Carolyn Hembree’s For Today is a triumph of Mississippi Delta poetry.

I’ve never worked at a fish processing plant, but I’ve met a few people who have.

When the water recedes, a flock of / small stones appears along the shore

“Define Situationship” should really / be a Jeopardy! question

Foxes keep showing up. Their voice contains a baby crying at night.

Her body and mine are the same shape. By reason, this means mine can be touched. I still can’t stomach it.

My Jewish wife and I / went into the Old City / through Damascus Gate / to eat sweet orange squares of knafeh.

Meanwhile, my sister and I / rate our father’s revenge stories by punchline.

My mother wrote a poem on her deathbed / after five bleak months of leukemia. / Something in Arabic to the effect of, Why me?

After death the heart sometimes keeps beating / a little. Or after it’s removed / from the body.

As an undergraduate at NYU, Daniel Lefferts found mythical beings: students at the Stern School of Business. They eschewed the de rigueur American Apparel hoodies and skinny jeans in favor of Patagonia vests, khakis.

Some call this cloud work, some call / this clever crows riding the updrafts.

Memoirist, editor extraordinaire, and dedicated literary citizen, it’s hard to miss Lilly Dancyger either out in the world or across the internet’s literary platforms

Well, a lot happens in our lives every day. We experience so many things and most of what we experience—most of what we see and feel and smell and touch and taste—we forget. Because there's just too much information to take in. But the things that lodge in our minds and that come back to us as memories or that we hold on to, I think there's a reason. And that's because it's a poem waiting to happen.

I was shimmying on stage, apoplectic in the harsh blue neons, when I remembered I have loved you my whole life.

Isabella Rosselini said she loved her father’s big belly / because it reminded her of how he used to sit in bed / all day writing

Who you are, what made me assent—all I know’s I was hopeful and bored / reposing in the Delta Sky Club

For months, small gold crowns have fallen from the sky.

It’s not the first time / someone did wrong, and you / smelled your blame

I thought I was undesirable. Unlovable, sounding / Just like a Bachelor lead, with way less privilege, not / Kissing generically gorgeous ladies in Forever 21 gowns.

Memoirist, editor extraordinaire, and dedicated literary citizen, it’s hard to miss Lilly Dancyger either out in the world or across the internet’s literary platforms

On 9/11, with the radio transcribing the ongoing events and his white coworkers in the plant nursery going mad as though the place was burning down, all my dad could do was laugh. As far as he knew, the Omaha nursery was fine. The roof was still above their heads. The ground was unmoving. The sky still blue, and most importantly there was work to be done.

in a place where one grass blade makes / the next grass blade’s shade / that grass blade made / the next grass blade’s root

Do we all migrare: pass into a new condition? / Are we all natives—nativus: born in bondage— / walking toward no-border?