Poetry
Read contemporary poems selected by Open Arts Forum’s editors, including visual poetry and work from the archive. Follow each poet’s name to discover more of their published work, or hear contributors in our author recordings. Writers considering OAF can read the poetry submission guidelines.
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PoetryGhost Light
This is no ordinary dark. In my day it took heavy machinery to drill through it: ellipsoidal spotlights when Fresnel bits broke, and mixing-bowl-shaped…
Art, Poetry.dust motes.
day of small things, slowly steadily worked. as we rest the dust motes, shine as gold. quiet, slow, and uneventful it left lasting impressions.…
PoetryIt’s All Fixed
One man keeps screaming “Fixed!” reacting to a stimulus only he can hear, his brain charged with the same buzz of electricity that opens…
PoetryWhen Rooms Had Names
It is sad to have a daughter so sad and tender to the touch in the midnight kitchen glow dipping ice cream for herself…
PoetryThree
dancing with my father’s spade practising the steps digging deep .... cardboard compost on his borders an abandoned home roses on the sidewalk ……
PoetryComing Back
Mom’s spare room was musty and oozed with black slime. Haze from the distant trailer park turned the drywall a sickly gray-pink, so I…
Poetrymemories out my back pocket
we numbered potholes in our country roads “need more road than holes, someday” we opined whilst ambling to the wide margins between cane-field rows…
PoetryGeorgia Pine
You grew straight, tall, sturdy. Regal, proud, adorned with emerald needles and earth toned cones. Bathing, basking, beaming under sunshine or rain a conifer…
PoetryBUTTER CHICKEN – De Rerum Entibus Caelestibus, 83.
83. EGG Weeks drift by. I go to work at UNO, teach Administrative Writing— Myrtle jill-of-all-trades at a one-horse France St. coffee roaster. Mermaid…
PoetryWatching A Darkling Sky Grow Blacker
What’s the point of crying in your beer, you did your best to live as a loving human, even toward the un- loveliest rats…
PoetryThe Tragedy
He died, did Clyde. Fried in the electric chair, inside Sing Sing Prison. On a Friday—Good Friday (but not for him). Stroked out in…
PoetryTop Deck Back Seat
nothing behind me the bald man in front pale as a peeled Maris Piper sings his apology in coughlets a young girl makes a…