Hafizah Geter’s ‘paula’
As a somewhat curmudgeonly 28-year-old, I’m not sure if I’m a Millennial, a Gen X'er or Y'er, or just lost between them all. I am a child of the 1990s, though, and so is this poem. I first heard “paul…
Y. Madrone’s ‘Tulip is the bravest flower, I mean bird’
Sometimes, I love a poem so much I want to crawl inside it and live there in a very tangible way, but because poems are words, I’ll have to let them live inside me. If you’ve ever felt displaced, repl…
Jonterri Gadson’s ‘Cardinal Sin’
The turning point in this poem, “It wasn’t my place / to teach other women’s children / about death” keeps me awake at night. That’s what good poems do—they resonate long after we’ve shut the book, tu…
Kayla Sargeson’s ‘Hellwave’
Dealing with the aftermath of trauma—emotional or physical—can shape a person forever. In Kayla Sargeson’s poem “Hellwave” the speaker—whose body has been previously traumatized, “cracked open like gl…
Stacey Waite’s ‘On the Occasion of Being Mistaken…’
Stacey Waite’s poetry rebels against and with identity, against and with the body. Waite’s poetry rebels against how outsiders perceive both as working together or against one another. This poem speak…
this little light of mine
This poem by Deborah Jack further complicates the already complicated feelings surrounding Americans and their varied experiences and beliefs involving the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In an era …
Arielle Greenberg’s ‘Neighbors’
A rebel of the academy, where she spent years as a professor, Arielle Greenberg writes in “Neighbors” of the entrapment found within the “ivory tower,” though the message of this poem isn’t limited to…
