Column
Philadelphia Stories is excited to share the winning poem in this year’s Sandy Crimmins National Prize in Poetry: Caitlin Kossmann’s “Airborne.”
Poetry
While they are sitting with the empty seats between them I am cleaning the flies stuck, dead, to the toilet seat in the apartment no one has touched for four months.
Poetry
On a Day’s Pause from the Rigors of Metastases We Walk Through Laurel Hill Cemetery, You and I
We have returned to see the lion, his human-like fingers of stone gripping stone where he sits above the river in the rain, high above us on a massive pedestal.
Poetry
Why I Never Talk About My Mother
When my father remembers my mother has died, when he realizes he had forgotten, and he cries
Poetry
A Black Body Stuffed in a Villanelle
One day, I’m going to be a star. Immortalized on a t-shirt at a justice walk, Momma pray that I make it to the squad car.
Poetry
Warning, Do Not Eat Your Fortune: 40 Dating Reminders Every Woman Over 40+ Needs to Hear Now!
1. You are not a ghost.
Poetry
DAD, BECAUSE YOU MADE ME DESTROYER OF WORLDS, YOURS, TOO
To you, connoisseur of cave mushrooms, imperious orderer of the underground,
Fiction
I knocked on my aunt’s door as insistently as my cold knuckles and army gloves would let me. The sound was pathetic and I’d be surprised if she could hear it. But just in case she could, I took a step back to wait.
Poetry
Don’t talk about them. Don’t talk about that family at the end of the street, don’t talk about the house with the woods beside it. Just ignore them, and don’t talk about them.
Non-Fiction
Every day for two weeks, my refrigerator vegetable drawer, stocked full on grocery day, slowly emptied.
Column
Dearly Beloved, You are my people, Do not pass on this story
As He says also in Hosea: “I will call them My people, who were not My people, And her beloved, who was not beloved.” Romans 9:25
Review
Review: Carlos Andrés Gómez, “Fractures”
In this rigorously introspective collection, poet Carlos Andrés Gómez looks at masculinity, family, language, and responsibility from the perspective of someone who recognizes the dangers of leaving corrosive attitudes unexamined.
Review
Review: Dilruba Ahmed, “Bring Now the Angels: Poems”
I approached Ahmed’s second full length book Bring Now the Angels as if the title were a command, but I was wrong—it is an appeal, almost a cue.
Review
Review: Joanne Leva, “Eve Heads Back”
Eve Heads Back (2021) is Joanne Leva’s sophisticated follow-up to Eve Would Know (2017, also from Kelsay Books).