- monarchs are the communication medium for when i die
“a tiny sun in my belly quieted by sweet tea & new tales” | by Phil SaintDenisSanchez, 2020 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- Pluto Retires(And During The Exit Interview Sits Near a Wide Window While Watching a Violence of Florida Rainbow Wreckage Unleash Its Storm Over an Empty Magic Kingdom)
“Time to hand in your costume child./ – So much has happened here.” | by Michael Martin, 2020 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- Wheel
“How I loved saying I was deeply skeptical of the adverb, very/ but then I got run over by a truck” | by Michael Martin, 2020 C.P Cavafy Finalist
- We Were the Kind
“to tell it true we’d say/ we don’t know what it is/ we’re nowhere near the end of.” | by Michael Martin, 2020 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- Dent on an Old Hum
“I set the ghosts free./ I found a new way to wear my hat.” | by Michael Martin, 2020 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- Any Minor Art World
“He’s far too young to be alone in this life/ and even a tiny frayed lawn chair can feel/ as heavy as a stranger.” | by Michael Martin, 2020 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- Mother Tongue
“Walking to the shuq to buy tapoocheem, chalav, and lechem from a merchant who didn’t care—” | by Mari Pack, 2020 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- Mammals, Mammals
“After learning the word mammal in first grade,/ I threw it at whatever moved.” | by Lance Larsen, 2020 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- Like A Thief in the Night
“My twitchy legs brood at never taking this wreck/ of bone spurs for a hike around the lake./ Meanwhile, my spirit says, don’t sweat it” | by Lance Larsen, 2020 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- If It Wasn’t My Daughter
“If it wasn’t/ my daughter, I wouldn’t have prayed like a man/ in a burning forest” | by Lance Larsen, 2020 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- An Amateur’s Guide to Summer
“crash kiss, pesto and blue corn chips kiss/ that was the summer you tracked them all” | by Lance Larsen, 2020 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- Aubade Desiring to Be an Ars Poetica, With a Release Date Inside It
“I don’t/ know what I think this poem can do/ for my soundless brother.” | by Michael Torres
- Nasturtiums
“feel the pod-throb/like your own pulse and the vine bluing in your wrist” | by Jenni Grassl
- Dear Survivor
“just a dayflower/dwarf in the blur-vast view/by won-heart ingress of loose strife” | by Jenni Grassl
- Not Fireflies—
“green stars, or the faulty strike of a match;/ not as you once imagined” | by Daniel Lawless
- My Brother, Solar Eclipse, 1965
“But for now, your half-smile says, relief — to be eleven” | by Daniel Lawless
- Funeral Services
“he’d be so perfect / if you could only convince yourself that/ he’s just a terrorist, not a human being”
- [Now we remember: janitors and the night-sellers of bread]
“we got to soak in the rain/ on cars/ loaded with the unemployed/ like magazines with cartridges”
- [someone stands between you and death-but]
“my heart whispers: Death, he hasn’t ripened yet/ he’s still green, nothing in his life has been/ sweeter than unwashed strawberries”
- [we swallowed an air like earth]
“some of us exhaled cherry pits/ some bullets”
- [people carry explosives around the city]
“people carry explosives around the city/ in plastic shopping bags and little suitcases”
- [Buried in a human neck, a bullet looks like an eye, sewn in]
“But the children feel as strong as their machinery,/ mass-produced, with plenty of seamstresses for repairing:”
- [The whole soldier doesn’t suffer-]
“just dreadful losses,/ just the day with a dented helmet,/ just God, who doesn’t protect.”
- [This is a post on Facebook, and this, a block post in the East]
“I’ll make you a gift: a camouflage case for your tablet;/ time is earwax, peddled in alleyways, under the table.”
- [When you clean your weapon]
“When you dig trench after trench/ When you dig this precious this hateful earth by handfuls/ Every other handful reaches your soul”
- Died of Old Age
“Olha was pregnant/ Serhiy was drunk/ and Sonya was only three/ they all perished, too/ and people said, they died of old age” | by Lyuba Yakimchuk
- Kings
“Those were days when I walked around a little hungry” | by Adam Zagajewski
- A Stranger Lives My Life And Wears My Body
“a speck of hell, the Universe’s scream— laconic and intense, devoid of exits…| by Vasyl Stus
- Things That Were Hidden
“of things never told before / of Chaos and Time and the Night.” | Neil Philip
- The Cycle of “Bomb”
“the war will be over in six days at most. /No reason the world should take longer /to destroy than to create” | by Neil Philip, Kijima Hajime, and Margaret Mitsutani
- Idbury Morris
“Each footstep in the claggy soil pulls the / booted foot half out of his hip socket.” | by Neil Philip
- In Loki’s Cave
“How can I withstand / the convulsions of my memory?”
- Cheatsheet
“In my all-boys school they’re all dumber than me./ I sit in the back and read André Gide” | by Armen Davoudian, co-winner 2021 PI Prize
- Woolf’s Hair
“…she’s gone—/ like the hairpin Virginia Woolf stuck into her unruly bun” | by Eva Heisler, co-winner 2021 PI Prize
- In a dream in which I am still brilliant,
“I ask my mother if they let bears in heaven,/and she says it would depend on the bear” | by E Yeon Chang, finalist 2021 PI Prize
- Rug Game
you made it seem like money grew on trees./ Of course it did. You could do everything | by Armen Davoudian
- while you’re away
“I soak up their light and translate it into a story” | by Frances Cannon, finalist 2021 PI Prize
- Conka
“She would guide my little fingers but I, / I think now, could never get the hang of it. “| by John Briscoe, finalist 2021 PI Prize
- Exchange
I loved how the green stone shone in the light like water./ I’ll tread to the jail and offer myself | by AKaiser, finalist 2021 PI Prize
- The Five Fingers of the Hand
by Aloysius Bertrand: The thumb is this fat Flemish innkepper, mocking and saucy, who smokes by his door, beneath the sign of the double March beer.
