Hit play below to hear Johnna St Cyr read her poem “My Windshield Saga (Version 8 Because Every Time I Write A Draft the Damage is Worse Than the Estimate)” and scroll down for the full text. “My Windshield Saga (Version 8 Because Every Time I Write A Draft the Damage is Worse Than the Estimate)” is featured […]
Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review reader Abigail McFee introduces Kristene Kaye Brown’s “Why I Stopped Watering the Plants” from our Spring 2021 issue. You can purchase it here. “A body that hungers is a body that hopes,” begins Kristene Kaye Brown’s “Why I Stopped Watering the Plants.” I believe, in this entrance to the poem, that
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My childhood closet was stuffed
with redheaded baby dolls
named for pieces of the body
that start with R—
At the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River Read More »
My cousin floats on her back a few feet away.
She’s the most beautiful thing—
Five years older & mean,
she used to kick me in my sleep.
We lie facedown on the concrete dock
as a hawk circles us.
Nye flawlessly writes about the power in prayer, in letting go of rage and the past, that by the end of the poem, we are left thinking of our loved ones and what we’ve learned from them – and how that knowledge lives in our bodies.
Nothing screams love more than food, and Song flawlessly executes the poem’s richness through her sound and imagery.
Shrinking the Uterus Read More »
Read MQR Reader Connor Greer’s response to Christine Rhein’s “Against Leaving Him” here. “Against Leaving Him” appears in our Winter 2021 Issue. You can purchase the issue here. Against Leaving Him “. . . [Ric] Hoogestraat was never much of a game enthusiast before he discovered Second Life. But since February, he’s been spending six
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Two fingers on her hands rattle like winter leaves on the tree. Words hiss through her head. Do-ga-ske-v-se-gu-hanaugh.I shrug in frustration. How do I tell her even the words of her Cherokee language do not survive? I put her hand to my head but she takes it away. She is not deaf or blind! I see her buckskin gnawed by the teeth of wolves. Her feet trail bits of a comet.
The state, however, frowns on people taking their
brains into their own hands unless they get a cut
out of industrial meatspace readied for recession.
Two Poems by Nikki Wallschlaeger Read More »
