All posts tagged: Issue 24 Poetry

Klan Giant

By TOMMYE BLOUNT

 

“Made of Duretta cloth and sateen, embroidered in silk.
Cotton cord and tassels. Price, each $6.00″
—from Catalogue of Official Robes and Banners, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

Look up here, the air is Aryan. The moon, 
our white hood. Our life must loom large 
above that which is darkened in our shadow.
A fate loomed long ago, ours

Klan Giant
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Ode to Powerline

Winner of the 2022 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry

By DARIUS SIMPSON 

 “if you’re ever lonelayyyy, stop, you don’t have to be.”
Powerline                                    

you, thrust open leather vest glisten chest in the desert
you, both knee beggin in silver pants plus rain
you, break a lover wide to see what lyrics may flow                                                            

Ode to Powerline
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Bones and Ghosts

By DAVID MILLS

From my row house mailbox, I fished
an envelope: no address, just “David.” 
scrawled. In my room, I read: e-mails 

bounced back, calls orphaned. If you’re 
alive and don’t want to talk I get it.
Though six hours across
the Atlantic
is much farther than six along it. If 
need be, I will kneel before your grave.  
here’s my number. just in case.

Bones and Ghosts
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Jerome Sons

By TERRI WITEK

 

I ask my sons what they want from St. Hieronymos, too old to befriend. Red hat, my dead son says. Fat book, my live son requests. No one mentions a lion, meandered in.

The lion asks for an edit= do these sons mark jars filled with body parts? Baboon son, jackal son? They flatten to black-rimmed eyes. No.

I climb through mountain sons. They are finding how far blue takes them. They are learning the ropy muscles of a man (higher animus/ they r anonymous) becalmed in a cave mouth. His red hat and book, the little fire.

Jerome Sons
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Maiden’s Tower

By TARA SKURTU

 

We pass a lighthouse and you tell me the legend—
a seer, an emperor, his daughter, the snakebite;
the tower he built to keep her at the edge of the sea—
when an old woman passes us on the ferry,
sniffs us twice, You are in love, I smelled it!
and last night on the island, over fresh fish
and a pitcher of ice-cloudy raki, I asked how
many words for love in your language:

Maiden’s Tower
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