“Daylight hurts like the memory / of more flexible structures, but night / inserts its stainless prongs and feels / for the organs most at risk.” An excerpt from one of three poems by William Doreski, published in the winter 2018 issue of The Coachella Review.

“Soon enough—a few weeks, a few months—and the poem seems to me like a cardboard cutout of a puppy: inauthentic, inflexible, lacking in depth or life. I don’t know why this is, but I hate it.” At The Gloria Sirens, Katie Riegel encourages other poets to be humble and willing to accept help.

“Alabaster” appears in poet Stephanie L. Harper’s chapbook “This Being Done”: “I am a pink rose petal’s pale glow / black ash tamped in furrows / between the breaths of the living…”

unlike the midnight special / there are no songs / to celebrate the early bird special / no IHOPian bard, / no poet laureate of the blue plate / no bargain basement Dylan / no cut price Cohen / to extol the digestive / and economic benefits / of getting an early start.

Bengaluru, India-based yogi and writer Bernie Gourley captures the city’s volatile monsoon weather in a series of free-form haiku: “trust old people | with umbrellas more than | the blue in the sky”

Revel in the beauty of the wind as revealed by poet Robert Okaji: “That it shudders through / and presages an untimely end, / that it transforms the night’s / body and leaves us / breathless and wanting, / petals strewn about”

At the Chicago Review of Books, Sarah Blake asked four poets to share their thoughts on opening poems, all of whom have prologue-poems in their new books.

Jason Preu with a poem on boxes, candy, and the passing of time: “My daughter enters the room / bearing candy and a smile. // The last time I wrote of her / she was seven. Now she’s ten.”

Monica Byrne shares a winning poem that her father, Donald E. Byrne Jr., wrote about her mother. It was originally published at Red Clay Review.

The caesuras in Dwight L. Roth’s poem add a poignant gravity to his verse:
 
“My words // chosen carefully…
Like stepping on wet rocks
crossing a stream.”

“My sister and I were once in the Child Welfare System so the death of Tina Fontaine struck me personally.” At Tea&Bannock, guest blogger Kailey Arthurson’s poem calls us to defend the sacred, to defend the children.

“You were once the pinnacle of aviation engineering, now less purposeful than you appear.”
 
Read a haibun from Marina Sofia at findingtimetowrite, in response to Haibun Monday at dVerse Poets.

Murray Sinclair, Canadian Senator and former Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, reflects on Colten Boushie: “I grieve for other mothers / with empty arms / who now think of their loss / at the hands of others.”