kingsoftrain

Justin Karcher is a poet and playwright born and raised in Buffalo, New York. He is the author of Tailgating at the Gates of Hell (Ghost City Press, 2015), the chapbook When Severed Ears Sing You Songs (CWP Collective Press, 2017), the micro-chapbook Just Because You’ve Been Hospitalized for Depression Doesn’t Mean You’re Kanye West (Ghost City Press, 2017), Those Who Favor Fire, Those Who Pray to Fire (EMP, 2018) with Ben Brindise, and Bernie Sanders Broke My Heart and I Turned into an Iceberg (Ghost City Press, 2018). He is also the editor of Ghost City Review and co-editor of the anthology My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry (BlazeVOX [books], 2017). He tweets @Justin_Karcher.

***the below poems are part of a project which also includes the poets Kristin Garth and Tianna Grosch***

~*~

The Unfamiliar Music of Mermaids in Snow Globes

This one time I was wandering in…

Adedayo Agarau is a student and poet hoping to make the world a little better with his words and photography. He has works up at Barren Magazine, Geometry, and 8poems. He is the author of For Boys Who Went. His manuscript Asylum Chapel, is coming to light for publication and looking for a good home. One can connect with him via twitter @adedayoagarau and Instagram @wallsofibadan, where he documents the beauty and pain of his Nigerian city home.

~

broken cross.
for olawale ibiyemi

there must be a god // in a house

a boy sets himself ablaze // you smell like goings

are you the mile? there must be a god.

of water & the attraction of the body what does the fire

say about rapture? what do the angels say about demise

how a boy leaves home to become a book on a dusty shelf

Forgive the Body This Failure
poems, Blas Falconer
Four Way Books, 2018

~

A poet who communes with absence that we might gauge how much space it deserves, Blas Falconer is a constructor of the spiritually perfect poem. In Forgive the Body This Failure, poems born to vigil and event become lullabies that sing from doom its preordained spontaneity. That ask form what form it assumes. This is a work of response, so kindly imagined, that it enters the world as a wound does- carried in its own making. Be finality the blood of origin, so bless Falconer for these tertiary balms of answer and inquiry and so praise this voice for adding its removal to songs that reveal the withheld.

~

reflection by Barton Smock

~

book is here:

Forgive the Body This Failure