Columns
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Three Poems
Crumbs — all that’s left of my coffee cake. Plates clatter as they’re loaded in the dishwasher. Ashtrays on the bar. When Hopper painted Nighthawks he didn’t intend to evoke loneliness —a waiter, two men in suits, a woman considering…
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Synanthropia
The mouse moves casually, irrationally, like it is curious. It does not see me yet. It is fat and grey like a mutt is grey. The scream is unlocked, some pre-language gesture at speech. I investigate its texture. Not guttural…
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The Strangest Sky Home Lost and Found in Leo Boix’s “Southernmost: Sonnets”
In his latest collection of poetry, Boix ushers readers into the halls of his personal museum, inviting us to peer within and peruse the memories and artifacts carefully numbered and ordered into the rhymes and lines of sonnets
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Connections and Community: An Interview with Patricia Henley
“It is a writerly habit to notice all the small and large things that comprise characters or potential characters. By the time they reach the page, I may not even recall the source of a snippet of dialogue or a…
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World in the Hole
When our time zones cooperate, I talk to Savion on the phone. I am, as he is, on the lookout for his mother, however dire our chances might be of encountering her. He has often shown me photos, since my…
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Rage Psalm
Glory to the waiting rooms, clipboards like tombstones. Doctors carving diagnoses into her chest: obese. unwoman. deviant. Praise the paper gowns, thin veils for the body’s indictment.
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The Lesbian Erotic Poem: Eileen Myles and Gertrude Stein
Whereas queerness itself is the resistance to sexual oppression, queer poetry is an arm, an extension and realization of resistance enacted with language. Employing Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” means that a lesbian poem aimed…
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Three Poems
I tend not to know how to say when it hurts. Firstly, I don’t know what it is. I wait for the call and no doctor rings. Wait, then, some more.
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The Pastor’s Ex
She was no flapper. Although she could see flapping from here, what with Sara’s daughter’s leather miniskirt dangling fringe on her thigh. She gave the fringe a shake and absorbed the crowded bar, the packed dance floor, the DJ spinning…
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Integrating Writing into the Pandemonium of Life: A Conversation with Martín Espada
“[P]oetry is not doing what it does in isolation. I don’t expect my poems to magically accomplish anything. I see my poems as part of a movement: That movement is political. It is artistic. It transcends poetry. It transcends politics.…
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The Rumpus at AWP 2026
Debbie and I are really excited to meet Rumpus readers, writers and staff at AWP 2026 in Baltimore, from March 4-8th. At the bookfair, you will find us at BOOTH 1240 where you can learn more about The Rumpus, what…
