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.
RICHARD SIKEN
Math is the most accurate language we have for describing the world, but sometimes we don’t need accuracy, we need relation and approximation. That's poetry. Poetry is a mutation of the language that allows for evolution ... We can expand a body of knowledge with lateral thinking and comparison.
MONIKA CASSEL
In ’87 I see guardsmen walk their AK-47s / on the platforms. The trains slow down but never stop. I think, / my mother was born in such a different Germany, but this is true for everyone / —so why can’t I stop looking?
JEHANNE DUBROW
Now we live in North Texas, hours away from the nearest shore. And yet, the massive amounts of open space—all the prairie, marsh, and plains that we have here—started to feel like another kind of vast water, another great expanse of distance and isolation.
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