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      May 13, 2025Douglas FritockStacking the Deck

      Without hesitating, I slip my fingers
      into the waxy pleats and tear the wrapper
      from the cards and stick of gum, while
      my father films it on his camcorder.
      It is my 9th birthday, and among a tableful
      of presents I’ll soon forget, my father has
      gifted me a pack of 1986 TOPPS MAJOR LEAGUE
      BASEBALL CARDS to add to my collection.
         
      Right off the bat, the first name I see is
      Mike Schmidt, third baseman for the Phillies,
      our hometown team. An auspicious beginning,
      my father says. And after him, Pete Rose,
      Mr. “Charlie Hustle” himself, followed by
      Roger “The Rocket” Clemens, pitcher
      for the Boston Red Sox. And on it goes
         
      like that: Don Mattingly, Bo Jackson, Jose
      Canseco—nothing but franchise players.
      Wade Boggs, Rickey Henderson, Darryl
      Strawberry, as if this pack were a snapshot
      of All-Star weekend. And the whole time
      I’m sifting through the big-name roster,
      my father, his eye pressed to the viewfinder,
      keeps saying Wow! or Look at that! or Holy Cow!
      like Phil Rizzuto calling a Yankees game.
         
      It isn’t until the next day he admits to
      buying a whole box, selecting only the best
      cards, and sealing them into a single pack
      using a glue stick. And it wouldn’t be
      for another 38 years—when the hospice
      nurse tells me he is too weak to speak,
      but can still hear—that I finally thank him,
      pausing briefly to steady my voice before
      asking, Remember the time I turned 9?
         
      Prompt: Write a poem that includes a prank and ends with a question.

      from Prompt Poem of the Month

      Comment from the series editor, Katie Dozier

      “This poem leaves me with the need to come up with baseball puns, even though I fear I will strike out! Despite never having held a pack of baseball cards before, with Fritock’s help, I can feel my hands rip open the wrapper. The double turn at the end takes us in a flash from heart-warming to heart-breaking—a grand slam of a poem.”

      May 12, 2025Hemat MalakAerodynamic Drag

      Why fly? Simple. I’m not happy unless there’s some room between me and the ground.
      —Richard Bach, A Gift of Wings
      When Anna, the mum with six kids, called me from the airport to say she was leaving, assuring me it’s true, most of me was horrified—her youngest was four! The other part of me was all awe and star struck and longing. I smelt pineapple—are there pineapples there—so fragrant I could taste it before my tongue, rivers of sweet juice running down my arms, sticky in the impossible sun, but me, who peels prawns with knife and fork, didn’t care. I walked along that beach, sand painting my rivers, painting my body with fuck it all. Seabirds screeched messages from home, but I don’t speak seabird. I adjusted my bikini—my bikini—and walked barefoot with my always-dressed feet, scratching up my pedicure like a wild thing. The rumble of a huge plane rattled the shells in my hand as it passed. The phone at my ear beeped in time with the washer announcing the end of the cycle.
       
      taking flight
      above
      the noise
       
       

      from #87 – Spring 2025

      Hemat Malak

      “I love everything about a haibun, especially the contrast between its long and short forms, and the ooh of the cuts between title and prose and haiku (so many spots for a poem to say, surprise!). I really enjoy the eccentricity of a haibun nattering on about something and then stopping, giving me a pensive look, and serving up a haiku.”

      May 11, 2025Carrie Jane BondRound Them Up

      Family With 2 US Citizen Children
      Deported by ICE After Traffic Stop
      Cheerios, dinner plates, wedding
      Rings—teapots and targets. Eyes
      On the circumference of your wrist.
      On a round table in my classroom
      With broken chairs: the globe.
       
      Holes punched in the left margin, being
      Left at the margins, not knowing:
      Will knuckles rattle their doors,
      Their shiny knobs bright, like that
      Once-new promise of America?
       
      Her torch blazes in the noonday sun
      Before, during, after the election
      From the island where she stands
      With eyes hooded and low, ever
      Watching over rough waters.
       
      I tell this mother on the phone
      From our classroom, cord curling ’round
      My fingers, we will do our best. They can
      Stand out there and press the doorbell,
      Ring forever for all we care.
       
      I am not worried, she assures me.
      Yet there is no list it is safe to be on—
      Everything being less sure. She is
      Less assured now, the news rolling
      On a twenty-four-hour cycle.
       
      A knock at the door is a knock
      In their hearts, thoughts spinning
      Round and round
      Like the vultures’ turning—silent
      Above the wide-open plain.
       

      from Poets Respond

      Carrie Jane Bond

      “‘Family With 2 US Citizen Children Deported by ICE After Traffic Stop’ is one of several headlines I have seen this week as ICE continues arresting and deporting Americans at a furious pace. As I work with children, some of whom are multilingual English learners, I have felt the ripples of fear in these communities most vulnerable to such blunt attacks. Attempts to round up those who are deemed ‘illegal’ is continuing despite errors, illegality, and an optics of horrifying cruelty. I am responding from my own outrage, that ‘give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ has given way to such headlines. I hope we as a country can remember who we are, or rather who we strive to be, and to remember what James Baldwin wrote oh so many years ago: ‘They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law — in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever.’”

      May 10, 2025Kim DowerI Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom

      breezy floral, dancing with color
      soft, silky, flows as I walk
      Easter Sunday and you always liked
        
      to get dressed, go for brunch, “maybe
      there’s a good movie playing somewhere?”
      Wrong religion, we were not church-goers,
        
      but New Yorkers who understood the value
      of a parade down 5th Avenue, bonnets
      in lavender, powder blues, pinks, hues
        
      of spring, the hope it would bring.
      We had no religion but we did have
      noodle kugel, grandparents, dads
        
      who could fix fans, reach the china
      on the top shelf, carve the turkey.
      That time has passed. You were the last
        
      to go, mom, and I still feel bad I never
      got dressed up for you like you wanted me to.
      I had things, things to do. But today in L.A.— 
        
      hot the way you liked it—those little birds
      you loved to see flitting from tree to tree—
      just saw one, a twig in its mouth, preparing 
        
      a bed for its baby—might still be an egg,
      I wish you were here. I’ve got a closet filled
      with dresses I need to show you. 
        

      from #48 - Summer 2015

      Kim Dower

      “I grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan—89th off Broadway—in ‘The Party Cake Building,’ apartment 6D, when NYC was still a place for middle class families, not just a city for the rich. I was the handball champion of the street, Benny’s hotdog stand and the New Yorker Bookstore on one side, Murray the Sturgeon King around the corner, rode my bike through Riverside Drive when I was ten (no helmets back then), went to the first ‘Be-In’ in Central Park. Though I’ve lived in Los Angeles for decades, my memories of New York sounds, smells, tastes, people, adventures continue to influence my poems. When I was a little girl I thought that only ‘TV families’ lived in houses. I never knew anyone with a yard, a ‘den,’ or a basement.”

      May 9, 2025Michael LaversThere Is a Fire

      We try. We water plants so we can watch 
      God bloom, we look at rivers till our sadness 
      feels beautiful. Tumult and peace 
      and tumult again, and we have no idea
      of what decides what rises and what falls. 
      My daughter combs her hair, 
      watching the snow come slantly down. 
      There is a world, through her, seeing itself. 
      We talk about objects because we cannot 
      talk about the hidden radiance. We talk 
      about how Arshile Gorky swam 
      into the Charles to end his life, 
      but then remembered painting, 
      and swam joyously back. Of pines, 
      of wind. Of how there is a mutual 
      wounding that’s required for love, 
      and although no one’s asking, I can answer 
      that I write about my children to obtain 
      for them life after death. Why else! 
      There is a fire at the heart of things 
      that can’t go out, and we are here, 
      and we remember it. We try. 
      A purple comb. Slant snow.
      My children are, which I don’t 
      understand, but no disaster’s possible. 
      I’m certain what they truly are was 
      never born. That though the sun 
      shall not endure, they shall endure.
       

      from #87 – Spring 2025

      Michael Lavers

      “The French painter and sculptor Georges Braque said: ‘In art there is only one thing that matters: that which cannot be explained.’ I don’t know what poetry is, where it comes from, why exactly I love it so much, or how it gets written. Nor, luckily, do I have to know. What a relief!”

      May 8, 2025Colette InezThe Play of Lovers

      Pears soft to the thumb, wine.
      Now the sun is the moon, each
      look a new word, phrases to arrange
      like roses in a vase.
       
      Lovers. Everyone has seen them fall
      into a blur of change; one leaf
      and then another on the lawn. Shade
      gives way to light. Snow comes down.
      Do you see them, two figures
      in the distance making their small mark?
       
      Words, too, submit to years. Plain
      flowers in the yard repeat their trick
      of vanishing. The sun is the sun
      and each look is seen again and again
      until faces disappear.
      Everyone has seen it.
       

      from #20 - Winter 2003

      Colette Inez

      “A poem is born right here, somewhere in my heart, in my blood vessels, in my gut. It comes to the brain much later. I have to feel them actually pulsing in my body, and then when they get shaped, when the brain, the controller, the pilot, whoever one’s metaphor, however this metaphor can extend, takes over. I like to think that my brain is the lesser part of my poems and that my heart, in the best of my poems, is the one that rules.”