Illegal
Imagining a landscape is easy
What is not
Is grappling with its spirit and pull.
In the Piazza del Signoria…
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MOUSHUMI CHAKRABARTY
Category: Poetry
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SAVANNAH COOPER
Fragments
Under the deepest, darkest sky,
I drive home. Only the stars
tacked across its bruise-blue
surface keep it from falling,
collapsing around me like a sheet…
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NATALIE CRICK
Two Poems
The whisper
Wicks from her lips.
A soothing salve.
She bends, twists,
Feet touching the walls…
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JESSICA LEE
My mom found my condoms
I’m eight hundred miles away
and my family is painting over the red
walls of teenage bedroom/boudoir,
boxing up
the contents of my flower-knobbed…
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D.S. MAOLALAI
A bowl of oranges
with you away
I sleep a lot
and not often alone.
my bedroom is a bowl of oranges…
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KRISTIAN O’HARE
Two Poems
Even the creeping myrtle
doesn’t stand a chance against
the lily-of-the-valley
as it storms the lawn, a cluster
of dark-green lanceolate leaves…
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MILLA VAN DER HAVE
Snowdrift
It’s dark when she wakes
darker than she has gone before.
It’s not a blanket or a cage
but rather the stark dissent
of all that’s missing…
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RACHEL WALKER
My Sister Posing in Front of the Arno
If it weren’t for the scrunchie
around your wrist and the teal
water bottle in the picture,
you could be Botticelli’s
Venus. Tawny hair swept…
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POETRY ISSUE #32
Chthonic
By Jonathan Louis Duckworth
How soothing to picture
my grandfather planted like a seed
in the crust
of the other continent
we call the older one…
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POETRY ISSUE #31
Defense of Dysfunction
By Crystal J. Zanders
My brother and I used to fight over the remote.
We would spend hours after school
before Mama got home, arms locked in battle.
If you let go, you lost…
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POETRY ISSUE #30
Find the Foci
By Rebecca Durham
An unclasped lapse
as ascent slips into our axis, to wonder what if
the fourth breath was the fifth?
A sharp breach of shadow…
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POETRY ISSUE #29
Some New Ways of Making Love
By Tyler Friend
You, holding a corpse pose.
Me, carefully eating a peach,
but cracking a tooth on the pit
anyway. You, riding a bicycle…
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POETRY ISSUE #28
Circle “C” If You Just Don’t Know
By Chen Chen
I failed the multiple choice exam. I failed to thank the driver
before exiting the bus. I failed my pet fish in the third grade.
I am failing to recall if it was the third or in fact second grade…
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POETRY ISSUE #27
Manifest Destiny
By Talal Alyan
“…..grow to love that strange language”
this century
bores. its growl like
a feral beast.
I want to devour
it with silver-spoon
teeth. put sea salt
along the spinal
cord of its borders…
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POETRY ISSUE #26
Folklore
By Seth Copeland
The wordless marker fell over years back,
but they know where to look, bending through
tensile wire, the blue spray of flashlights
guiding their drunk steps…
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POETRY ISSUE #25
The Lovers
By Triin Paja
when we go to a garden of rusted bathtubs
my body bends towards you
like a field of sunflowers, my face mantled
in the gauze of your hands…
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POETRY ISSUE #24
COFFY AND LA CUMPARSITA
By John Manuel Arias
tonight she feltches battery acid into his missing eyes
he wriggles like a baby bird
mid orgasm and blurts out I’ve just made love
to a shotgun because she’s
sawed off at the waist
he’s a magician
he’s the one who’s done this to her…
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POETRY ISSUE #23
A STORY OF BEGINNINGS
By Christina Mun-Lutz
After the wind pushes the weanling
away from its mother, after the night, black
so black it nearly glows, after the ocean’s
million hands fold and unfold,
the young will be less young,
and the old still old.
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POETRY ISSUE #22
Romantic Sensibility in Urban Pop Culture and Why it Persists
By Bruce Alford
Everything that is old is new again. Taoism says
Be natural and unconstrained, like flowing water—
perhaps this persistence has something to do with
speed, movement without return; the essential to go
on forever at the end….
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POETRY ISSUE #21
“Is Anxiety a Defense or a Philosophy?”
By Ace Boggess
Two anxious people walk into a bar.
No one notices, & everyone does.
Depends on whom you ask, I guess,
for that joke to make sense.
All I know is the fear of “Hello”—
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POETRY ISSUE #20
Office of the Dead
By Peter Vanderberg
The illumination for Office of the Dead
baffles scholars: Two corpses share a grave
while bones lie scattered
among gravedigger’s tools.
Two monks, in corpse-brown robes,
vigil the dead, reading scripture.
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POETRY ISSUE #19
CHILD PLAYING: ANNETTE IN FRONT OF THE RAIL-BACKED CHAIR, EDOUARD VUILLARD, 1897
By Lisa Beech Hartz
He scrawls the iron bedstead, silent
but for the hush hush now of the pencil,
so that the child forgets him….
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POETRY: ISSUE #18
Stitch
By Wendy Willis
I can barely keep up with the news,
noting the notations, annotating the annotations,
calling roll for the last reluctant mammals.
Even the Hammond B will be held
to account in the tally of usefulness.
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POETRY: ISSUE #17
1. Siddhartha
By Abhay K
I must have been cruel
to turn my face from my young wife
my newborn
longing for my lullabies.
I secretly fled at night
without goodbyes
riding my beloved horse the night through
who died exhausted at dawn.
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POETRY: ISSUE #16
Netsuke
By Luisa Igloria
How many worlds could fit into a leather pouch, strung
through cord and looped around the waist? Wood
or ivory, horn or bone–antlers and hooves,
miniature wings and fins, even the tiny pulleys
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