Rowan Crosthwaite
I find myself nodding to the question the waitress asks in the middle of the poem, “do you ever just get so tired?” I understand asking that question of a random person, a customer even. I love the push and pull of the poem, the narrator willing to commit unquestioning arson for this exhausted waitress, while she calmly rebuffs his attempt to offer anything. There’s a question hanging at the end, is his desire to impress or even woo her strong enough to give her the one thing she wants, and leave.
Read Danny Caine’s poem, “Burning Down the Waffle House”
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Akeakamai Ishikawa
Khaled Mattawa’s “Your City,” challenges the reader’s notion of what defines a poem. The first part of “Your City,” a paragraph lacking rhyme or the grammatical deviations typically associated with paragraph-style poetry, feels isolated, like a passage ripped from the pages of a novel. Mattawa follows up his paragraph with a few lines of biblical prose turning what wasn’t perceived as a poem into one. These lines connect Mattawa’s story to the story of the world, where the rich build paradise until it becomes hell and then move on to make another paradise. At the construction of each new paradise, the poor have to work even harder.
Sam
When I was preparing for Poetry Out Loud, I delved into the world of an ancient Egyptian tyrant (Ozymandias) whose desire to immortalize his legacy ultimately proved futile. Today, more Egyptian tyrants are doing the same; the generals of Egypt seek to escape revolt and their people by building a new and fabulous city (The New Capital). In “Your City,” Khaled Mattawa addresses the ancient tradition of authoritarian rulers going to great lengths to keep their power up and their people down. As the unjust uses of American taxpayer dollars increasingly appear on the front page of my Google News feed, I feel the utmost sympathy for people whose leaders care more about self-preservation than the responsibilities of leadership. While time changes, Mattawa shows how the greed, vanity, and selfishness of tyrants remain the same.
Read Khaled Mattawa’s poem, “Your City”
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Rita Gray
The poet asks: “what is it like for you on that side of the war?” She imagines it to be a warm place where “a boy with a violin stands all year long in a tee shirt.” She later returns to this boy, but now he is on the cold side of the war: “and the boy you thought would sell his violin so that he could buy a coat.” We don’t find out if he did. The answer remains “suspended between snow and music,” like her doves over the rainbow. The hope doesn’t disappear; it just freezes.
Read Anna Malihon’s poem, ”[I’ve wanted to ask for a long time…],”
translated from the Ukrainian by Olena Jennings
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Amaan Chan
“Childhood” by Luciana Jazmin Coronado is a good poem because it says we are not born with a real identity and we steal things from the people we see. This means when we are younger we don’t know how to do anything and we learn things from the people around us and we copy them. For example, when we grow up we learn language from our parents and they teach us how to walk and talk. I can relate to this because when I came to USA for the first time i didn’t know how to speak English very well and I learned it from the other people in school.
Read Luciana Jazmín Coronado’s poem, ”Childhood,”
translated from the Spanish by Allison A. deFreese
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Andy Peyrie
Daily I read Poetry Daily or try to, to forget/displace the headlines. So, what’s the choice (choose what)? All the hardly known but essential poets: jess rizkallah, “bootstraps,” poetry counter to headlines or headlines as poetry. And the voice, “the point of view”? One that implicates while implicated, post-apocalyptic but awake at dawn (“now raze the city/to raise the flag”). And the final piece of advice? (“we are royally fucked/unless we tenderize the rich”) An ironic reversal of the cannibalistic “eating,” geared towards softening while the BBQ is fired up, the “royal we” using thrones for fuel.
Read jess rizkallah’s poem, ”bootstraps”
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Jami Macarty
I love these poems for their lyric vascularity, their oceans through my veins and muscles. The poems’ heartbreak and struggle has at least two faces. One is that of the experiencer from within the poems’ tear-salted waters—the ‘I’ who will “claw … out” or “in” or “under.” The other is that of the observer who takes a sort of meta-extra position outside the poems and has to do with their making and maker. The poet generously invites us into the scratch marks, color densities, two languages, and a longing to be safe from appropriation by being wholly artistically unique.
Read E. R. Pulgar’s poem, ”Locura Azul”
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Kevin Jackson
My father had a series of small strokes that led to a massive stroke back in 2021. I took over his financial reins and tried my best to pay for rent and food despite difficulties. This led me to deeper depression, anxiety, and a loss of patience and resilience. Yet, I don’t believe I have written a poem about my dad specifically. Could doing that be therapeutic? Reading this poem by Andrew Grace made me think, “Should I ink my pain upon my paper? Or just deal with it without dealing with it?”
I think I will write it out.
Read Andrew Grace’s poem, ”Do You Consider Writing to be Therapeutic?”
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