Editors’ Choice: 2022 Sandy Crimmins Poetry Contest
The summer keeps on swallowing
My loved ones
Whole and crushing
Their bones.
I did not get to bury my brother.
The flowers are all gone all gone.
The world won’t stop
Spitting my people out.
My city is burning and there is no
Trace of a memorial beyond the parade of black.
Where does life go, in the
Blood-heat?
A mother’s baby is devoured
And the sun is still hungry for someone
Else’s heart to eat.
The steam wave carries the names
I cannot hold.
The ashes are singing on,
In what a body can join and what
The ground longs to cradle.
We burning up down here,
Where it keeps turning out bullets for
Sons and daughters.
The city keeps eating and,
And the sun keeps shooting,
and the summer keeps smiling as it feasts.
It is hungry out here.
Mikhayla Robinson writes, “I am currently studying English at the University of Georgia, in Athens. I released my first chapbook, Dichotomy, in May of 2020 (Nightingale and Sparrow Press). My work has also been featured in War Crimes Against the Uterus, a reproductive rights anthology, and the Toho Journal.”