Poetry

In my field journal about rocks for my seventh grade biology teacher, I write: You know Georgia peaches. Plump and juicy. And some more hairy than others. Well, today, I went peach picking with my family. We got some really nice ones. I slice open one to find a dancing worm. My body jerked, but …

& God said, “love your enemy,” & I obeyed him & loved myself. Kahlil Gibran because this mess i made i made with both hands. because the loneliness of astronauts was too much to bear, i guzzled entire bodies, mouths like wounds i’d drain & ditch down a storm pipe. because when you know you’ll …

pocks on the motherworts. gray-green, white- green, dogeared. no one volunteers to be ill, you say. and i the heart alone sustains us. above the light in cowlicks slips between our sundown’s favored trees. coming around inspiration point’s eastern face, one last mile, we traipse the odd gap-toothed bridges designed to break the ankles of …

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 Baldwin There wasn’t a funeral. His sun-stricken eyes never felt cool relief under red dirt or earth embrace. His bones have surely bleached under the gaping Connecticut sky. …

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 …