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Juke

By Diane Seuss
What kind of juke do you prefer?
For me, it’s the kind with three
songs and thirty-seven blank
title strips. Three songs, and two
are “Luckenbach, Texas.”
The third is beautiful and arcane,
but the patrons hate it,
and the record skips.
I prefer the three-song juke
and the three-toothed human

smile. I found the juke of my dreams…
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Poem of The Day

A Brief History of the Passenger Pigeon

By Lynn Pedersen
Not to be confused with messenger pigeons, birds sent behind enemy lines in war, but think passengers as in birds carrying suitcases, sharing a berth on a train, or traveling in bamboo cages on a ship, always migrating on a one-way to extinction. How would extinction look on a graph? A steady climb, or a plateau, then a precipitous…
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Artist’s book

An artist’s book is a book and a piece of art, often integrating various forms of content such as text, images, and materials.
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From the Poetry Magazine Archive

  • Poem

    p1

    From “Dissolve”

    By Sherwin Bitsui
    On limbs of slanted light
    painted with my mind’s skin color,
    I step upon black braids,
    oil-drenched, worming
    from last month’s orphaned mouth.

    Winged with burning — 
    I ferry them
                    from my filmed eyes, wheezing.

    Scalp blood in my footprints — 
    my buckskin pouch...
  • Poem

    p1

    The Dream of a Fire Engine

    By Kimiko Hahn
    Without the sun filtered through closed eyelids,
    without the siren along the service road,

    without Grandpa’s ginger-colored hair,
    Mother’s lipstick, Daughter’s manicure,

    firecrackers, a monkey’s ass, a cherry, Rei’s lost elephant,
    without communist or past tense,

    or a character seeing her own chopped-off feet dancing...

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