Current Issue

Sylvia

I moved to Oil City to get away from Sylvia.

Roommates

John used to say that we were millionaires, but now we might lose the house. Tommy, our oldest, and his wife, Ashleigh, plan to buy us out.

In The Woods

The cut ran fifty yards, a scar halfway up the hillside. The cut scoured by glaciers, or so the boy had been told. He climbed atop a boulder larger than a car, and he imagined the hill and all he knew entombed in ice.

Seaming

My mother holds me down, her hands locked around my wrists as I am screaming, writhing in pain. It is midnight, or sometime after. The fluorescent lights of my room feel too bright, they burn against my skin, cursed with hypersensitivity.

Elegy For Breath

Picture the adolescent: mimicking what makes him worthy.

All Objects

Here are feet on the floor of a plane over Omaha: Here are swatches of ground turning into ground

Nine-Year-Old Suicide In Reverse

A candle unsnuffs, its smoke drawn back in, its guttering, finger width flame relit.

How To Read Whitewater in the Mid-Atlantic Region

Here’s the gift, the undetermined, toothy space in which it bubbles up crazily, thrashing around and telling you incessantly about

Post Rehab

they taught us to pray mother to our lord jesus for strength to refuse

Phantom Limb

I trash the bird feeder, scatter the seeds away from the house.

Bruce

Outside, it’s scarcely my sixteenth winter, pacing the drive, unsure what’s led here—hours of typing, the heyday of dialup chatrooms,

Imagine Sisyphus Happy

Does he whistle as he sweats and groans the boulder up the mountain?

Tapestry Room

I decided to write my feelings big and hang them on the walls.

Neighborhood Report

The day after we read the Leda poems in class, I am smacked alert by

Letter from the Poetry Editor

This year’s Sandy Crimmins National Prize poems explore deep grief and remind us of the system we operate within—a system that will kill difference or defiance.