“The world will wrestle you into place and pin you/down while the weeks slip past./Don’t be/so easily corralled. Buck it./Go visit your fucking folk.”— Jacob Boyd Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly…

“Let’s imagine that silence roams our world and sometimes inhabits a segment of space/time, effectively blotting out any sound that was there previously. And as an analogy, poetry roams our world as an…

“Driving along once on some country road in Greece, I thought about how I would really like my death to be. And so the poem came . . . .”—Becky Dennison Sakellariou Where…

“After the Japanese national soccer team lost in the 2018 World Cup in Moscow, they left their locker room spotless with a note thanking the Russians for their hospitality. After all, the players…

“I wound up taking several of his workshops, eventually doing an MA with him and, in the process, learned how to focus intently on details in my writing, to not be satisfied with…

“Nature will not yield to any combination of weapons and surveillance. The Sixth Mass Extinction and abrupt climate change are subject to neither human will nor a change in the living arrangements of…

“They play at being retired or married, spend the night in a featherbed four feet off the floor, where/they make love, where she crawls beneath the covers and the bed creaks with no…

“Repeatedly poring through Prospero’s introduced me to a far greater range of flavors and ingredients than I’d thought possible. To this day, whenever I come across the book’s recipe for Venetian Pastitsio, I salivate:…

“There is a roll of Bounty paper towels that sits in my mud room closet. It is a smaller roll of paper towels than any sensible person with a small child should own.…

“Throughout the years, Calli has taught me so much about living with frailty and an illness that is not only ‘messy,’ but which can lead to more and more serious and even fatal…