The American Poetry Review

The countdown to you begyns with me, deere Starman, when I wander, dumbly, deep into a space hospittable to Hunger. Now, all’s desert. No milk in syte. Just pitifull sand, what shushes as it slydes through your hande to rejoin itself. I’d join myself

Don’t go to discover your roots, Ladybug says. If you want to look for roots, go and look at a tree.Another day at a cafe, avoiding. Pretending to— Why did you come here Tell me whyIf you want to die go ahead and die do it quicklyIf you want to be de

The hastily assembled angel climbedThe ladder God had many times proposedThe prophets build the prophets never built itThe ladder to the sky and Heaven in the skyThe prophets never built it knowing God Was testing them but also teasing themSince all

For the past ten months, I have lived in San Francisco. I work in Silicon Valley. Capitalism swirls around me: Long work weeks, robotic men and women with their faces in the blue glow of their screens on the train, rampant homelessness among the weal

Santo Jesus, did you have a jeweled number?Did you play spin-the-bottle in your day?What colors and configurations of glass? I imagine there were no remedies for cleft palatesbut that people loved their penned animals:brushed their fur and picked the

MOON and its dark star of calamity.MOON like moths: twilight- and night-flying white moths.MOON with half-suicidal/half-sexual affect. Unimpressed, Islamic nations won’t standardize a lunar calendar.Should we bother to name it soon? A Copernican prin

Would we trust other ghosts? —Dawn Lundy Martin I was so excited to hear that J. Michael Martinez and Sherwin Bitsui had poetry collections coming out in 2018. Martinez’s Museum of the Americas was selected as a winner in the 2017 National Poetry Ser

This dresser’s wood has held some air in it—a dresser of air—and the air holdssomething about what it was to be alive sixty years ago:the kitchen brighter than its garbage,the hanging kitchen ornaments almost sarcastically still againstthe strength o

Big boy blue, when you were borndid you weigh ten pounds, or a dozen? And were youthe color of a summer skytill your big lungs took your firstFebruary first breath? The fire,this morning, looks like hair, growingfast motion and writhing. When you wer

Here in my hand a cone from the beautiful eastern white pine sitsan offering from the tree planted thirty years ago after earth softened upcome spring enough to dig a hole roughly twice the size of the burlapball around the root of it. The cone measu

before I was one I heard every soundas a sound that had never been heard,before I was one I saw every lightas a light separate from dark, colorhidden in a place I had not been.Before I was one I used feet to wakenin water, to pedal through air,hands

Why is it drowning? Why unpinnedfloaty locks, inset with fallenleaf&filth as if any buoyant trash were jewel? Why painted pale—not pale and bloated? Why more adoredminnow-lipped than when she breathed air, spoke? Why love wesuch dank ophelia? Why rat

Last year’s Tarot cards were the High Priestess and Justice.1 The world was full of sadness and sharp edges and it was time to own up to our truths, individually and collectively. This year’s cards are the Empress and the Hanged One—an odd pair and i

I am thinking terrible thoughts.Dozens dead again and I am thinkingabout what types of humans they were—the gunman and the fallen. YesterdayI was so happy to be greeting fall at last.You wore a sweater with holes in itand we had dinner with your aunt

selected by C. D. Wright ”Alicia Jo Rabins’ poems bring together the spiritual, the surrealist, and the erotic. Their wild imagination and fierce passion are aroused by hunger of the soul, and they use poetic intelligence as a desperate hammer to bre

Dear Reader, We are grateful for the support that you, a Friend of APR, have shown the magazine. We hope you will join us again now, as we enter our 48th year, to keep The American Poetry Review going strong. So far in 2019, we have published five ou

Twelve years ago, I adopted a young baby in Vietnam and made myself a firm but vague promise not to “raise him white.” But what did that mean? To figure it out, I started to educate myself about race, trying to see how I, a white mother, might not me

The wind in swells through the wild rye rolls.The bright sky dulls. Over the hills,Their green backs ringed with blue-Bells sunset-rung, flaps a wingy shadow west-Ward. A jay. Poor bird that no netMet nor gin it didn’t love. Good luck,You luckless sc

What have you done with my keys? I blame youthough it’s hard to hold a grudge these daysbecause I usually don’t rememberwhy I was angry in the first place.I look at a person sure she’s done me wrongthough the inciting incidents are lost. Former stude