You are a tortoise in a hard hat.
I am a heart growing gallons and gallons of hair.
You made it with me: a perfect love,
which went hard from the softness of its innards.
And though all the love went elsewhere, you hung around,
like a gas, like sand in my bikini pants.
Katharine Kilalea is the author of One Eye’d Leigh, shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize for writeers under 30.
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JEHANNE DUBROW
For years, I’ve been drafting a book / about trauma, how words may form / a likeness of the mind that’s torn— / the past tears easily as paper, I write. / And don’t the leaves on the ground / resemble ripped poems, as if the weather / keeps trying to find the right phrase, / all those crumpled revisions of the seasons.
CONSTANTINE CONTOGENIS
Near destitute, I’m this close to homeless. / This killer of a city, Antioch, / it’s eaten all the money I have, / this killer and its cost of living. // But I’m young, in the best health. / I speak a marvelous Greek / (and I know, I mean “know,” my Aristotle, Plato, / the orators, poets, the—well, you name them).
PETER FILKINS
pissarro is dead cézanne too / swept away like willowed flotsam / that brute degas gone as well / chafing tides the sea of years // long ago battles fought discarded / ballast tossed from fame’s balloon / rising like heat and the unheard prices / feeding straw to the fires of need // for more garden cuttings variants
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