So I had this great idea where I would write a monthly post about the poems I read each month that I loved. I started collecting these poems…and then I graduated from my MFA program and turned 40, and then I said goodbye to my beautiful pooch, and then I started my new gig as a Poetry Editor for Crack the Spine, and then work and life got in the way and suddenly it’s mid-March and I haven’t written a single monthly poetry post. Now I’m once again in Hawaii, on what should be my last trip to this island, and it’s the weekend and I have to do some work and I’m battling a cold so I thought it was as good a time as any to write this post. So while I may not do this monthly, because I’m very much aware life gets in the way of the best-laid plans, I’m going to try to make this a semi-regular event. I’ll post links to poems that I’ve read and loved. So without further ado, here some of the poems I’ve read in the past couple of months that have wowed me.

When I look at the dead
Auschwitz, alive White House, I see the end
of a process, names switched senseless, chambered
rounds, bullets in a slave’s back, death camps curved
like the upwards vogue of a devil…

~ from Uncivil by Prince A. Bush, published by Barren Magazine

We point at food
we don’t want. Go eat. We
are told. You need to eat,
the nurses repeat to get us out
of the unit, out of Mom’s room,
out of their way.
We carry our trays to
tables in straight rows, sit
beside people we don’t know,
holding our forks as if
we have never seen silverware.

~ from Cafeteria – 2013 by Amy Haddad, published by Persimmon Tree

Today,
one of my students told me to have
a lovely day, not even just a good
one, but a lovely one. I can imagine
that as a blessing, though the air was
cold and the sky was gray and I’ve been
holding a sense of dread under my skin
for days, no weeks, no I’ve been holding
it there for years.

~ from This Will Be Your Fortune Long After I Can Tell You by Chloe N. Clark, published by SWWIM

Leaving is how I apologize


for every morning I wake with my hands

on someone else’s skin.

~ from Slash in Paradise by Amorak Huey and W. Todd Kaneko, published by thrush poetry journal

Listen: sometimes a girl can’t eat,
becomes afraid of kitchens and knives.


The way the air presses skin, through
blood into bone, into the marrow.

~ from Living Room by Kristin Ryan, published by SWWIM

The first time I confessed to having a crush
on a girl was in my journal. Hieroglyphics
barely legible, a language I refused to speak:
            There is               a girl
I didn’t dare call it what it was, couldn’t

~ from Hatshepsut by Caroline Earleywine, published by Nailed

I hope you check out these poems and I hope you like them. Leave me a comment to tell me what you think. Leave me a link to a recent poem that wowed you, I’d love to read it.