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Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

I’ve been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite,
can stop the bleeding — most people forgot this
when the war ended. The war ended
depending on which war you mean: those we started,
before those, millenia ago and onward,
those which started me, which I lost and won —
these ever-blooming wounds.
I was built by wage. So I wage love and worse—
always another campaign to march across
a desert night for the cannon flash of your pale skin
settling in a silver lagoon of smoke at your breast.
I dismount my dark horse, bend to you there, deliver you
the hard pull of all my thirsts—
I learned Drink in a country of drought.( Read more... )

From Postcolonial Love Poem - pg 1

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author: terrance hayes

Sonnet 7 by Terrance Hayes

I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,
Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.
I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat
Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.
I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold
While your better selves watch from the bleachers.
I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow
You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night
In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow-
Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars
Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls.
I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.
Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough
To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.

From American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin page 11

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author: traci brimhall

Lullaby on Mount Moriah by Traci Brimhall

The lullaby I wrote on your throat about the stained
hilt of the knife in my hand begins — Whisper, or snow
will come and make its sadness famous in your mouth.

The why of you a radiant devilfish, the what of you
a fat little soul bluing at the edges.

The surest way to receive a free ram is to tie your son’s hands
behind his back. Offer me a metaphor, God said.
Abraham stretched Isaac out on a rock, Like this?
( Read more... )

From Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod pg. 6

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A Series of Gentle Reminders by Rudy Francisco

Delete the number,
trash the boxes
give the sweaters away.
Stop holding onto things
that do not fit you anymore.
Clutter has many faces.

Forgive them.
They didn’t apologize,
and you’re still mad,
but what I do know is this:
a closed fist
can punch through a wall,
but you can’t fix the hole
until you open your hands.

The past
is one of the few things
more stubborn than we are.
It will not change
and doesn’t care if
you have a better idea
of how the story
should’ve ended.
( Read more... )

from Excuse Me as I Kiss the Sky pg. 119-121

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(no subject)

to care this way

by Threa Almontaser

is turning me off. so i take a walk.
plums fall from trees and protest
& i can’t see the colour green
anymore & just last night yo
just last night god went SPLAT
on my window like a fluttery lick
spittle & told me all love starts
in a garden. what am i supposed to do
with that? another friend goes. gone
enough. almost never here. those facetimes
inside me out all year, wishing I could see you
in the hospital. life breaks who doesn’t cry
eventually. one more grave in the middle
of all that green. prayers tangle in my pockets
like earphone wire. i think about the best way
to maneuver my mask & eat, then give up.
i think about the best way to sneak
into the hospital. what about the body
& everything it can’t keep? i’m so over
the garden. i stood at its knee, dressed in
leaves, begging for fruit. learned the only
predator in paradise is me. no eating or being eaten.
bony limbs, broken lungs & growing more
unknown.

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The Pages You Loved by Khaled Mattawa

Foresee how dried, yellowed,

with neglect, think

of the hands that made them,

not with love, with certainty,

the leather smooth decades later,

the pages warm as wood,

the thought reaching a seed

that fell from a bird’s flight,

a hoof tucking it in folds of loam,

wispy roots sending it deeper

into the dark, the thought

like a hair in your throat.

Earth knows no such ambivalence,

good to itself, mending,

dampening sends you to self-

ignited forests, hordes fleeing,

blazes in what was there before

mouths came to call them eyes,

fear and fire, how close

the thought wanders into flood

and drought and motions

attributed to a fist-sized heart.

All those rocked, senses quaked,

those eyes flooding and welling

add up to a stone rolling

down a mountainside

into salt water, the sum the size

of a cloud or glacier thawed.

Shut the book, the thought

writes itself like yeast;

seam the sky, a smoky tail,

fastened by the measure of limitation.

And you the world’s watcher,

moments at the mirror

allowed as achievement,

the wisp of wheat (highlights)

in the coffee of her hair,

the two of you hand in hand

across a window display,

a clip from that day in Eden

the short footage of days recalled—

all illuding fingers,

hidden under the sheet’s grain.