Poems from Summer/Fall 2024

Read 5 poems from our recent print issue, which features a folio of work of Ekphrastic Poems from Guest Editor jason b. crawford

From jason b. crawford’s folio of Ekphrastic Poems in Poet Lore Volume 119 1/2
Tariq Thompson

THE IDEA OF ANCESTRY

It was just a windless field: quiet
blanketing the switchgrass, light
bleeding through the pregnant
clouds, caliginous. No crow calls
or cricket chitters. No laughter
stretching through the past.
Overhead, the sky growing
lonely and old. Sometimes
I feel like a motherless child.

From jason b. crawford’s folio of Ekphrastic Poems in Poet Lore Volume 119 1/2
Adrian Dallas Frandle

Homo-Mithraics 

(pain[t] on plaster; unknown Roman artist c. 3rd C. A.D.) 

Consumed by each other’s lack 
Of uneasy light, what if we kissed
Under the tauroctony? You be Sol 
And I’ll be Mithras—we will be 
Each other’s Zodiac bloodletting. 

Let the ravens shovel sullen stars
In our crescent cracked mouths, 
And we’ll share in the scorpion’s 
stingclean feast. Unmake me
Like the hollow bull of twilight. 

Hallowed earth, we crush in the tussle 
Of our sky-struggle. Night into day, 
Let loose the sacred world, lost 
in our godliness. Brilliant daylight, 
Dazzles that first step outside 
The cave of denial. Wingless, 
We fall together, up, entangled.
Our horns become sticky 
With sky, having gored out 
Our hearts with sun-sharpened eyes. 

From Poet Lore Volume 119 1/2
Margaret Ray

Wuthering Heights

My friend M is making a red painting
about Kate Bush’s music video
about Emily Brontë’s novel about
what haunts. Now I am making
a poem about my friend’s painting.
Quite obviously the novel and
music video are more stimulating
than either our painting or poem.
This is a case of dilution rather than
enrichment. The sound I want to make
is in my mouth like the sound of a bell
without a clapper. Nonetheless, here we are,
throwing whatever small talents
we might have at the usual things:
love, death, and other women’s work.

From Poet Lore Volume 119 1/2
Njoku Nonso

Oh Mercy

Tenderness spills like a sea-burst of green 
we mistake it for an ark
built over a scar-city. 

The knife in my hand, in your hand, brightens
a sunset-orange kiss of a bruise, 
but the road isn't desired. 

The fire eats the city but the city stays undead. 

In the meantime we can hear the stars laughing 
beside their makeshift graves; little fine-robed children 

caught at the schizophrenic hems of a dinner party. 

Everything looks like habitual singing. 
A split door between a woman crying at the bus station
and the iron-clad sky raining clean handkerchiefs. 

From Poet Lore Volume 119 1/2
Grzegorz Białkowski, translated from Polish by Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka

the internal poem

I would like to write the internal poem

in which a word shines with nothing 
but
its inner glow

in which the lines run ordered
by nothing
but the pressure of the fire within

which
melts everything