Knowing This Life Holds a Passage to the Next
A child
whispers
‘show me,’
and pushes
a flash drive
into warm
brie.
Almost.
Remember
you expected
the wind
to snatch an
ember
from your
pushy friend’s
cigar.
Knew
it would land
in your eye.
You are free.
Fire in Bone
Focus
on the feeling,
washing dirty chives
in rainwater.
Don’t think that
this would normally
be an interface
between us.
Stay physical.
Bananas on the office desk.
Pins in the cubby
behind glass.
Don’t wonder if
a black person’s peace
is different
than a white’s.
Sometimes it will be
difficult to call
anyone back.
Frost Monsters in the Microchip Business
Are you in peril.
Does the brown rag
in your lawn feel
symbolic.
Of course
you could just
say yes
and reach it.
What will you do
with that
ten-foot plant,
someone asks.
Fill it with frost.
Origin Story
We were overeating
cheese cubes when
it happened.
Someone said,
‘The pope
must know
what a McDouble is.’
Yes.
This place
with its
hairdos
in moonlight.
A wet ant seeking
revenge.
Darren Angle is an artist and web developer living in Chicago. For more, visit darrenangle.com.
To create her compass poems, poet and programmer Allison Parrish trained a machine learning model with two parts: one spells words based on how they sound, and the other sounds out words based on how they’re spelled.
The house was quiet and the world / Greased my palm / The air outside a weighted blanket / Scarab shells rising with the pitch of their hiss / In the shadow of a bodacious oak / I thought of a famous actor
On visits home I see gifts ripped open, and the confetti. / How much candy is in lil’ piñata? My niece asks. / So much candy he can fly.
Let me tell you first about what it was like being a Black woman poet in the ‘60s, from jump. It meant being invisible. It meant being really invisible. It meant being doubly invisible as a Black feminist woman and it meant being triply indivisible as a Black lesbian and feminist.
Audre Lorde
