We are offering expedited poetry submissions when you contribute to an evacuation aid fund in support of families from Gaza. When you donate $10-$20 to a fund, you will receive a decision on your poetry submission within 7 days.
We also email each poet a copy of our poetry prompts bundle, a collection of 114 poetry exercises.
As of this writing, this initiative has raised over €1,500 for Gaza families. These funds have assisted 4 families in evacuating from Gaza.Your support is saving lives. Please spread the word.
My only dollhouse dripped with dust for all the years I owned it.
Instead, my bedframe bore the deep grooves of playtime roughness, its rounded sweet-cream beams bowing up from the floor to form a castle of pillows and pillared bridges where thick-lipped witches in washcloth cloaks, loved doe-eyed princes doused in my father’s cologne;
where my fingers
slipped through the invisible to touch gold-paved paths to forgotten forests, and the silver warmth of stardust brick and ballgowns;
where I couldn’t outgrow myself.
I’m three months married now, moved out, moved on, and my parents are repainting my attic room with a half-baked buttermilk hue.
It’s my brother’s now, and like I picked the pale spring green they’ll piece away, this claiming is his right.
And it’s okay that the soft side of dawn won’t light those walls in a moss-soft glow, and my bed-frame is broken down and boxed in a basement somewhere because nobody will buy its pockmarked pieces,
but I have to know where my dolls went,
because if the dolls are gone there is nothing left of me in my childhood home but that dollhouse.
That dollhouse.
There is nothing left of me.
By Paige Winegar Fetzer
Biography:
Paige Winegar Fetzer is an undergraduate student at Weber State University, where she is majoring in English with an emphasis in creative writing. Her work has most recently been published in the Sink Hollow Literary Magazine.
The Political Economy of Gaza In memory of Mahmoud Fattouh
Things that aren’t allowed to enter Gaza:
Anesthetics Analgesics Ventilators Oxygen cylinders X-ray machines Crutches Wheelchairs Insulin pens Sanitary pads Maternity tests Water filtration systems Water purification tablets Sleeping bags Dates Strawberries
Things that are in short supply in Gaza:
All of the above
Also:
Food of any kind Water Medicines of all kinds Fuel Electricity Internet service Intact buildings Intact families Intact cemeteries Functioning hospitals Doctors Aid workers Reporters Hope Confidence that anyone cares
Food that is available in Gaza:
Cattle feed Bird feed Grass Leaves
Things that are plentiful in Gaza:
Rubble Death Martyrs Orphans WCNSFs Amputees Unexploded ordinance Exploded ordinance Collective punishment Pain Suffering Grief Trauma Despair Outrage at the world’s indifference
Also:
Heroism Self-sacrifice Solidarity Steadfastness Fortitude Dignity Resilience Determination to survive Determination to remain in Gaza Determination never to forget
By Steve Babb
Biography:
Steve Babb is a 65-year-old retired public health worker who has fought for social justice all his life.
He has written poems on a variety of social justice struggles, including Central America solidarity/anti-intervention, antiracism, immigrant detention, and the movement against the genocide in Gaza.
He has been inspired by the poetry of witness of Anna Akhmatova, Roque Dalton, Carolyn Forché, Clint Smith, and Javier Zamora, and by the lyrics of Rosana Arbelo and Silvio Rodríquez.
Jean Anne Feldeisen is a former resident of New Jersey, now living on a farm in Maine. At age 72, she had her first poem published in Spank the Carp in 2021, then several more in The Hopper and The Raven’s Perch, Thimble Literary Magazine, and other online publications. Her first chapbook, Not All Are Weeping, was released in 2023 by Main Street Rag Publishing. Poetry is an especially important mouthpiece for Jean Anne in her seventies and she hopes she can use her perspective as an elder to help herself and others understand, manage, and maybe even fall in love with their lives.
My nephew doesn’t know the word ‘bomb.’ I thank only luck for this kindness.
He has never felt the serpent squeeze of smoke strangling his lungs.
His hollow bird body does not bear the weight of a city leveled.
When I ask about ‘flour,’ he draws petals, not hunger. Not blood.
He wakes each morning with all his ten fingers and I name this holy.
My sister has never made the animal sound of a mother mourning.
I pray a prayer of gratitude and a prayer of resistance, and they are the same:
when the sky opens overhead – only rainfall.
By Neha James
Biography:
Neha James is a first-generation Indian-American poet and PM&R physician based in New York City. A self-described “compulsive” writer in her younger years, she left her craft for over a decade in pursuit of her medical career. Her return to poetry is inspired by her role as both artist and healer.
A student came out to me for the second time today. Most days they don’t say a word, but today their courage makes them the loudest kid in class. I tell them I love them. I tell them that I’m proud. I do it because they deserve to hear it, and I know they might not find these words at home. Later, a girl slips me a piece of paper, carefully creased so it’s contents won’t ooze out. When the classroom empties I find a poem about what she’s most afraid of: A monster who whispers I love you just before he paints her ribcage black and blue with a tube sock full of oranges. I take a moment to cry for her, and then I walk the evidence to the counseling office. When I get back to my desk, I find an email from a parent. Mrs. Wright wants to know why I’m making her son read Things Fall Apart, she says it makes Tucker feel uncomfortable. I want to tell her, that’s the point! but for the sake of my job, I can’t. So, I tell her he can read The Great Gatsby instead, it will all go right over his head anyway. When I get home, I find I left the TV on and talking heads have lots to say about what teachers are doing in their classrooms. They say we should stick to the curriculum, like we aren’t already, say we should stick to the classics, like that’s not all we read. It’s enough to make me not want to go to work tomorrow, or ever again, but I shudder at the thought of who they’d find to fill my seat. So the next day I teach the classics, the ones the talking heads have never read. We begin with some Walt Whitman, then some Sylvia Plath. I end with a little Langston Hughes. I hope the kids who really need it can read the rebellion in the subtext, see their reflection in the pages, and know they aren’t alone.
By Chris Atkin
Biography:
Chris Atkin is a high school English teacher, spoken word artist, and poet from Orem, He is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2022 semifinalist for the Sandy Crimmins Prize for poetry, and his work has been published by Ink & Nebula, Last Leaves Magazine, and the Lascaux Review.
I’ve tried to learn what makes a woman make-up and pink hot meals and sex until a man rages wife material
But my voice is too husky and honest spring daisy dresses make my skin itch mama called it tomboyishness in the 90s
On special nights she’d draw a bubble Epsom salt bath turn my curls straight before the nails
took their turn classic red polish skin bleached Ambi my sister stands by bright in her femininity watching my glow-up
Now I bite nails to the nubs past the thumb sucking warning my gap would always be seen as ugly
But maybe it wasn’t all bad seated at the table of my mother’s worry that one day I’d never learn to use that power
Today I took my time climbing a sloping ridge in boots and dark gloves holding a family of robins in a camera’s lens
A woman passed me we shared a secret smile in the shade of an elm tree where no one else could see
By Monique Harris
Biography:
Monique Harris has been a healer, a teacher, a traveler, a dancer, and a graduate MFA student of Indiana University. She has work published and/or forthcoming in Yellow Arrow Journal, Talon Review, Moira Literary Review, Press Pause Press, Packingtown Review, Wards, Torch Literary Magazine, Collateral, aaduna, and more. She currently calls Raleigh, NC home and can be found most days hiking, reading, and writing.
You must make merit 99 times, two 9’s for the eternal ones.
As the monks’ chants are recited in Pali words,
The yellow candles burning out, the scented water thrown to our heads…
All this work to activate the pinpoint of our soul: the praleung
Almost jolted to life in such a way,
That most of us won’t even realize the
Memories of our past life, may manifest
As a dream
As Deja Vu
As a simple thought…
A hill tribe member in Laos,
A gawking farmer in the rice paddy of Vietnam,
A lonely wounded soldier in the jungles of Cambodia.
How and when we died are scrambled like pieces
Of a broken stone temple,
Belonging in specific area but never truly meant to return
To its original form.
Sadness & despair,
They are the hovering older brothers of remembering past lives,
Which make us realize that it is better
To live this one & move on.
By Ryan Samn
Biography:
Ryan Samn is a writer and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work explores themes of culture, identity and language from a 2nd generation Asian American perspective.
I fell in love with cars briefly after a not so bad father-son trip to Tennessee.
My queerness was a watercolor painting cup, murky and hazy.
I was fourteen, too tall to hide behind father’s tree-stump legs anymore.
We stayed with our southern family that withered off the vine long before I was born.
I had to explain my chipping nail polish to blood strangers who wolfed down brewskies and Marlboro Reds on M A G A front lawns.
We drove over four hundred miles for… a car.
A 1967 Ford Fairlane to be specific, a relic of good ol’ American Steel that spent the past 15 years rusting away in an overgrown backyard.
I never understood my father’s obsession with repair.
He always had a fixer-upper rotting in the garage. I knew this would be no different.
I wandered amuck through the wreckage peering into mildew windows.
The car was hidden in a labyrinth of shattered windshields, wasp infested hoods, and flattened tires.
I discovered a Mustang from the 80’s with mangled windshield wipers, cherry red
seats, and manual transmission. I told my father I liked it. It was the first time I had seen him smile in a very long time.
We spent the rest of the day oohing and aahing over other Detroit bones.
For those brief moments we were best buds again.
There was no Fairlane.
There was only a son slipping through his fingers.
By Hunter Hodkinson
Biography:
Hunter Hodkinson is a Non-binary, Appalachian born poet, carving a place for themselves in Brooklyn, NY. They have found a poetic home with Brooklyn Poets, where they work as an Events Assistant. They also find enjoyment as a Reader for The Adroit Journal. Their work can be found in, december, Anti-Heroin Chic, Dream Boy Book Club, Artistic Tribe NYC, and elsewhere.
A Requiem for Juan Jose -after Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks
Night owl, your deathbed was silent, only the low hum of fluorescent light ballasts about to fail and the pit pat of nurses shoes on linoleum.
Peace be with you.
In death as in life you were alone. All sunset day beginnings, all sunrise end of days. And neon lights, and traffic signs, car horns and the L-train rumble overhead in rhythms keeping sleepers sleeping, running mostly on time.
Peace be with you.
No family to tuck you in, just a sealed casket and strangers. Methodical process, your naked body, a wet sponge in a gloved hand. Someone else’s idea of how you would look best.
Peace be with you.
The rosary in your hands, the tattoo of the Christ on your chest, a prayer.
By Mike Cantu
Biography:
Michael Cantu is a recent recipient of an MFA from CSU Fresno in the heart of California’s Central Valley. His writing explores the difficulty of life and the understanding of one’s self. He works within the realms of loss and longing, loneliness and fear, and the euphoria of rare moments of enlightenment. His work has appeared in: “HAIS: a literary journal,” “Flies, Cockroaches, & Poets,” and “Kaleidoscope Literary Magazine.” When not creating, he works as an English teacher helping underserved youth find their voices.
