“The number of rice grains left in your supper bowl foretells how many pockmarks will appear on your lover’s face Sleeping on your back will flatten your head’s shape but sleep on your stomach and you’ll induce nightmares Eating the fat inside the crab sharpens the mind so too the roe extracted from…”— Jenny Xie, apmpodcasts.org
“'If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.' -Orhan Pamuk Before the hanging cross, the girls take turns standing at attention before us with eyes closed or hands clasped, headbands bright green or bangles yellow, glints that fill the…”— Tarfia Faizullah, apmpodcasts.org
“A classmate and I chose pendulums, what happens when a pendulum hangs from a pendulum? How does gravity work then? We were studying invisible forces and left the classroom, heading into the world with just our two bodies, which were to be both string and bob. In the woods behind school, he climbed i…”— Catherine Barnett, apmpodcasts.org
“everyone wants to know what I saw on the long walk away from you I couldn’t eat and didn’t sleep for an entire week I can hardly picture any of it now save the fox I thought was in the grass but wasn’t I remember him quiet as a telescope tiny as a Plutonian moon everything else was wilding around us…”— Kaveh Akbar, apmpodcasts.org
“When the bass drops on Bill Withers’ Better Off Dead, it’s like 7 a.m. and I confess I’m looking over my shoulder once or twice just to make sure no one in Brooklyn is peeking into my third-floor window to see me in pajamas I haven’t washed for three weeks before I slide from sink to stove in one lo…”— Patrick Rosal, apmpodcasts.org
“Today is a trumpet to set the hounds baying. The past is a fox the hunters are flaying. Nothing unspoken goes without saying. Love’s a casino where lovers risk playing. The future’s a marker our hearts are prepaying. The future’s a promise there’s no guaranteeing. Today is a fire the field mice are…”— Campbell McGrath, apmpodcasts.org
“The guy Dad sold your car to comes back to get his money, leaves the car. With filthy rags we rub it down until it doesn’t shine and wipe your blood into the seams of the seat. Each snowflake stirs before lifting into the sky as I learn you won’t be dead. The unsuffering ends when the mess of your h…”— Matt Rasmussen, apmpodcasts.org
“A man walks into a coffee shop. But it’s not a joke. I bought coffee there last summer. Small, with milk. It’s never a joke to walk in or out of a shop unharmed. It’s easy to forget you aren’t a person being shot at. I’m not. I wasn’t, though I was there, last summer. Not-shot-at and I never knew it…”— Lia Purpura, apmpodcasts.org
“Koko Taylor walked up on John Henry took the hammer right out his hand and bent it and twisted it into a fine necklace and took him to a real nice dinner. Koko Taylor had twelve thousand wigs. One she never wore. Just kept at home. Was enchanted, spun from gold and full of rubies, and sang to her at…”— Eve L. Ewing, apmpodcasts.org
“My mother was in the hospital & everyone wanted to be my friend. But I was busy making a list: good dog, bad citizen, short skeleton, tall mocha. Typical Tuesday. My mother was in the hospital & no one wanted to be her friend. Everyone wanted to be soft cooing sympathies. Very reasonable pigeons. No…”— Chen Chen, apmpodcasts.org
“She couldn’t stop—she did it almost every afternoon while they napped or later sat upstairs with homework. She listened to the scrape of desk chairs on the ceiling while she measured and blended, hummed from oven to sink, redolence rising in a sweet promise she thought was required, didn’t know how…”— Lisa C. Krueger, apmpodcasts.org
“Because words dazzle in the dizzy light of things and the soul is like an animal–hunted and slow– this buffalo walks through me every night as if I was some kind of prairie and hunkers against the cold dark, snorting under the stars while the fog of its breathing rises in the air, and it is the lone…”— Steve Scafidi, apmpodcasts.org
“abuelita’s hands were a time card she clocked in and out, morning and night. they were a pile of dirty sheets at the foot of a bed, gnarled broomsticks, dustpans, and sooty vacuums, her hands were soiled rags in yellow gloves, they were two pillows beaten of mites and dead skin, her hands were paper…”— Aja Monet, apmpodcasts.org
“Instagram is democratising poetry. For gatekeepers, who work via western frameworks, it is clearly awful. But women of colour, LGBT+ and other marginalised people now have platforms to speak up, and that is not a literary journal. They, who want to make these platforms disappear, generalise the work…”— Nikita Gill, Surbhi Gupta, indianexpress.com
“If William Shakespeare was alive today, he would be on Instagram”— Harman Kaur, Jessica Wong, cbc.ca
“A bush in the excitement of its roses could not have bloomed so beautifully as you did then. It was a look I'd like to give this page. For that is poetry: to bring within about, to change.”— William H. Gass, amazon.com
“While poets historically focused on producing a few highly thought-provoking poems in a given period of time, social media seems to have changed that. Poets are now expected to produce an absurdly high quantity of poems just to keep readers happy.”— @theboyandhisdickies, Morgan Sung, mashable.com
“I stood at one end of the room and watched him. Between us was a bed and a table and things in a hotel--you know, things that are anonymous and belong to no one. Like a sea or a life. And all I remember is how expensive it was. Not the room, but the feeling.”— Alex Dimitrov, theparisamerican.com
“I’ve always thought that writing poetry has very little to do with the intellect. It’s not something one can explain and chat about very easily: certainly not about the making of it. It’s very resistant to explanation. It comes from a place that is occult, in the sense of being hidden. It attends to…”— Robin Robertson, Rachel Cooke, theguardian.com
“i think about this poem a lot. as a single woman in a culture/society that constantly sells romance, i feel isolated. people often refer to themselves as "lucky" when they find someone, but does that mean i am "unlucky"? this poem reminds me that i'm not. thanks, @nktgill”— Bina Perino, twitter.com