We are offering expedited poetry submissions when you contribute to an evacuation aid fund in support of families from Gaza. When you donate $10-$20 to a fund, you will receive a decision on your poetry submission within 7 days.
We also email each poet a copy of our poetry prompts bundle, a collection of 114 poetry exercises.
As of this writing, this initiative has raised over €1,500 for Gaza families. These funds have assisted 4 families in evacuating from Gaza.Your support is saving lives. Please spread the word.
Dirt faced and kid smelly, beautiful how constant pressure spits out a pearl, another holy bead on my necklace of reflection.
Jasmine lived down a driveway of gravel and broken glass. The neighborhood slept to the lullabies of her parents country music loud enough to drown constant coal trains passing.
I often awoke to red and blue lights outside my window thinking aliens had finally arrived but the next morning, tormented tire tracks proved the only abductee was her innocence.
In summer, Jasmine approached like a stray to our front porch knocking on the door until someone answered.
My poor mother—Popsicle Lady to the Parrish St. children, was hounded relentlessly year after year for twin fructose treasures, leaving red, blue, and green stains down elbows and chins.
Jasmine was a bruised piece of fruit sweet but always black and blue mosquito bites head to toe and feet black as tar.
She ate apples to the core I’d never seen anyone do that. But she always left a little Granny Smith crown at the top by the stem, offering the last bite.
I wish I had said yes. Now everytime I eat an apple I bite my tongue.
By Hunter Hodkinson
Biography:
Hunter Hodkinson is a Non-binary, Appalachian born poet, carving a place for themselves in Brooklyn, NY. They have found a poetic home with Brooklyn Poets, where they work as an Events Assistant. They also find enjoyment as a Reader for The Adroit Journal. Their work can be found in, december, Anti-Heroin Chic, Dream Boy Book Club, Artistic Tribe NYC, and elsewhere.
Running away from their birth place for peace of mind
Running away from their homeland for safety & comfort
Running away from their familiar surroundings to survive.
Someone in my bloodline,
must’ve looked at the war & famine & said
“Nope, I will not die here like this… & neither will my children”.
So I imagine they packed what they could:
Folded articles of clothing, jewelry, photographs & documents
They sold everything else they possessed &
gathered one last time with their loved ones to say goodbye.
Warm tears falling from their eyes & onto their cold cheeks
Only to step foot onto frail boats in the brisk morning fog.
And as the boats leapt from their docks
I can’t imagine how one’s stomach must’ve turned over
Knowing they will never ever return home.
My grandmother told me that this was called “Jow Nam”.
Literally, to run south.
Chinese running south only to get as far as Vietnam or Cambodia.
So many people had relatives doing this,
that the people in Guangdong actually coined this term: Jow Nam.
Today, we arrogantly read the pages of our family history…
Their migration patterns as just sentences on a page
Disregarding their heart ache & fears.
Why do I treat these decisions they made so lightly?
Why do I act like I’m so different?
When in reality,
I am no different than they were.
Like my ancestors, I ran south.
I ran away to find peace of mind instead of living in anguish.
I ran away to seek safety & comfort from the red, the blue, the gray & the black.
I ran away to survive the present from my own tormented memories of the past.
Jow Nam wasn’t distant from me, it became my path too.
By Ryan Samn
Biography:
Ryan Samn is a writer and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work explores themes of culture, identity and language from a 2nd generation Asian American perspective.
i pledge allegiance to mi patria one nation under oh my god they have our babies locked in cages on cesar chavez boulevard
i pledge allegiance to mi raza with liberty and justice for all my homegirls & the lady with her baby strapped to her chest selling chicle at the intersection
By Julianna Salinas
Biography:
Julianna Salinas is a Texas-born Mexican-American poet and nonfiction writer based in New York City. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College, where she was the recipient of the Academy of American Poets University and College Poetry Prize and the Louis B. Goodman Creative Writing Award.
Jean Anne Feldeisen is a former resident of New Jersey, now living on a farm in Maine. At age 72, she had her first poem published in Spank the Carp in 2021, then several more in The Hopper and The Raven’s Perch, Thimble Literary Magazine, and other online publications. Her first chapbook, Not All Are Weeping, was released in 2023 by Main Street Rag Publishing. Poetry is an especially important mouthpiece for Jean Anne in her seventies and she hopes she can use her perspective as an elder to help herself and others understand, manage, and maybe even fall in love with their lives.
You ask for a statement, I fill with question pours in with news clips of dust blood cries, prized rubble stuffed teddy bear, I feel my hand rise to my mouth, I feel one word pulsing: Why. Why. Why. Learn those stories, bury smile under shoes piled, dead end rail, why bear witness to evil twist glory, why learn of Other, of separating man from child from mother, of Anne Frank of Elie Wiesel, why slip from the couch in Connecticut into the depths of Hell is images of ghosts in bone skin– black and white haunting for us to try on from behind eyes hollow, tasting tears burrowed into the heartbeat of history, like that clip from Schindler’s List we pick up the ring, we beg of our children–unknowing, unhollow– not to grow into a humanity of whispers of ones who will claim it does not matter, all of this dust blood collateral. Will you not ask me for whom shall they cry and if not all why?
By Joan Barker
Biography:
Joan Barker is a writer who lives in southern Maine. In 2021, she penned a series of op-Eds advocating for US government accountability on the issue of vulnerable interpreters left behind in Afghanistan, a place she lived and worked in 2018. Her poem Hometown has been selected to appear in the upcoming issue of The Alembic. Barker’s writing is anchored in a firm belief that all people deserve to live a life of dignity.
A massive star collapses, no one knows what’s inside: hiding its face but peeking at us. A nurse fills out the time: 12:05 AM, my sister’s death. I sign where her finger points. And my sister and I are alone in the darkest place in Madison, Wisconsin.
In the sixties, she, the bookish one, was leaving for the US in a blue two-piece suit. But now, what makes her rush to leave her house in white cotton pajamas?
Her eyes stare upward maybe defiant at what is happening, or recording the images of plants, books on the shelves, work plaques, and a brown water spot on the ceiling: too busy to fix it.
The collected data collapse into the inside, into the shrinking grids of the black hole. (Six months before, she told her psychiatrist, “My brother in California isn’t coming. I’m dying alone.”)
As I prepare for her journey, it’s funny to have a hard time breathing since it’s just me taking air. In this crumbling block of time, she takes my image with the others into singularity.
By Hee-June Choi
Biography:
Hee-June Choi has published three poetry books in Korea while living in the US. His work has appeared in Korean poetry magazines and journals since the late 1990s, and in the JoongAng Daily, a top-three newspaper by circulation, in Korea. His work has been published in the 2014-16 editions of the Red Wheelbarrow and volumes six and eight of The American Journal of Poetry.
I tried to write a poem without confessing anything
without having to confess the day
heads were bursting into
flames and the windows were shattering into liquid
You paused. You hurled
yourself onto the road. You opened your mouth.
I tasted twigs and Coca-Cola–
then suddenly it was summer
and summer loves watching people survive I kissed you because I believed life ended at seventeen
You touched me. You touched someone else. You held your breath while I held your sweaty wrists.
I want permission to write this into a story
with fairies princesses lions
you’ll be the heroine and it’ll build up to that moment
when you’re crying before the tears fall
before the clouds spill dark blue
You tug me in. You wait. You say my name like poetry.
By Emi Maeda
Biography:
Emi Maeda is a high school poet from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She writes poems in Japanese and English, but when she is not writing, she is crocheting and watching TV with her sister.
My only dollhouse dripped with dust for all the years I owned it.
Instead, my bedframe bore the deep grooves of playtime roughness, its rounded sweet-cream beams bowing up from the floor to form a castle of pillows and pillared bridges where thick-lipped witches in washcloth cloaks, loved doe-eyed princes doused in my father’s cologne;
where my fingers
slipped through the invisible to touch gold-paved paths to forgotten forests, and the silver warmth of stardust brick and ballgowns;
where I couldn’t outgrow myself.
I’m three months married now, moved out, moved on, and my parents are repainting my attic room with a half-baked buttermilk hue.
It’s my brother’s now, and like I picked the pale spring green they’ll piece away, this claiming is his right.
And it’s okay that the soft side of dawn won’t light those walls in a moss-soft glow, and my bed-frame is broken down and boxed in a basement somewhere because nobody will buy its pockmarked pieces,
but I have to know where my dolls went,
because if the dolls are gone there is nothing left of me in my childhood home but that dollhouse.
That dollhouse.
There is nothing left of me.
By Paige Winegar Fetzer
Biography:
Paige Winegar Fetzer is an undergraduate student at Weber State University, where she is majoring in English with an emphasis in creative writing. Her work has most recently been published in the Sink Hollow Literary Magazine.
The Political Economy of Gaza In memory of Mahmoud Fattouh
Things that aren’t allowed to enter Gaza:
Anesthetics Analgesics Ventilators Oxygen cylinders X-ray machines Crutches Wheelchairs Insulin pens Sanitary pads Maternity tests Water filtration systems Water purification tablets Sleeping bags Dates Strawberries
Things that are in short supply in Gaza:
All of the above
Also:
Food of any kind Water Medicines of all kinds Fuel Electricity Internet service Intact buildings Intact families Intact cemeteries Functioning hospitals Doctors Aid workers Reporters Hope Confidence that anyone cares
Food that is available in Gaza:
Cattle feed Bird feed Grass Leaves
Things that are plentiful in Gaza:
Rubble Death Martyrs Orphans WCNSFs Amputees Unexploded ordinance Exploded ordinance Collective punishment Pain Suffering Grief Trauma Despair Outrage at the world’s indifference
Also:
Heroism Self-sacrifice Solidarity Steadfastness Fortitude Dignity Resilience Determination to survive Determination to remain in Gaza Determination never to forget
By Steve Babb
Biography:
Steve Babb is a 65-year-old retired public health worker who has fought for social justice all his life.
He has written poems on a variety of social justice struggles, including Central America solidarity/anti-intervention, antiracism, immigrant detention, and the movement against the genocide in Gaza.
He has been inspired by the poetry of witness of Anna Akhmatova, Roque Dalton, Carolyn Forché, Clint Smith, and Javier Zamora, and by the lyrics of Rosana Arbelo and Silvio Rodríquez.
Jean Anne Feldeisen is a former resident of New Jersey, now living on a farm in Maine. At age 72, she had her first poem published in Spank the Carp in 2021, then several more in The Hopper and The Raven’s Perch, Thimble Literary Magazine, and other online publications. Her first chapbook, Not All Are Weeping, was released in 2023 by Main Street Rag Publishing. Poetry is an especially important mouthpiece for Jean Anne in her seventies and she hopes she can use her perspective as an elder to help herself and others understand, manage, and maybe even fall in love with their lives.
