Kathy Boles-Turner (Chapbook Confessions #4)

Chapbook Confessions is a series in which poets discuss, at length, the writing of their most recent collection of poems, in whatever way they desire. For more information on the series, go here. Below, Kathy Boles-Turner writes on her 2018 collection, Ramshackle Houses & Southern Parables.   Listening. That’s all I was doing when poetry…

Robert Okaji (Chapbook Confessions #3)

Chapbook Confessions is a series in which poets discuss, at length, the writing of their most recent collection of poems, in whatever way they desire. For more information on the series, go here. Below, Robert Okaji writes on his 2017 collection From Every Moment a Second.  Chapbook Confession, or, How to Write Chapbooks without Knowing…

Pablo Cuzco (5 Poems)

Flowers of Dawn A yellow moon over the rooftops—striking in silence—blue sky, dark and twinkling—stars meld into street light—alleyways cluttered with bottles clink | a cat howls in summer heat— water washes away the smear | bleary-eyed and broken, I stumble among dust bins and sediment of the living—crowned with a halo—spirits | God and…

Emily Dickinson (Forerunners)

While some of Emily Dickinson’s more well-known lines had been in my head for years, I didn’t sit down with all of her poems until a flight from Atlanta ages ago, to attend my grandmother’s funeral back home. As Dickinson says, time does not assuage; but her strange words and stranger company of her presence…

Ken Craft (6 Poems)

from the collection The Indifferent World Trigger This is where I held my breath— a stand of red pine, needles and snowdust scribed about my boot, cold crescent resisting a swollen finger itchy-numb with November. This is where a buck held its breath— mouth mid-meal amid the mast, a single line of berry drool spiking…

Daniel Bennett (6 Poems)

Bermondsey Spaces By the corner forecourt of the Shell station the man eating ribs from a paper bag lets a crutch dangle on one elbow, as he picks his way through want and circumstance, under the gloaming, the overpass, beyond the river’s abstract mass. A light like fine quartz inside concrete ghosts our day. Low…

Kitty Coles (6 Poems)

Black Moon Season for walking out into white frost under the black moon. Feeling the grass bend, the cold enfold flesh, the dark draw closer. Scenting the wet earth, lying fallow: ice has its own smell. Tasting night on the tongue, cobwebby, thin, and the mouth’s own heat. Watching the breath steam, cloudy, abundant, twining…

J. S. Belote (5 Poems)

Boriska Snowmelt mangles gray potato fields, oxcarts rot & sink by dung heaps, & month after month the heaps rise—   I don’t care. Again the sky is opaque. &, still, wizened, Andrei goes on painting icons. In one he gives Christ a cloak the color of earth. He hangs it nonchalantly over His left…

Daniel Paul Marshall (6 Poems)

the fire festival men cook muricidae in their shells, on oak wood fires at the entrance to the marquee i can hear the small slugs of meat hiss like slow punctures —the scent of the wood turns my nose inside out. the residents of Hallim-eup get a coupon each for a free lunch—no one checks…