The Dark Lady
Nighttime rubs against windows
Like the same black cat
Who slinked out of language
Punched black-&-blue by fists
Nighttime rubs against windows
Like the same black cat
Who slinked out of language
Punched black-&-blue by fists
Hit play below to hear Kate Partridge read her poem “Eve from Above” and scroll down for the full text. “Eve From Above” is featured in MQR’s Summer 2020 issue. Eve From Above Enter dipping close to the mountains, the sheep bouldering their positions along the ridge. As long as you can feel the air pressing against the
Next morning, the kitchen is
still flooded. I drive Michelle to the factory
where she assembles sprinklers all day. The streets
are dark, and the rain is still pouring down.
Monologue While Watching the Rain Fall Read More »
“White waves—a bitter dream—my mother’s mother in the lower deck—wet and cold in the blue-black night.
Dahomey child, betrothed when she was young, before she knew of white men or the sea.
A thin veil of fog. Her family brings a farmer, a boy not yet a man, to marry with the business of the home. Each dawn she climbs the palm tree and touches wine with her hands. A feast prepared. The gods must have a hand in this! A young goat sacrificed, okra, oranges, a basket of yams laid at her feet. She stands with old friends in new finery, her buba and iro an odd-colored blue, hair in beads, piled to the sky, tapping the palm wine from the palm tree.
Kidnapped before the roast meat was cold, snatched away to America; she was a stranger to the sea. White waves in the blue-black sea. Now a voyage of a different sort. Maria won’t go unless I come along. White waves in the blue-black sea till we land in port.”
From the Diary of Sally Hemings Read More »
somehow a crop of possibilities I won’t gather,
because my attention’s owed to other pastures,
tilling the sounds below for sense, just as now
Reading Szymborska Under a Harvest Moon Read More »
O California, don’t you know the sun is only a god/if you learn to starve for him? I’m bored with the ocean
I’m Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense Read More »
20 years ago MQR published the first of two special issues on the Secret Spaces of Childhood. The following poem, from Thylias Moss, is available via our archives. The Generosity of Arpeggios and Ravens Please note: The following is an arpeggio. It was possible to leap from world to world using the sturdiest balloons I’d
The Generosity of Arpeggios and Ravens Read More »
The planets rise like white spots in the purple
evening sticking out like a child’s tongue
for a doctor to hold the moonlight to.
In eternity, everything is healthy, but here
even a good family must struggle to get along.
“The plum tree decides to give a shit” from the chapbook Miss America by Elena Ramirez-Gorski and “The fourth tuesday in november” from the chapbook Cape Midwest by Navanas Chetsandtikhun are being published through our partnership with the Jane Kenyon Prize. These two manuscripts were finalists for the prize.
Jane Kenyon Prize Finalists Read More »