Calling poets to a greater role in public life and fostering a national network of socially engaged poets.
By Amy M. AlvarezI keep thinking about Breonna Taylor asleep/ between fresh sheets/ I keeping thinking/ about her skin cooling after a shower/ about her hair wrapped in a satin bonnet/ I think about what she may have dreamed that night
By Kimberly BlaeserBeginning with our continent, draw 1491:
each mountain, compass point Indigenous;
trace trade routes, languages, seasonal migrations—
don’t become attached.
By Carmin WongStart with something simple: 13 loosely lingering light-hearted lines that eventually morph / into crowbars ★ corps ★ prison cells ★ bylines.
By Kyle DarganThis poem is guilty. It assumed it retained
the right to ask its question after the page
came up flush against its face.
By Trevino L. Brings PlentyArms, face, scrotum – dark brown.
The kind of brown to drive
monsters to exterminate
bison to starve
a people.
By Maricielo Ampudia GutiérrezWith each finger, I pressed on black ink, and one by one placed them on the transmitting screen. Following instruction, I rolled each finger, left to right, and slow—every quarter inch of skin recorded. On the display, perfect fingerprints glowing.
_139_134_c1_smart_scale.jpg)
By Tarik DobbsChorus: Like a bridge over troubled water…
For years, settlers longingly, vertical, build over us, Starbucks has no sinks. Will we go? Lately, the bridge, their throne. When even these are somewhere to watch from, to drop a knee & propose somewhere to feel for a bank.
By Daria-Ann MartineauI find myself noticing you again
eight years later,
you coming out of the earth, pale,
erect, shadow over men.
You can’t be buried.
By Cyrée Jarelle JohnsonBlack excitement is danger. We have seen the other side of optimism for so long. Feels like fiction. Put your feet up on that dashboard because here comes the F U T U R E! Wow! Chewbacca was the blackest part of "The Force Awakens."
By Natalie WeeI was born in 1993, the year Regie Cabico became the first
Asian American to win the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam.