- The Hidden Springs
“I have a feeling for a moment that the elk is God—/ a god that we can watch.” | by Sarah Maclay
- Art Deco Sonnet
“O sleekness, O pizzazz, O mirrors, O chrome,/O remnant inklings of a light-struck world” | by Jacqueline Osherow
- Ghazal Season
“Once, I wrote a ghazal trimmed in gold,/ to mirror the implausible” | by Jacqueline Osherow
- Cochlea
“The murkiness, the smog, the thickened haze/ in me are hard to love.” | by Jehanne Dubrow, 2021 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- The Usual Suspects or a Chronological List of the Ways Men Have Referred to my Breasts:
“They’re my favorite part of you, Mama,/ my son says, pressing into them hard” | by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, 2021 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- Silence in Syria
“Melt the ink into my hands/ like the metal of a tank being welded./ Use this newspaper as a rag” | by Seif-Eldeine, 2021 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- Exit
“On every door in this village/ there are last notes left by families/ crossing the sea to another land.” | by Rasaq Malik, 2021 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- The Starlight in Syria
“The wounded know stars are a furnace/ for mankind’s sins. The wounded curl themselves/ into a ball of starlight” | by Seif-Eldeine, 2021 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- I sat next to Adele on a plane and she bought me a house
“I’d gotten a fluky upgrade, moved from 38C to 4B./ She— a stranger still, was already sitting, a silver/ studded handbag at her feet,” | by Patrick Holloway, 2021 C.P. Cavafy Finalist
- 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 Jenny Grassl
- Dear Survivor
“just a dayflower/dwarf in the blur-vast view/by won-heart ingress of loose strife” | by Jenny 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
