poem

The poet Libby Swope Wiersema writes on grief and healing.

My mother idolized the pampas grass and my father idolized the peppers that fell when I was born.

In this poem by Rebecca Lauren, a granddaughter recalls a missing family member.

This poem compares the martyrdom of Emmett Till to St. Moses the Ethiopian, the patron saint of Africa; both saints share the same feast day.

A love poem.

Meredith Kunsa’s prose poem retells the memory of a Pentecostal service where her grandmother, “jabbering in a voice” she cannot understand, gives a command that both haunts Kunsa and compels her to conclude that there is no Jesus in her, that “I’m not who I think I am.”

A sonnet about work.

In “For Hannah,” Robert Vander Lugt tries to narrate the experience of watching a child cling to life in a hospital bed and encounters difficulty in the motions and effects of prayer, in how to tell such a story in the first place.

In “Manifestation,” the poet Tania Runyan encounters prayer as something that hooks her “like a dendrite branch,” its movements slow, deliberate, and intimate.