Poetry Selections
Lately I have been considering poetry’s role in society—specifically, in the future society I want to live in: radical society, abolitionist society, society without empire and oppression, society in which all peoples have their needs met. To make that a reality, we have to be able to imagine it. I do not want to give up hope in that future’s possibility—in fact, doing so would only feed the death machine.
In the essay “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” Fargo Nissim Tbakhi writes, “Craft asks us to consider the language first and the politics second, tells us that a political education is not central but peripheral to being a writer. We must reject this.”
I have decided that I am simply not interested in poetry that does not engage with politic, writing that is devoid of any acknowledgement of the very real and the very devastating contexts in which the writer lives. Here are five poets whose work, use Craft and Voice to disrupt the very systems to which they are subject.
In a poem about queer love, Summer Farah asks us to consider “the poet’s choice.” In another love poem, the speaker says, “I allow myself to pretend.” These lines ring with Audre Lorde’s assertion that to care for oneself is an act of self-preservation, and that self-preservation, too, is political when one’s body and life are seen as antithesis to the status quo. On the banks of the Jordan River, Summer implores us to lean into beauty and goodness, “despite, despite, despite.”
In a similar mode of defiance, Ariana Benson asks whether “if speaking a thing could unravel it.” Words both unmake and repair. These are hungry poems, poems that ask for more, poems that feel insatiable and revolutionary in their desire to turn animal and devour. This is not greed; it is a breaking free.
While Ariana’s poems ask to take up space, Stephanie Choi’s poems take up time, contending with whitewashed history. In “Maiden Voyage,” Stephanie writes in the collective voice of the Chinese workers aboard the Titanic, at once a reminder of the history of Sinophobia and class conflict, and a reclamation of erased narratives. Stephanie moves us forward in time—she melds her speaker with the son of a shipwreck survivor, and writes through a Chinese survivor’s ghost watching Titanic (1997). When we acknowledge our past, we are able to see the possibilities for our futures.
The histories of our ancestors exist in poetry, too. Threa Almontaser writes of hijabi girls “wear[ing] bright scarves” in the style of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” a poem lauded for its tender depiction of Black men rebelling against expectation and establishment. This is the poem that gave way to the contemporary poetic form The Golden Shovel, a poem that, when it is referenced, requires the reader to understand the history of the narrative itself, alongside the history of racism and anti-Blackness. Threa’s poems here are poems of collective liberation.
And finally, we have the poetry of Jake Rose, poetry that makes grand, sweeping gestures in the face of heartbreak. Jake’s poems echo the collective of this folio. “[H]ow painful,” he writes, “to live among our partitions / and the imperfect ecosystems that remain,” which recalls Summer’s assertion that borders are “fake” and “violent.” In another poem Jake writes, “asking for more is holy too isn’t it,” and I would assert that Ariana’s poems reply with an emphatic yes. In “Ecology,” a book holds a ritual between the living and the dead, almost as if Jake’s speaker and Stephanie’s enact the same need to connect with their histories. And in “Afterglow,” Jake writes of the desire to “break open childhood / poems like charms to find their secrets discharged,” which is exactly how Threa’s “we grilled girls” operates.
These five poets write with a critical understanding of Craft as both necessary and as more than what lives on the page. They do so with love, with soul, with responsiveness to their surroundings, at once present, historical, and future-looking. They do so, I believe, in the spirit of Aracelis Grimay, who wrote, “& so to tenderness I add my action.” They are asking you to remain tender. They are imploring you to act.
—S.K.
Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from California. She is the author of Self-Mythology (University of Arkansas Press, 2024), selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lit Hub, Kenyon Review, The Margins, and other publications. She is the poetry editor for Sundog Lit and a board member at RAWI.
Summer Farah
The Angels Are Falling
By legacy, by land decree, I find faith in my grandmother’s
name on my father’s side. I find faith in desire, maybe.
I believe in god, astrology, science, magic / Every cosmic
or rational thing that made us real. I cannot imagine the
beginning of the beginning, but know my people were
there: Found god in oil well-preserved, salt in resting
places, & coffee spilt towards evening laugher / Time
makes my heart hurt as we consider the slowness of
continental divide. When did we begin to notice the
difference? I place my foot on either bank of the Jordan
river. Every border is fake if you think about it long
enough. Every border violent, too. I dream I fall / baptized
again, again, again, I want to believe people are good,
despite it all / Poetry asks, is this not beauty? By beauty,
I mean remembrance / In the early modern period,
Englishmen blend piety with lust and attention with faith;
to love is to worship, to read closely is to pray, and poetry
the scripture that remembers it. What vision is worthy?
The child tasting fresh bread for the first time / beaming.
The child saving a kitten from rubble / beaming. The old
woman who bends down at the side of the road to pick
wildflowers / despite, despite, despite. To be human is to
learn and unlearn and learn again into goodness / I learn the
trials, this negotiation of duty among angels: filing taxes,
making a phone-call, discerning which mushrooms are
edible, knowing who will not hurt you when they learn
where your family is from, saying Palestine, saying
Palestine, saying Palestine,
Amalgamation of Waters
after Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Imagine: the picture of hysteria,
all moon-cycle synced,
like the water in the body is controlled with the tides
You confuse desire & death & desire for death again
Héloise lifts her skirts
& rushes towards the water
& Marianne looks at Héloise
like she is beautiful but terrifying
& maybe she is inspired
by the alive-but-dead-woman,
Seafoam! seafoam!
friends sing the day you cover your scarred legs with sand
& do not speak / how frightening it is
to be silent in front of the ocean
Imagine: this is a dream, or maybe a film,
Be your own muse / writing a self raw & unreal,
always avoidant this fact of desire
Have you considered its cost, the pain of fairytales?
Marianne looks at Héloise like she is beautiful
but terrifying & maybe she is inspired
by the alive-but-dead woman &
You are always joking about death,
& Marianne makes the poet’s choice
& again you confuse not-lovers for moon
while everyone is chanting sea cure! sea cure!
at your crumbling throat /
Imagine: addressing a not-lover at the water’s edge;
Image: addressing the moon;
Do not write of those you have loved / Do not dream of those you have loved,
the tides rise they echo,
sea foam, sea foam
On Having a Gemini Sun & Venus
A Gemini has two faces.
I learn to love my sun while
we frost a cake. I am a proxy-lover,
a steady hand, I read you a love poem
before I realize it is a love poem.
Fountains trickle moonlight
while we keep warm
apart. The sun shines while I keep
this secret. We sing in the car,
I allow myself to pretend.
The song finishes, so there is no time
for confessions.
I let mourning be the excuse.
White tulips die. I want to grow back
in their place.
There never was much difference between
partner & friend, I speak fast to close gaps
between worlds that imply otherwise—
I wish I read the love poem like a love poem.
Summer Farah is a Palestinian American writer from California. The author of I could die today and live again (Game Over Books), she is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers and the National Book Critics Circle. She is calling on you to recommit yourself to the liberation of the Palestinian people each day.
Ariana Benson
Classical Conditioning
I am, of course, lying when I say I don’t want you
desperate. Don’t want, in my rough palm, your chin
wet with desire. You might call me cruel
were you the one making the call. My pet,
I obsess over you. This immaculate choreography.
Your hungers go without saying. Naturally,
I am lying, more to myself than to you
when I treat our relationship as though I’m invested
in its continuing.
What I needed from you, I got the first time
I rang that bell, its silver tongue
making song of my hollow. The first time
you came running, running on
what scraps of instinct remained,
bloodied and panting, after its death
match with doubt. And I, for my part,
kept going until I felt satisfied
your doubt suffered wounds too deep
to survive the silver din of my demand.
I am every bit the creature of habit
you are—that habit being control.
That force that commands
my hand, my numb body that moves
quicker than my mind ever will—it will
without fail, pull us both in. Moth to flame.
Dog to bowl. Mouth to whatever
it has a taste for. Whatever will satisfy.
What, Unmade, Resists Repair
As if speaking of a thing
could unravel it—
remove the dripping cold
cloth from my neck;
close my door; night the red
morning; roll your car back
down that hill we once had
to scale on foot, perhaps in a test
of the dignity, or what could be
called resolve, that we gave up
as we did ourselves to ourselves; replace
fluorescent haze with color
and light; find, from our own ends
of the bed, some median
softness; pull your flesh
back into my orbit; annul
what, probably, at least one of us
thought of as love, though now
my leathered hide bristles
against the idea of love
as something that, as if by tool
or trade, can be fashioned or made;
dress you; rebury the blush
bubbled up under skin;
amnesia the warm bite
of your lips from mine;
amnesia your name, too. Amnesia
even the forgetting itself.
Prey Drive
Lure me to the pack for slaughter.
I have grown too arrogant in my belief
that my city-muted throat
can out-howl a wild thing.
I am domesticated—a human
lured me to its pack. For slaughter,
no, but to say a death was wrought
in me would not be entirely wrong.
My mind’s fangs whittled to milk
teeth, instinct smothered by inane comforts
that lured me onto my back for slaughter.
In their world, I must lower my head
to drink from a silver bowl, eyes closed
To avoid the sight of myself. So come
Coyote Man, goad me toward a nobler end.
Lure me back to your pack, its righteous laughter.
Ariana Benson is a southern Black ecopoet. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2024 Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Leonard Prize and the Library of Virginia Prize in Poetry. Benson is a proud alumna of Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for HBCU students.
Stephanie Choi
Maiden Voyage
for Ah Lam, Fang Lang, Len Lam, Cheong Foo, Chang Chip, Ling Hee, Lee Bing and Lee Ling
“We found four Chinamen stowed away under the thwarts after we got away. I think they were Filipinos, perhaps. There were four of them.”
—Bruce Ismay, Senate Titanic Hearings, 1912
From shore to shore, of our survival
we could never be sure—
the white man’s strike left us
out of work, sent aboard Titanic
on a single ticket, America
not our final destination, but via—
for us, not the Ship of Dreams
or land of land and gold,
but the fruit boats in Cuba,
where our labor could be used.
From shore to shore, of our survival
we could never be sure—
that night we lay toe to head
from our shared bunks startled
by the drag and screech
of ship, then the sheet
of water pooling underneath
our trunks—not enough
time, we left with only
what was in our pockets.
Left the new overcoats,
suits we bought in case
our luck somehow allowed us
in—then we could make money
enough for our own names to carry
centuries across the country
whose laws excluded our entry.
Maybe we’d meet a girl and marry,
find an old friend or relative
in Cleveland or Boston, stay
and see our dreams
on land. Dynasty of our old country
fallen, a revolution. While we go
shore to shore—our survival
we could never be sure,
but finding ways out we knew
that to us was nothing new—
navigating narrow tunnels,
stairs our whole lives, someone
at the gate, locking us out
or in. We saw where they weren’t,
freed ourselves onto the A-deck,
even though we did not speak
a word of English—fear
in any language is the same.
The men pushed us away,
said no, no. We tried our best
though to live, on the last lifeboat
lowered, four of us kept
our heads down, horror
and night kept us invisible
enough to get by, one of us
latched to a piece of wood,
balanced for hours, was the last
man pulled out of the sea.
From shore to shore, of our survival
we could never be sure—
even when rescue came, we found
instead more accuse,
the white men horrified
so many of us survived.
Offered not brandy nor hot cocoa,
but almost thrown overboard,
at the mercy always
of their whims. We shielded
ourselves, sewed a blanket
of our huddled bodies,
warmed each other’s hands
until we arrived in New York
where our feet did not touch
American soil, but the deck
of another ship, and in our still wet
clothes in steerage we slept,
until we felt the engine jerk
Interview
with Tom Fong, Wing Sun Fong (Fang Lang)’s son
Tom owns a Chinese restaurant in Wisconsin
says I never really knew my dad he was so old,
which is what my mother says about her father.
They left out a lot in the documentary you know
because they had five other survivors to trace.
His father was the last one to be rescued, the inspiration
for Cameron’s Rose. He says there’s a scene where
a Chinese guy is running in the background.
I have rewatched this part he points out many times
and still don’t see what he sees. My father
was involved in the war effort, I found a suitcase
full of war-bonds. He has a photo with Chiang Kai-shek.
In the documentary a village relative recites
the poem his father wrote about surviving
the wreck. If you knew my father you never
would have thought he was very poetic. He
was always well-dressed, in a suit—knew
everyone in Chicago’s Chinatown. Quite possibly
crossed paths with my own grandparents
in the ‘70s. When I was young, my father never
spoke about the past. This too is what my mother
says about her father. I think he had PTSD, I think
he relived it a lot but never spoke about it,
when I watched Titanic and saw the gaze
in old Rose’s eyes, I realized my father
had that look all the time—it’s strange the way
myth and reality; a movie and a life collide.
Wing Sun Fong’s Ghost Watches TITANIC (1997)
I was just a boy like Jack,
living day by day, broke
but happy in the way only youth
brings. With age, the truth—
that ignorance is bliss.
Poor Jack and Rose—
believe they’ll live to see
a whole life together—the sea,
never-ending night, towards
another shore. Their hands
clasped tight, Rose on the raft,
Jack alive, then dead, afloat,
she imagines he’s just asleep—
then there’s no time even to weep,
that boat-light already turning away,
she must let go. I’d say
their story is better than mine—
I cried. Of course, Cameron
knew that. He used that tiny detail
of my life, which I could never tell.
Like Rose who moves on, breaks
with her old name and takes
Jack’s, when I return again
to America, a paper son
I too have another name.
Though, it’s not one and the same—
the movie and the life I lived—
which was no romance: I survived.
Stephanie Choi’s poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Electric Literature, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, The Lengest Neoi, was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the 2023 Iowa Poetry Prize and published in 2024. She was the 2023-24 Poet-in-Residence at Sewanee: The University of the South and is an Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma State University.
Threa Almontaser
so i take a walk
to care again. but plums
fall from trees in protest
& i can’t see the color green
anymore & just last night yo
just last night god went SPLAT
on my window like a fluttery lick
spittle & told me all love starts
in a garden. what am i supposed to do
with that? another friend goes. gone
enough. almost never here. those facetimes
inside me out all year, wishing i could see you
in the hospital. one more grave in the middle
of all that green. prayers tangle in my pockets
like earphone wire. i think about the best way
to maneuver my mask & eat, then give up.
i think about the best way to sneak
into the hospital. what about the body
& everything it can’t keep? i’m so over
the garden. i stood at its knee, dressed
in leaves, praying for fruit. learned
the only predator in paradise is me.
we grilled girls
after Gwendolyn Brooks
we grilled girls
hop dutch rope
cough loud dope
& call boys cruel names.
we don’t slink away we
sway. the blondes on our block
ain’t glitzing with what we got. we
grazed girls start street races with loose laces
past paper-thin windows & blurred faces
shouting get yo’ ass home! we
cornrow real cool
pray after school
eat hummus dips make bodega trips
sneak wise chips in our wide hips
wear bright scarves that get stuck
in car doors
& choke us.
we gruff girls
roast talking ass slapping
always know what’s happening
hands clapping & trapping—
but mostly we
taunt god for proof by climbing up roofs
to see how far we can go.
Threa Almontaser is the author of the poetry collection The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf Press 2021) winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American poets and nominated for the National Book Awards.
Jake Rose
Ecology
it was a river and now it’s the plains
I saw a shell in a bank today
whose ridges reminded me
of a wrinkle in a brain sleeping
when the dash replaces the o in god
it looks like an eye is closed & hushing
under the susurrant poplar leaves
I often feel like I’m sleepwalking through life
like I have spent years preparing for
a critical role that’s just adjacent
to the anonymous interior moments
of my own imagination
I thought I could double my patience
would that it double my soul
but now I don’t hold even this conviction
day after day watching
what is constant scatter
like pearls through a comb
I open the book and brush with a finger
each eyelid to bed it’s a ritual
between us that separates
the living from the dead although
I’ve read that angels cannot make
this distinction how painful
to live among our partitions
and the imperfect ecosystems that remain
when you can still feel on
some days in the right light at the
correct hour what it was like
to be flooded as water
pouring out to the sea
Silhouette
I never trusted a body I could not swallow whole
& be spread into with that broke feeling
of having nowhere to go & all the time in the world
to let my meager love rejoice and resolve itself
into a train of iridescent plumage dripping blue
at the false eye’s corners I want that one more time
I need to know if that pleasure could even find me again
somewhere birds of paradise are sucking honey
from the stem crowding bushes and pulling
ribbons of light from the sun I want to steal back
each word that cuffed my cheek last spring
until I levitate and my grammar breaks at the end
of each sentence my mouth is empty and I have nothing
left to give but asking for more is holy too isn’t it
all promises on earth are states in flight
we’re moving upwards slowly and bashful as children
for an honest hunger I have held a pound of sugar
so hard it turned to glass and shattered I have closed
a door with the urgency of courage departing
I have kept the small passport photo you gave me
where on the back you wrote red really washes me out
the change was sweet in its pure violence on the bed
something deep in my chest unhooked it was like god
sinning in the mirror just to see how it looked
Afterglow
is it even possible to not be exactly where
desire has placed us shivering amid brackish tears
and the unruly flush of a loneliness buried in autumn
I can’t wait to have no proof at all of our intimacy
to wash my hands like my eyes and break open childhood
poems like charms to find their secrets discharged
perishable tonic of conclusions where are you now
I meant to save the camellia for one last blooming
the truth is that I adore my enemies my faults & my fears
I am full of a love that has no more suspense as
I used to imagine it would when I thought it might end
although it will end and then I may be grateful
is a fact a feeling you can see past
often I feel stranded and prefer to take your words as you do
mine for what we’ve been through the present tense wide open
you said good news feels transparent as it moves through
your body like a sun neither rising nor setting just spilled
though now I’m burning in an afterglow rueful
walking slowly towards an inward arc of obscurity
& excess hanging onto other people’s sentences I leave mine
open like I’ll leave this one ajar just for you
Jake Rose is a poet and artist whose work has been featured in Adult Groceries, Our California, the Manetti Shrem Museum, Root Division Galleries, and Berkeley Commonplace. He lives in the Central Valley and teaches at the University of California, Davis.
