The American Poetry Review

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Four Poems

Jan 1, 2022

followed—in front, as horses—into daisy& silver dancing, knowing the jaw who unkeysin the danced earth to drink me down to haints,& will go again. was willed. distrusted happiness, addicted to it.a god needs of a god. here, i don’t want to reachfor g

The American Poetry Review

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The Epic Of Gilgamesh

Jan 1, 2020

My friends, who can reach heaven? The monster bellows like a river swollen with flood.Many are consumed in his fiery breath. My friends, who can reach heaven? Let us ask the mountain for a sign.Let us cut the spirits from the cedars. My friends, who

The American Poetry Review

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AUSTRALOPITHECA1 & STARMAN2

Sep 1, 2019

The countdown to you begyns with me, deere Starman, when I wander, dumbly, deep into a space hospittable to Hunger. Now, all’s desert. No milk in syte. Just pitifull sand, what shushes as it slydes through your hande to rejoin itself. I’d join myself

The American Poetry Review

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Four Poems

Nov 1, 2022

Day after Thanksgiving. I give thanks for Eveto beat the rush of appreciating hernext year and let her sleep inuntil three hundred o’clock.Thank you light on the mountainfor being my star on cloudy nights.Thank you all the guns I’ve never ownedand ki

The American Poetry Review

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Two Poems

Nov 1, 2023

For I woke with a walnut for a skullFor every star switched on, burning through black pagesFor if you seek God you will find His childrenFor everything I know fits in a walnutFor every scene I once lived now invisible For I didn’t want to meet people

Sunday Tribune

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Extract From Belonging: Finding Tribes Of Meaning

Sep 15, 2024

Chapter 1 Peering Into My Soul The cauldron of white water crashed below at the base of Chapman’s Peak, one of the most iconic coastline drives in the world. The wild froth foamed, eddied and danced, a furious fascination of heaving waves, wild beast

The Paris Review

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Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

Dec 15, 2017

The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

New Philosopher

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Love Letters

Mar 7, 2022

MY BELOVED ANGEL, I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them. I can no longer think of nothing but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you.

The American Poetry Review

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Five Poems

May 1, 2022

If I call myself unlovable, I am, practically; if I say itenough times: unlovable. Then, like practical magic, I’m hollow as old garlic; I’m distance-skinned.I’m a long, mean package, a terror-dyke, a nag, a squinting, slut-spun hag—it’s easy, really

The American Poetry Review

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Two Poems

Nov 1, 2021

I have an endless appetite for starfruit,for biting my teeth into the universe and spitting outthe space junk, for licking the rings of my favorite planetsand never slicing my tongue. There’s a story I shareabout my birth where angels circle my dead

The American Poetry Review

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Four Poems

Jul 1, 2022

The embers of a Thousand YearsUncovered by the HandThat fondled them when they were FireWill stir and understand——from Emily Dickinson’s “1383” Remember when we hurriedourselves into the evening’s sacral blaze: Our coal-covered bridal gownsdrenched i

The Paris Review

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Two Poems by Mary Szybist

Sep 15, 2019

Like an alarm I can’t shut off, the summer.Like air raid sirens stuck onthe world is burning, the world is burning& I can’t stop it. Can’t stop ash from the reddening sky falling dry onto grass, onto cloverlit purple at their tips. Mouth level.My che

The American Poetry Review

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Three Poems

Mar 1, 2022

i look like someonehealing from an accidentbecause i am someonehealing from an accidentthe book of actsscales falling from saul’s eyesremembering my capacityfor stillnesshow long can i sitwithout looking awaythe fear of god escapingi desperately need

The American Poetry Review

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Five Poems

Nov 1, 2018

A poem is a gesture toward home.It makes dark demands I call my own. Memory makes demands darker than my own:My last love drove a burgundy car. My first love drove a burgundy car.He was fast and awful, tall as my father. Steadfast and awful, my tall

The American Poetry Review

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Two Poems

Sep 1, 2020

after Joanna Klink, for Mary Oliver Go out barefoot to the car for what you left,for what you didn’t have enoughhands to hold.Go out as a soft offering for gravel.As a practice swing at walkingfarther and farther from the comforter,from the sighing w

DIVA

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Editor’s Letter

May 26, 2023

Rainbow glitter! Beaming, sweaty faces! Cher on the loudspeaker! Drag queens! Drag KINGS! DYKES ON BIKES!! I am in Sydney at my very first Pride. After coming out to my not-exactly-thrilled parents, I’ve taken the logical next step and boarded a plan

The American Poetry Review

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Two Poems

Jan 1, 2024

For Jordan Neely, a brother in madness/After Leila Chatti On the train home, an evangelist. He says:GOD IS CALLING YOU TO COME HOME TO HIM My eyes closed, pretending he cannot see me on this third dayof antipsychotic withdrawal, my insurance expired,

The American Poetry Review

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Snow day & Other Poems

Nov 1, 2024

I set a tea kettle on top of a snowman.I’m pretending I don’t have laundry to do,that the drywall isn’t crackedin the bedroom, that I’m stillthe sixteenth inch thick bar of steelI was in my twenties, when if you bent meI sprang back to where I’d been

frankie Magazine

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Don’t Have A Bird

Aug 2, 2020

There are so many rites of passage you’ve already missed out on, and the school ball is destined to become another item on that ever-growing list. You try to delay the inevitable until every breath from your lungs sounds as if cystic fibrosis is cack

The American Poetry Review

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The Dark Whispers

May 1, 2024

i. We ride horses in the slowly-falling snowand you tell me it is Summer, it is warm,and I don’t quite believe you, but I love you,so I go along with the oddly humorous deception. My mother says “Love is blind”and “Hindsight is 20/20,” but it doesn’t

The American Poetry Review

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Three Poems

Nov 1, 2024

O this is so painfulthe open concave of my broken heartthis boundary-less bordera kind of abandonment momentin resurrect. I remember how your lipsfeel on my handwhen you kissed—a whole worldand nothing else. Today the workers in their workgo. Cars so

The Paris Review

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The Oyster Diaries

Jun 18, 2024

I know a certain amount about sports, mainly baseball. Last night the Rangers won the pennant, for example, and I know what the pennant is. The thing my husband finds truly poetic is sports. He’s always trying to talk to me about it and explain. “Wat