New England Review

Luther Hughes

Culture

“Hmmm-That Sentence Doesnt Know Where To Go From Here” by Qianqian Ye

The headlights remember boys like us: black, unbroken
by the law. As they man us to the curb, Brandon says
he’s been broken before. But not like this. The car parks.
Two white men get out. Their blue uniforms adore their muscles.
You boys up to trouble? 

[Read more]

 

Buy the issue — or subscribe!

Luther Hughes is a Seattle native and author of Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018). He is the founder/editor-in-chief of Shade Journal and associate poetry editor for the Offing. A Cave Canem fellow and Windy City Times Chicago: 30 Under 30 Honoree, he has published his work in Columbia Poetry Review, BOAAT, TriQuarterly, Adroit Journal, and others. He is currently an MFA candidate in the Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis. You can follow him on Twitter @lutherxhughes. He thinks you are beautiful.

Avia Tadmor

Song in Tammuz

Becalmed by Mattina Blue

                                                                    after Traci Brimhall 

The last time I saw my brother, he’d been dead
eighteen months and came as a ghost in the passenger seat,
his arm hanging out the window and whistling
an old boot camp song. He said
we were born on the two ends of Tammuz
and that our mother, ever since Dachau, knew God
wanted us close . . .

[Read more]

Buy the issue!
Subscribe!

 

Avia  Tadmor was born in Israel. She received her BA from Harvard University and is currently completing her MFA in poetry and literary translation at Columbia University, where she also teaches undergraduate writing. Her work appears in or is forthcoming from Crab Orchard Review, Adroit Journal, Apogee, Fugue, Cider Press Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. Tadmor is the recent recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. She was named a finalist for the 2016 Indiana Review Poetry Prize.

New Poetry from NER 38.4

Wonder Days by Nomi Stone

Wind by Birgit Bunzel Linder

What I meant is that when the child shook the branch,
the beetles, quiet, somnolent, darkly, fell and again fell
like plums. Once woken, they bzzzed towards
the street lamps, loving each light well, thwacking 
against them until they landed face down or face 
up, trying to find their feet, reminding me of Eve’s face
as a baby when she tried to lift her head on her stem
of a neck before yet she could. Upon the child’s shoulders,
beetles landed, kinging him . . .

 

Read more

from NER 38.4
order a copy today — or better yet, subscribe!

 

Nomi Stone is the author of the forthcoming collection of poems Kill Class (Tupelo Press, 2019) and Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008). A Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology at Princeton University, Stone has an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in New Republic, Bettering American Poetry 2017, The Best American Poetry 2016, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, diode, and elsewhere. “Wonder Days” was inspired by Thalia Gigerenzer’s podcast “On Wonder” (www.thaliagig.com/on-wonder/). 

New Poetry from NER 38.4

Immigrant Aria by Rajiv Mohabir

there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea!
—D. H. Lawrence

Sunset by Ramsay Wise
To swallow new names like krill, dive.
You have few tides before you
return to motion. Once this shrine
was the abyssal plain. Once Empire
shackled you. Once you answered
to monster, to dragon, spewing steam, fire
bellowing in the furnace of your hide . . .


Read more

Order a copy today — or better yet, subscribe!

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press, 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books, 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry). In 2015 he was a winner of the AWP Intro Journals Award. Mohabir received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY, and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. He is an assistant professor of poetry at Auburn University.

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Categories