Category: poetry

True Apothecary | Ellie Gold Laabs

This is how the night unravels
the coiled mesh of the mind.
It’s cold and blue as the center
of a flame. In certain seasons
the evening can take your knees
clean out—crawl you towards
some bright, unsteady dawn.
And you can look for yourself
in letters and the contours
of a bottle, impatient-seasick
to stumble over any pair of eyes
blind enough to meet your own.
And you can sigh and you can
bruise and you can stand so long
underwater your arms become
the trunks of trees, ages hence.
Yes, the windows open and shut—
again, again. And still you can ache,
still stumble. There’s really nothing
to be done. Only hold out a hand
to the mirror, and murmur, like love,
all the things for which you have
to be sorry.

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The Widower Writes From the Shipwreck | Ellie Gold Laabs

I’ve hardly wanted after waves, but here
in this salt we were, I think, too much
each other. Every door, a mouth, every
mouth, a bed—spitting names only you
have heard. My wife, the river is drowning
all your doves and I’m so far beyond magic
I forget what it feels like to own a hat. I couldn’t
see darkness so now I go everywhere with eyes
inside my face. All these things it now seems
I’ve done, dragged by the current to bed,
to be named again—acrid.

When I was the needle, I became the blood.
When I was the blood, I became the suture.
A smile slips, skinless, from my face—
some hardness that was never spring.
My wife, I am the fault line in a city that
couldn’t settle earth, where the sea is wide
and indifferent. And the truth is I’ve grown
mauve while the others all are happy. I am
no longer habitable. Where have you gone.

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Arouse Yourself, why do You sleep, O LORD? by Yin Cheng

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Autobiography of a Violin | Cassie Burkhardt

When I lift the instrument out of its case
to show my daughter,

unearthing it, as if from a dig–
what I feel in my hands

is not so much a violin
as a person—

a girl I kept shut away in a case
for twenty-five years,

slender wooden neck that barely weighs a thing,
angular, hollowed-out body of thirteen-year-old me—

anorexic, with monstrous braces
enough inner violence to snap a bow in half over her head.

Spent eighth grade in a treatment center
wanted to disappear, got so close she almost did.

I lift her up, curve my hand around her scroll
and she fits inside me still.

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Cassie’s Poem was selected as the 2025 Honeybee Prize winner in Poetry by Julia Kolchinsky. Julia had this to say about the poem…

“I was instantly struck by the control within each of the couplets and then taken by the central metaphor of the violin. While recollecting a traumatic past in its narrative, the poems lyric arc is one of tenderness–self love and acceptance not wholly arrived at but reached for, the way a bow against strings makes music. And once the melody ends, I just wanted to reread the poem again to keep listening to its music.” 

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In Defense of Liquor | Pamilerin Jacob

            Nunc est bibendum
            ~Horace

Whiskey clarifies what God does
not. Its philosophy: pungent & purifying.
Look how we banish sadness from our bones
with a gulp. Join us. We are touring the world,
adding sweetness into every root & tongue.
Our blood, full of praise songs. Tornado-
in-the-gut, it unscrews the knees, undoes the need
for self-importance: dancing made easy.
Thanks to whiskey, we are freer than most.
Mouth full of liquor, my prayers ricochet off God’s
shin like tennis balls. Then he picks it up, bites into it.
Tastes good, he says, tastes good. Who let sin into
the world? Why is love so full of shadows? What were
Okigbo’s last words? I don’t care for such
anxieties anymore. There is a gun to be put down.
There is flight to be made. O glee, now that I
know where you live, I will never stop drinking.

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ephemera 31 | Chris Lisieski

hunter is deadly
quiet when he comes
home after seven
twelves on the rig
eyes in the defilade
between brow and cheek
nothing’s bad
enough to hold sway
like what he saw
in the desert a girl
holding half of her
twin like a red rag
doll like half
of her heart missing
so when he drinks
he does it with purpose
and his doodles
on the napkin
spiral looser
as the fallen soldiers
mount next to him
until becca brings them
to the recycling
quietly

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Don’t Ask Me About the Hymns | Ezra Fox

~ after Michael Kleber-Diggs’s “Coniferous Fathers”

i.

Speak to me about the boys. Sunday armor
ill-fitting and incomplete. Their starched
collars yet scuffed soles. I bow to no deity,
still I watch their lips, shape words
like abomination and love while knelt
in this stained-glass aquarium, swaying
to currents of guilt and glory,
as if still nestled in the flood
of their mothers’ wombs.

ii.

Only in dreams do we truly sing,
limbs unfurling like hesitant ferns.
In sleep, we are all Davids dancing
before the ark, unashamed.

iii.

After service, these boys, with patent leather
dulled to scars, litanies already fading
from their tongues, weave through each other
like water. Even their shadows play
at holiness, neckties slipping off like shed skin.
The chain-link net singing its metallic psalm,
each rebound a confession, each shot arcing
towards grace.

iv.

They don’t yet know which rituals they’ll spend
lifetimes unlearning, or how fiercely they’ll cling
to the sacrament of touch long after the sermon fades.

Ezra Fox reads their poem…

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if   |   Keira Deer

Masses would not have cried
for days on end, nor would the streets
outside The Dakota be littered
with poster board—a quarter of the alphabet
torn and strewn along the street,
the letters        I M A G I N E        painted
in black—and something of a blood stain
on the ground. John would be
alight with life, sitting naked
on a plastic cube and tickling
the fraught ends of his vocal cords—
new bars for the next great album
off Geffen Records: a legioned fantasy,
the accordioned fold of each note stretched
out, John tilting his head to see
the vibrations that hum from his throat
moving the folds in various different lights.
The wailing ambulance and winding red
siren would not bend through the streets
of New York to find him there, dead—in fact,
John is rearranging the abandoned
letters of poster board now,
sitting on a bench in Central Park,
spelling                         I,   ENIGMA
on the ground at his bare feet,
his sneakers kicked away at some length,
eyes squinting behind lenses
to sketch a man: alight with life, barefoot
on a bench, with vines of strawberries sprouting
from his shoulders like wings,
ripening for flight.

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