Poetic Medicine

By Adam Stone The nun teaching sex education rolls the condom the wrong way over the banana in a room full of starved monkeys The shee...

By Bonnie Lyons He places anything resembling a cell phone against the side of his head and listens, and when his pudgy, dimpled finger ...

By Julia de Burgos Ay, ay, ay, that am kinky-haired and pure black kinks in my hair, Kafir in my lips; and my flat nose ...

By Cynthia Macdonald   He was eight when they gave him the felt overcoat— his birthday. ...

By Mary Oliver I worried a lot.  Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction, will the earth turn as it was ...

By June Jordan First they said I was too light Then they said I was too dark Then they said I was too different Then they said I was to...

By Tony Hoaglad I like that , he said in the hospital, where I was rubbing his feet which were dry and smelled a bit. Ahh , he said...

By Chanie Gorkin Today was the absolute worst day ever And don’t try to convince me that There’s something good in every day Because, ...

By Edwin Brock There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man. You can make him carry a plank of wood to the top of a hill and nail him to it....

By Jabari Asim It’s more than time we had that talk about what to say and where to walk, how to act and how to strive, how to be uprigh...

By Khairani Barakka This is what they will say about my daughter And her eyes: that the way they haunt your  Memories are vestiges of tr...

By Naomi Shihab Nye Yesterday you cried in the car when you said soldiers in that war asked if women were fair game and the leaders said, ...

By Miller Williams For the second inauguration of Bill Clinton (1997) We have memorized America,  how it was born and who we have been ...

By Annie Freud I am here to welcome you and to help you prepare for what is about to happen. I can see that you're hoping that we...

By Lawrence Raab   Years later they find themselves talking    about chances, moments when...

By Martín Espada The cardiologist prescribed a new medication and lectured my father that he had to stop working. And my father said: ...

By Jane Kenyon A volunteer, a Daughter of the Confederacy, receives my admission and points the way. Here are gray jackets with holes in...

By Elizabeth Alexander Sometimes I think about Great-Uncle Paul who left Tuskegee, Alabama to become a forester in Oregon and in so doing...

By Zachary Schomburg One night, when you return to your childhood home after a lifetime away, you'll find it abandoned. Its pa...

By Christopher Salerno The bakery’s graffiti either spells HOPE or NOPE. But hope and results are different, said Fanny Brawne to her Ke...