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Words to My Love
By Countee Cullen
What if you come
Again and swell
The throat of some
Mute bird;
How shall I tell?
How shall I know.
That it is so,
Having heard?

Done, let no trick
Of what’s to come
Deceive; the quick
So soon grow dumb;
With wine and bread
Our feast is spread;
Let’s leave no crumb.
But Not Forgotten
By Dorothy Parker
I think, no matter where you stray,
That I shall go with you a way.
Though you may wander sweeter lands…
Notes on Devotion
By Caroline Harper New
A man by the name of Skinner becomes famous
for keeping caged
pigeons, whom his clock feeds or starves
at random. Their tiny twitching heads exaggerate until...
Pencil Letter
By Irina Ratushinskaya
I know it won't be received
Or sent. The page will be
In shreds as soon as I have scribbled it.
Later. …
Rewind
By Anastasia Taylor-Lind
It’s 9/11 the first time you stay.
In the morning you bring Taliban poems back to bed.
I drink cardamom…
He Was Chaotic
By Fatimah Asghar
My teacher says of their cat, now gone
missing. In his absence, everything is still.

The small, silvered…
Dinah’s Back in Town
By Jayne Cortez
I wanna be bitchy
I said I wanna be a bitch
cause when you nice
true love don’t come
into your life

You get…
- Love
- Realistic & Complicated
Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance
By Ada Limón
Sometimes, I think you get the worst
of me. The much-loved loose forest-green
sweatpants, the long bra…
Unshuttered ["1. You crush me with your damning glimpses..."]
By Patricia Smith
1. You crush me with your damning glimpses, Anna. You,so rancorous, so wounding, and so cruelly bred…
I’m a Fool to Love You
By Cornelius Eady
Some folks will tell you the blues is a woman,
Some type of supernatural creature.
My mother would tell…
Intimacy
By Paisley Rekdal
How horrible it is, how horrible
that Cronenberg film where Goldblum’s trapped

with a fly inside his Material
Transformer: bits of the man emerging

gooey, many-eyed; bits of the fly
worrying that his agent’s screwed him—

I almost flinch to see the body later
that’s left its...
Marigolds of Fire
By Ama Codjoe
1.

He had a caribou's face. Once he let me
lick the sadness there. It tasted of salt

and moss-covered rocks. He grew the beard
of a mountain goat. He scaled the face

of a mountain. Lying beside him, I stared
into the face of faceless...
Catania
By Benjamin Gucciardi
We lived in a stone farmhouse at the edge of town.
I’d been assigned to process asylum claims
and you’d come to write about the abandoned homes
in the island’s interior the government was selling cheap.
A family of barn swallows lived inside our...
#Bringbackourgirls—Mama’s Boy?
By DaMaris B. Hill
Every wife must apologize for not being her husband’s
mother? But he will not forgive you. The absence
of his mother's kiss is the scar of repeated
wounding. He marries you too young, before
he littered his seeds along the road. This is why
he...
Fragment Thirty-six
By H.D.
I know not what to do—
My mind is reft.
Is song's gift best?
Is love's gift loveliest?
I know not what to do,
Now sleep has pressed
Weight on your eyelids.

Shall I break your rest,
Devouring, eager?
Is love's gift best?—
Nay, song's the loveliest.
Yet, were you lost,
What...
Who Makes Love to Us After We Die
By Diana Marie Delgado
I turn on the radio and hear voices, girls becoming women after tragedy. Talk about dreams! His heart was covered in a thin shell the color of moon and when touched, I grew old. The best movies have a philosophy...
Unromantic Love
By J. V. Cunningham
There is no stillness in this wood.
The quiet of this clearing
Is the denial of my hearing
The sounds I should.

There is no vision in this glade.
This tower of sun revealing
The timbered scaffoldage is stealing
Essence from shade.

Only my love is love’s ideal....
The Metaphysical Amorist
By J. V. Cunningham
You are the problem I propose,
My dear, the text my musings glose:
I call you for convenience love.
By definition you’re a cause
Inferred by necessary laws—
You are so to the saints above.
But in this shadowy lower life
I sleep with a terrestrial wife
And...
In the House by the Sea
By Stacie Cassarino
I admired the sea, most days,
but not the heirs or millionaires
sailing in stiff-capped winds,
buttoned for summer. After all,
we were the spectacle, two women
touching in all the wrong places,
furnishing rooms with no children
in the hull of a house gone still.
She had...
Bar Napkin Sonnet #11
By Moira Egan
Things happen when you drink too much mescal.
One night, with not enough food in my belly,
he kept on buying. I’m a girl who’ll fall
damn near in love with gratitude and, well, he
was hot and generous and so the least
that I...

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He Was Chaotic

Dinah’s Back in Town

Catania

In the House by the Sea