Poetry

If you comb your hair at night, you will lose your memory. i don’t remember which came first, the alzheimer’s or the alopecia. my grandpa lying on our couch– moonlight pooling between clumps of curls like rain falling through a tattered canopy– his sentences cobbled together like the bones of an animal they say once …

“Recognition is the misrecognition you can bear.” – Lauren Berlant“It ain’t only the bad ones nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under.” – James BaldwinThere wasn’t a funeral. His sun-stricken eyes never felt cool relief under red dirt or earthembrace. His bones have surely bleached under the gaping Connecticut sky.My brother didn’t tell …

Why do you pretend to be stone, wind, bird? – A. AJMÁTOVA ONE STANDS STILL while another takes flight, each according to their nature, I understand stones and birds. Even the elusive owl. If I grew a stem, roots, leaves if I sunk in the water, without breathing but without dying if I were born …

Sir Francis Drake great great ringing of alarm bells firing of cannons a singed odor in the courtyard of English attack dogs as they came the windows of shameful tortures red-hot irons merchant of terror the business of pirates that hidden village with so lucrative a fortune mad ideas over three hundred years of that …

As you talk, it seems that a lily strolling in your voice Talk to me I want to hear you You were the gardener of your voice And your laughter a flock of white doves that fly at once I love you like adhan at dawn like the road that leads to sleep I love …

Marianne von Willemer to Goethe, circa 1816 I sent one to you while you were at work— as if an artichoke could make a wife of me—a thistle for your fork, Cynara cardunculus, after a quick dip in olive oil and lemon. “Poison,” you once wrote, was not some Secret Thief, but “the intensity of …

Bellingham Review is so excited to share with you a folio of poetry that emerged from the 50th Association for Ethnic Studies Conference at California State University, Los Angeles, in 2022. This poetry folio on home, nourishment, and community features the creative work of Shayda Kafai, María I. Morales-Sánchez, Nicole Leopardo, and Pau Abustan. Poetry …

The podcast host asks “When did you realize you’re queer?” but no age counts the same knuckles, wrinkles and twinks, ear and armpit hairs, orthopedic aches the real daddy, time kudzuing reason, premature efforts to fit in and feel good when feeling different is always the first queer feeling. “What was the thing that made …

Hanggang Sa Muli We see our dead everywhere. A butterfly, a bat—Lola? Dad? Is that you? Just today, I saw my father in the long finger of an okra, overgrown past peak deliciousness. It waggled at me— naku, not even good for deep-frying!— and reminded: tingnan mo! Always look close at your garden, at your …

Snowfield I was in the brightness of day that lives beyond the fir trees, I walked on fields and mountains of light — I crossed dead lakes — the captive waves whispered a secret song to me — I passed over white banks, called the dormant gentians by name — I dreamed in the snow …