Rumpus Original Poetry: Four Poems by Zachariah Claypole White
sisyphus never bothered to name breathless desire / suffering a language like canker sores you collect
Poetry
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Like A Mother: Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles
For the reader, it is the dedication before McSweeney’s first poem, “for my daughters,” that signals it is time to read.
Rumpus Original Poetry: Four Poems by Nazifa Islam
but I haven’t the discipline to really live / for poetry, for dreams
The Poetics of Holes
Unawareness can be exhaustion, but the very act of poetry is recognition—witnessing. To tell her truth, Nguyen must tell what is, to her, a mystery itself.
Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Dabin Jeong
What time is it there / It is like another world / Have you eaten yet
Embodiment as a Sensorial Practice in Saretta Morgan’s Alt-Nature
Morgan practices the language of collective and enumerated ecologies . . . lexicons we often consider distinct, without an ecotone.
National Poetry Month: Leslie Sainz
You never begin with a flashlight but / there are always portraits on the walls. Long women like / Modigliani's, like stretching, life fear.
National Poetry Month: Zeina Hashem Beck
To stay. Oppressors use words to possess: / “settle.” Lovers use words to escape fear.
National Poetry Month: Tariq Luthun
I wring myself / into a pain loud enough to numb / my sorrow. How long before they learn — / those boys — to do the same?
National Poetry Month: Amanda Johnston
What a waste, / one teacher shook her head upon / my withdrawal. Just another [insert stereotype].
National Poetry Month: Adam Falkner
Who doesn’t ache / for a slice of quiet in the noisy sugar of us? / Pocket of still amidst the looney & clatter?
A Panoptical View of Slough: On Sylvia Legris’s The Principle of Rapid Peering
Scattered with a sparse collection of the poet’s original sketches . . . the poems move through the slanted and repetitive months of the pandemic, bleeding into “self-digesting” seasons.