson

As a boy I was grazing land. / Last year I was a tennis court. / Yesterday I was a building site / greeting the dawn with obscenities ... 
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Decadence
by Elisa Gabbert

My parents didn’t listen to the Beatles / in my life. I don’t know / which albums go with which songs— / not too late to learn, but will I? ...
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Two
by Geoffrey Babbitt

in the dissenter’s graveyard, time’s / erasing headstones’ sharp outlines / and unchiseling inscriptions—grass /
overgrown, moss spreading, sepulchers / held intact by ratchet tie-down straps ...
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Three
by Karen Elizabeth Bishop

i thought we were trees, / shrieking, dense, millenial. /  but no, we were hands, / fleeing, ignorant. unknowing ...
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Two 
by Amy Catanzano

In the   green room     of the poem / an artificial      intelligence  flexes / its wings. Protesting, the surrealist /
logs out forever ...
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The    Side-Show
by Iain Britton

the fog clears     the phoenix palm / scratches for more space / pushes books into the body of a memoir / time’s transparency / feels tampered with       the morning ...
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Ah!
by Kathleen Hellen

I think I see / clearly now / the squirrel that’s digging up the bulbs. The iris hailing. / The deer eye to eye before they startle ...
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Two
by Katharina Kiening

About xylophones and assumptions / About wrong answers / And how complexity was kicked out / About little figures on the wall leading the way ...
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Exploding    House
by John Gallaher

It’s raining in Colorado, just outside Denver. We’re driving, / and then the truck in front of us hits a highway pool, /  and our windows turn a smeary gray-silver ...
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Two
by Matthew DeLuca

Hart Crane wrote to the tune of Ravel’s Bolero, / perhaps entertaining a notion / of disentangling from that joyous fray / the subtle caprice of passion and birth ...
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Three
by Raisa Tolchinsky

No matter / how many times / I tell it, I tell it / like someone in / the story who / begs the writer / to make it end ...
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Rituals    of    Language
by Nur Turkmani

Yes, the fog has lifted. / I can almost think again. / Mostly about words, / what remains of them, / where they are stored. / No doubt it is January, / outside the trees strip / like bodies ...
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Selected    Poems
by Laynie Browne

When every part of me does not want to go / What I knew I didn't / The mind's ceaseless games to avoid the actual / Counting days, reasons not to detach / Was it the day of my perpetual headache—you went ...
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Four
by Rae Armanstrout

Gray July day, / humming-bird hovers / beak-deep in a hank / of late-blooming wisteria. / Is it—are they— / ever aware of failing ...
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girl    scout    camp    pastoral
by Lip Manegio

the lake i’m learning to swim in is choking under algae bloom. / when it was built, with water pumped from the housatonic, / a whole village was buried ...
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The    Bardo
by Anna Evas

Vested in bright green, he surveys the parking lot / for shopping carts, then drives them one-by-one / into metal corrals. A more able employee will herd them / into the store with a motorized rig ...
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Bus    Ride
by Alex Braslavsky

I am the youngest one in this flotational room, / one only meant for roads, / but I will be the biggest ears. / In that room, parallel to ours, my friends froze to death ...
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Two
by Patrick Cotter

The boy who carries a large wallclock on his back / about-faces the temporary puddle which reflects him. / Time runs backwards in the puddle like the clock’s hands ...
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The    Strangers
by Jai Hamid Bashir

I am the phantom in the tree outside. / Standing in front of an old house where / an unremarkable schoolboy first took off / my bra and ran his hand over the band / of my underwear. He never found ...
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Monosyllabic
by J. R. Solonche

The best ones are the small ones, / those you need to hold in your hand / two or three at a time, those you need / to feel for size, and shape, and heft ...
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I    Think    Too    Often    of    Modigliani
by Noelle McManus

I think too often of Modigliani / who is wiser, / deader than I, / who curls at the foot of my bed / like an oil-drenched dog / dragging strokes of cadmium yellowred / along the floor ...
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In    the    Burrowing    Slowness    of    Indifference
by Emily Munro

In the burrowing slowness of indifference / ​worm felt her middle jerk / watched eyeless as space opened / heard wind whisper if you only could / comprehend boggle-headed where a turn can take you ...
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I've    Given    Up    Looking    for    Her    Song
by Foster W. Donnell

My hometown echoes in the rearview mirror. / Up ahead on State Highway 18 the dividing lines / Dissolve to meet the Texas sky. / A pale light meets the horizon. / My wife is somewhere south of here ...
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Look    at    Yourself    in    the    Mirror
by Paul Cunningham

look at yourself in the mirror / so I can see something backless / before tomorrow’s / mourning / for space and hashtags / or whatever sells data now ...
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Tomatoes
by Brian Sneeden

The day I split my tooth you crossed an acre of red concrete cupping a tomato plant in your palm. It was the week before thrushes and after robins, when the rain is suddenly warm ...
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A    Blessing
by Salma Sayed

Today was itchy. Itchier / than usual. A few names / kept scratching at the back / of my neck. I’d even cut / the tags off of the shirt ...
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Concrete
by Alicia Byrne Keane

​So you take some symbol, like / the overcoat       the pockets / an obscure tangle of thread & air / so any weight dropped there went right / to the lining ...
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Five
by Eleni Sikelianos

If you were a child / standing on the grass holding an ice cube in your hand / and your hand was warm, was warming / or if you were the earth holding an iceberg in your belly / the bathing veins feeding the heart ...
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Picking    Blueberries
by Rosanna Oh

It was a risk my father had taken in midwinter: / ordering 240 pint boxes of blueberries / in less than desirable condition at a discount / so they could be repicked, repacked, and resold ...
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Three
by Eric Pankey

The canyon walls’ striations / Wrought by water, by wind, / Reveal deviations / In the parallel of lines. / : : / How to integrate the minutiae— / The febrile marks, a torn web ...
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Three
by Daniel Carden Nemo 

Lately I see things / fade to a dark shade / till they wear through / their own orbit. / What strikes my eye / is an altercation of fluency. / Part concomitance / of form. Part vacuum / that sucks me in ...
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Two
by Rebecca Macijeski

When he was born, he could already play. / Music, like time and space, was in his blood. / He only had to wait for his body to catch up / to what was flowing inside. / It happened like this ...
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Four
by Jessica E. Johnson

On a hill / where someone planted you: / needles skyward / sensate iterations of self / open to a too-gray heaven ...
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Nausea
by Elizabeth Loudon

Even when I fainted on the dockside / I wanted to do it with grace – / a limp swan folding its wings among reeds. / I remembered my kin who long ago / sailed this way, all plunder and panic ...
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When    the    World    at    Large    Makes    You    Feel
by Amy Gordon

afraid, as if any moment you might fall through / the thin glaze you’re skating on, you hold / your breath, as if balloons in your chest / could prevent the worst, until one day, a crack ...
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Two
by Jimmy Lo

taking off my coat, / my "care of place," someone / said. I hear the roar / of a thousand-thousand places / being stripped like / the blank time in between ...
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Distichs
by Frederick Pollack

​Life is the model for a poem, even the subtlest; / for life ignores death, as a poem ignores logic. / If they say your studies are a waste of time, / tell them you’re taking a bite from it ...
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Sunrise,    Late    Winter
​by L. Ward Abel

​​About halfway past seven just as / the northeast sky lit up orange / from waters aloft / I looked right and, distracted, / thought of all those million souls / then flying in waves / towards Carolina ...
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Niels    Bohr
by Harrison Fisher

​is quoted as once saying, “Prediction is very difficult, especially / about the future,” some real comedic talent in evidence here ...
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Two
​by Ken Poyner

The authorities are confiscating clocks. They debate mother’s egg timer, finally taking it. For clocks set into architecture, they take the hands, come back to etch out the faces ...
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Three 
​by Sean Thomas Dougherty

​When I was about 19 years, / I recall this summer night / I put this Etta James cassette / on my Sony Walkman / & took a bottle of wine / I stole underage from the packy store ...
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Writing    Biography
by Janet McCann

​So good to lose oneself / in someone else— / rewrite her to fit. / I see myself / on that doorstep in Austria. / Heavy wooden door. / Bronze lion knocker, or is it a griffin? ...
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As    It    Is
​by David Ruekberg

Some men have discovered the secret / of power is to simply disregard the / rules. One takes his woman securely / by the throat as if it were her job / and pays her well for it. One sweep / of his baton and the forests flame ...
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Two
​​​by Iain Britton

sometimes i feel stuck in the foreplay of a warm vaporous dream / * / i’m fascinated by this detachment of being – not being / i crave for new sounds – for intakes of fresh air – for / living off the edge of a clock ...​
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Two
​by Lesle Lewis

What is the self but an idea of self? / Or two flutes and a harp. / Is truth better than belief? / Or electric guitars? / You’re making it up and making it real. / The tall, shiny icicles become moons or medicines. / One thing becomes another so easily ...​
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Four
by Loisa Fenichell

Come dusk, the field makes the sound / of a vanishing. I cut through, feeling / just like a waste below the pinkish clouds / that dangle without any language. / Last night, was told that language makes / the world. Tonight, the world makes the line ...
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Conversations    with    the    Neighborhood    Girl
​by Vanessa Niu

I know what love is. / It hides under the endless growing space under my bed, / pulsing like a second, mechanical heart of mine. / It is my nature to love, although falsely, at a distance ...
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carnivorous    plants
by Eric Adamson​

when a victim is identified it is only in the post / mortem that confirmation can occur. mollusks, / spiders, birds all enjoy alike the sweet sugar of a / pitcher plant, completely lacking self-awareness. / the truth is ​carnivory thrives in uncertainty ...
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On   How    to    Be    Free    in    the    World
by Jocelyn Ulevicus

I don’t want to be held back any longer—​ / I want to float / in the atmosphere with the darlings / I slaughtered, ringed with marigolds / my dark hair / ringing with blackbirds, / with stars / in my throat ...
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Ocean    House
by Stephano Pereira

The front door bursts open / ocean waves gush into the house / and beyond it /  the sky is a clean cerulean / touched by a diamond air ...

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Two
by Matthew Woodman

a sconced frieze fingering geologic time / a print exposing the empiric impulse / to impose /     / frame / into recognizable focus / an emergence of torsos and tendons / from shrouds of ash a protrusion / that dares us not to say / face ...
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Excerpts    (adapted)
by Simone Weil

Decreation: to make something created pass into the uncreated. / Destruction: to make something created pass into nothingness. / A blameworthy substitute for decreation. Creation is an act of love / and it is perpetual ...
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Bird    Calendar    (Earth    List)
​by Kate Fagan

​Eastern koel / January companion / in the vertical air / Sulphur-crested cockatoo / February rises like / a burning mantle / Brown thornbill / March folds away its songs / while sap falls ...
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Five
​by Christina Pugh

Every pin is a tender path. / Every arrow begins to sew. / The skin, not the mind, creates the soul ...


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Three
by Jacqueline Kolosov

In death they float, and so became known / as the “right” whales. Escalating now, their vanishing. By day / the remaining few brave ships, nets. Ahab said the eyes / define the face of man. What of a whale’s eyes? / Theirs capture the light, too ...
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Three
by Kellam Ayres

Even in August, a chill. / Boxes stacked on the painted pine floor. / Sheets pulled over the wingbacks, the sofa. / The door closed after letting in the last / of the room’s good air. / Years ago I burned here ...
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Three
by Daniel Carden Nemo 

Let us rest a little. / There is much to take in here. After a long process of disintegration, / rootedness. The life instinct exceeds bounds and gives off sparks / flashover of anti-form / before it breaks free / without recall. / To break free / will take a lifetime ...
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Pavlov's    Dogs
by Brian Culhane

In the midst of his famed experiments / (buzzer or tuning fork, food, salivation), / the Neva one night overflowed its banks / and the basement lab filled with icy water / as Pavlov’s dogs fruitlessly sought escape / from a tide they could hear and scent ...
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Broken    Words
by Barrett Ahn

Shakes hand shakes head / long journey before words out of mouth / (use hands and eyes to convey meaning / wave around / gesture frantically / be emphatic on the tones I know) ...
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The    Inside    Twitch
by Robert Okaji

Of leaving: nothing ever lasts / but odd habits and those rancid / bits of love’s lonely power grid / held hostage. Having survived blasts / of rage, battered enthusiasts / patch their holes and hope to mend ...
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So    I    Am    Little
by Hasham Khalid

​And madness is like a discus / bolting and tearing the space with burgeoning circumference. / I have kept my little / And in keeping my little, found / all that is little is like me. / All that looks curious, / All that keeps waiting ...
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