Contender by Traci Brimhall It’s alright to overdress for the riot. Your rage is stunning.It’s alright to pursue the wrong pleasures and the right suffering.Here’s my permission. Take it. It’s alright to replace a siren with a bell. Let the emergency make some music....
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? Ok, so I need to tell you that a month ago, our house was destroyed in a fire. In my head, I say it like I would as a kid--our house burned down. I needed to start with saying...
And Blue by Kiese Laymon All our irony and stretch marks and knowing nods and creations and trifling ways and imagination and sight beyond sight and dignity in the face of murder and lies that sound truthful and the truth that sound lied up and porches and...
Horseshoe Crabs off Loop Beach, Cape Cod, Mid-September by Carole A. Stasiowski I don’t expect this extravagance of death, a thousand and more ...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? I was 12 or 13 in the early 90s, an American tween living in the suddenly former East Germany, my family part of a tiny English-speaking expatriate artist community. There...
2019 ANNUAL REPORT Letter from our leadership Dear poets, friends, bibliophiles, partners & wordsmiths all, Joining Mass Poetry in 2018 as its executive director felt like a homecoming to me. I mean this in the deepest sense. Poetry, for many years, has given me...
Unmasked by Maria Luisa Arroyo for Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018) | Stonecoast Writers’ Conference, 1993 LB squared, you flipped up my mask, askedme to write beyond my eyes, the Hagia Sophia, Agha-jan’s stern face, Mamani’s tear-soaked chador, their son, my husband...
thank you by Najya Williams To a body long forgotten. To a body long stretched plucked pulled. To a body long abandoned. To a body never forgiven. To a body often criticized. To a body discarded. To a body thick like molasses. To a body...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? Poetry seemed a little exclusive to me when I was younger, a little chi-chi. But that was only because I wasn’t exposed to very much of it. In college I was interested in trying...
Mass Poetry is co-sponsoring two events at the virtual 2020 Boston Book Festival (October 5th – 25th, 2020).
Against Melancholy by Nathan McClain At first it is Beethoven’s Ninth I’m thinking of— not all of it—mostly the fourth movement, that rousing crescendo you might hear at the end of a movie where the protagonist has graduated or overcome some great hurdle, cello,...
Completely Dishonest by Cliff Notez To live in this skin,When being completely dishonest with the worldDo not tell them how you snore like lightning Tell them that you are only 5’9’’Tell them you hate to read Do not tell them that you are...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? There was no poetry in my parents’ house, and mostly genre prose. Ian Fleming, not Henry Fielding. From first to twelfth grade, I read what teachers assigned, too often less than...
Only by Danielle Legros Georges Nature hides the most beautiful design: the norm, the anomaly, the rare, the rarest, which is to say, the only, and aren’t weeach, twins even, only? “Only” from The Dear Remote Neamess of You. Copyright 2016 by Danielle Legros Georges....
Autumn Leaves by Tim Hall To live in this skin,Is to fear breathing,Is to have no control of breathing,Is to walk around with two puffs left in my inhaler,hesitant to use it,worried that I won't be able to breath someday. To live in this skin,Is to scream...
When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems? It was the summer I turned eleven. I discovered T.S. Eliot’s collected poems on my mother’s bookshelf, along with Emily Dickinson’s work. I was blown away by how you could use...
I am From the Church of Human Hands by Sarah Dickenson Snyder the Hands that tighten the lug bolts on rotated tires, the Hands that picked the hen-of-the woods (and not death caps) I buy to make wild mushroom soup, the hundreds of steady Hands clasping...
Interview with Aimée Sands, Co-Director
A Tarot Reading (5 of Cups) by Hannah Wagner The cups hang above me andthe wine drizzles down the sides of my mouth. I let dreams by Fleetwood Mac play on repeat. 5 was always my lucky numbersays every fortune cookie I never ate. I am alone in the kitchenat...
Everyone comes to writing from different places -- how did you first encounter poetry? Did you have an ‘a-ha!’ sort of moment where you realized you wanted to be/already were a poet, or was it more gradual? I first encountered poetry in elementary school in fifth...
Bad News, Again by Cameron Awkward-Rich after the June 2015 Charleston AME church shootingafter Mary Oliver There are so many reasons to stay inside, to lock the room around my heart. I don’t even like it. My heart. Bitter little fruit. Little lead stone, carnation...