sonnet for the new age
before contemporary verse meaning was contained in a frame solidified by ruling rhyme and iamb. we feared weaning poems off their infant structure defied all comfort reason and tradition raised into being an unbound form of word doomed to non-meaning only to be praised by howling radicals wit
LOOKING BEYOND BORDERS WITH ARMS OUTSTRETCHED
By virtue of its own hybridity as a manifesto, invitation, and poem, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera reimagines political borders; it observes their artificiality and porousness. Written in Spanish and English, Borderlands is perceptive and analytical; deconstructive and didactic. Anzal
JESA
We invited our ancestors to dinner for a feast too good for the living a low lacquered table lay immaculate and swept — a week’s worth of preparation on smooth wooden platters porcelain cups metallic bowls; a different clack thud and tinker at each spare movement — and
For a Mourner
If I’m in the right frame of mind, I can still picture the old Whitechapel. Back then, there were no sleek walkways as there are now, and the current, chic, steel arches were made of sandstone brick, darkened by soot and grime. My father lived in the area from when I was seventeen to twenty-four,
Berlin Prayer
The Spree Komtesse is groaning with passengers The tables are laden with hams and bratwurst This summer’s arteries are almost cut – Out spill the last songs of the August nights From all four chambers of her heart And the black Spree takes us rolling and rolling Cradling us down her a
Lavender
I would love to tell you of the softness of the night. I want to write of the way the sky shifts through a thousand velvet, silken blues, the pinprick stars drifting through its infinite expanse like fish through the ocean, slowly spinning around me. I want to write about how the cast of moonlight [
Go Figure
“During those days, women were mistreated to spare the guilty from chastisement. They even went as far as shaving women’s heads.” Go figure. I, whose remorse was The wretched woman Left on the pavement. The conceivable victim, Her dress in ta
Finding my way back to the nightingale
The exalted song of the nightingale has long haunted the poetic imagination. Though I have never heard a nightingale sing, I have read its lamenting melodies in the lines of Ovid, Keats, and Coleridge. The real song remains elusive, yet somehow still a familiar refrain, and I wonder whether it is po
white horse
[inspired by White Horse Hill in Folkestone, Kent] on the hill with the wind in my face: the hill where the white horse shines where they stood long ago, saw the rock, and began to carve where today the hiss of steam trains washes through the valley and lambs lie in the [&hellip
