David Ishaya Osu, a Nigerian poet, is our poetry editor for February and March. His work has appeared in: Eureka Street, Atlas Poetica: A Journal of World Tanka, Birmingham Arts Journal, Vinyl Poetry, Grey Sparrow Journal, RædLeaf Poetry: The African Diaspora Folio, A Thousand Voices Rising: An Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry, among others. David is … Continue reading
Feel my body like an unattended blackness
a portal a kept sake
not meant for keeping settle me remove
the pillows and rupture me
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I imagine this boy, the lotion on his hands, pressing
and releasing, and then the kiss—which opened up
every sense in the world. How he, too, could lean in
and start something small.
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He’s got eyes like wet cement. Sticking Junior is like finding your name in a graveyard.
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American sex goddess, innocent
as white bread with trimmed crusts.
That was who I agreed to be.
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I wish a bitch would tell me to smile, the arrow of my brow cutting their spleen out.
On my best days, I take my sheer black bra off before the deadbolt slides shut.
Our poetry editor for November and December is Dawn Lundy Martin, who is an author of three books of poetry, and three chapbooks. Of her latest collection, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books 2015), Fred Moten says, “Imagine Holiday singing a Blind alley, or Brooks pricing hardpack dandelion, and then we’re seized and thrown into the festival of … Continue reading
Our poetry editor for September and October is Oliver de la Paz, the author of four books: Names Above Houses (SIU Press 2000), Furious Lullaby (SIU Press 2008), Requiem for the Orchard (U. Akron Press 2010), and Post Subject: A Fable (U. Akron Press 2014). With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: … Continue reading
Once as a child you believed the graveyard shift
meant whole cemeteries uprooting themselves &
passing like ghosts through cities
to some other hills
that would accept them as they were,
would take them in
with the grace of an unhinged door.
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The James Franco Review 