Shevaun Brannigan
Frank Learns to Juggle During Quarantine

Shevaun Brannigan - Frank Learns to Juggle During Quarantine

Poetry
Shevaun Brannigan’s work has appeared in such journals as Best New Poets, AGNI, and Slice. She is a recipient of a Barbara J. Deming Fund grant and holds an MFA from Bennington College. Read more »
Matthew E. Henry
mannish water

Matthew E. Henry - mannish water

Poetry
MEH is Matthew E. Henry, a multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated poet. The author of Teaching While Black (Main Street Rag, 2020), he has recent and forthcoming works in The Amethyst Review,… Read more »
M. Drew Williams
Pike

M. Drew Williams - Pike

Poetry
M. Drew Williams is from Western New York. His poems have appeared in publications such as Harpur Palate, Hobart, The New Territory, and Poetry South. He holds an MFA from Creighton University. Read more »
Jeannine Hall Gailey
Planting Camellias as an Act of Resistance

Jeannine Hall Gailey - Planting Camellias as an Act of Resistance

Poetry
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She's the author of five books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained… Read more »
Rita Mookerjee
Rooh Afzah

Rita Mookerjee - Rooh Afzah

Poetry
Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Iowa State University. Her poetry is featured in Juked, Cosmonauts Avenue, New Orleans Review, Sinister… Read more »
John Blair
The Floods of May

John Blair - The Floods of May

Poetry
John Blair has published six books, the most recent of which is Playful Song Called Beautiful (U. of Iowa Press, 2016), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize, and he has a seventh book, The Art of… Read more »
Katherine Gekker
The Root Cellar

Katherine Gekker - The Root Cellar

Poetry
Katherine Gekker is the author of In Search of Warm Breathing Things (Glass Lyre Press, 2019). Her poems have been published in Delmarva Review, Little Patuxent Review, Broadkill Review, Poetry South,… Read more »
Andrew Kozma
Transplant

Andrew Kozma - Transplant

Poetry
Andrew Kozma’s poems have appeared in Blackbird, The Believer, Redactions, and Bennington Review. His first book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award. Read more »

The Floods of May

John Blair

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date. . .
–William Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII
Who could have seen this coming the river squatted in its bed shoulders thick with houses going rogue and shaking it all off like a dog shedding fleas and puddle water? A whole family drowned and gone missing except the father who rode a snag of siding and shingles back to the bank somewhere between these limestone hills and the walleyed Gulf of Mexico; the darling buds of May survive of course as they in their leases tend to do kettle-corned & popping under the hot blind eye of a Texas summer sun into bursts of ready leaves and flowers humming with bees as though to hide the sound of the river’s hurry to sow like grains of rice another big handful of the sinful into its sacral waters sated with drowning and now biding like any living thing its time as it herds ineluctable these gifts of flesh and the solemn slow- rolled trunks of trees ever downward branch by sky by light like hands that urge lost children home to sleep in quiet beds.
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