Song of Destruction / The Halation Effect

by Erika Meitner

the Tappan Zee of my childhood blown up today after
an inclement weather delay—the wingspan of that bridge,

its steel body carrying everyone always over the Hudson
to the Jersey …

I Could See Horses

by Kathleen McCracken

My father’s voice
was Utah copper, honeysuckle gold.
Fine-tuned. Viola, not violin.

A radio voice. First pilot calm
air traffic controller
confident. Cargo in the hold.

His local intonations laced with faraway

by Airea D. Matthews

“Inherited Divide” is a part of a series of redacted historical texts and photographic palimpsests in conversation with the ideas and the physical text of 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith’s …

etymology of a blouse

by Matty Layne Glasgow

to wear a man out
a floral top pressed to his skin
by a silken breeze

weather brings them closer:
bees emerge
from the soft petals of his chest

to thread each …

In This Country

by Octavio Quintanilla

Baudelaire’s Paysage (a translation)

by Daisy Fried

To compose my sexless eclogues, I will
Bed down near the sky like the astrologers
And, neighbor to bell-towers, listen dreamily
To the somber wind-carried hymns.
Chin in hand, high …

Scout

by Richard Greenfield

The Baby Monitor

by Jennifer Givhan

The neighbor off to the market for bags of salad
leaves me alone with her baby monitor
I’ve set on my balcony jagged with wood

rain-rotted & scarred with yellow …

from Holloway Letters

by Emma Must

[What She Was In For]

You learn not to ask ‘What are you in for?’
but what she was in for was parking on the road
outside her house to get …

What You Call It

by Nathan McClain

Not my usual route to the market—past
the railroad tracks, then past

Grace Episcopal Church,
its courtyard empty—no men

clasping hands as though agreeing,
finally, to the difficult terms

of some treaty—so I …

My Neighbors in Lincoln, Nebraska

by Patron Kokou Henekou

This poem was translated from its original French (included below) by Patron Kokou Henekou and Zócalo Poetry Editor, Connie Voisine. 

 

I have neighbors
at the corner of N 26th & Holdrege:
the …

Antiode for Rescue

by Leslie Contreras Schwartz

Inside us runs a map of our cells unmapping
in small gulps, a finite road with no rescuers.
 
I’m waving from that dead-end where the weeds
wild and lower …