Les Negres de Paris
“…Every back, / it seems, is a blood neighbor” | Kwame Dawes
Poems
On the Streets of Hanoi
“and the outsized appetites/I am shedding bit by bit” | by Katherine Towler
Light
“I have apprenticed myself to light,/to the way it moves through the world” | by Emily Portillo
The Duck Pond
“The pond rises and sways, wind-rippled/a gelatinous mirror ball waiting to fall” | by Daniel Zeiders
Sunporch
“Our house was a seabed of alien vines/reaching to touch the windowsills.” | by Emily Leithauser
Listening to Michael Jackson in a Closet
“my son/can recognize Michael’s voice/anywhere” | by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
Shell
“The sea is an incarnation of God./God is quiet.” | by Jordan Pérez
Lambing Season
“I knew better than to protest/but my shoulders sloped/like the sides of the valley” | by Laura Voivodeship
Midday
“were almost twenty-five and twenty-eight:/even the connection on the phone was faint” | by Emily Leithauser
A Night in Madina
“The stranger didn’t eat much/and she didn’t dance/and she didn’t remove her plastered shoes” | by Brian Gyamfi
The Tree Carries Water
“Dandelions pass where I used to live./The gardener lets go of the river, the water whispers” | by Brian Gyamfi
The Valley
“I took the boat out every morning,/allowing my hands to skim/the shimmering sky” | by Lauren Aliza Green
Pack Your Bags
“In no time, he cannot/ see too far into himself, so full he is, so dull” | by Anna Leahy
Navigation by Falling Stars
“Of course, some lives/ burn hotter or brighter than others” | by Anna Leahy
Gloss
“No one is a machine of perpetual motion./ There’s more to it—to us” | by Anna Leahy