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Chiyuma Elliott
Some of those battles were pointless.
I opened the tent flaps and peered out at the world.

The bird learned to copy so many sounds;
its entrails were clogged with bright bits of plastic.

What was our strategy again?
And why did the wind wince

as it skirted the brilliant corners downtown?
Some of those battles were jointless,

footless, feckless. Yet I polished the armor
and sat on the ground

and shot no sheriffs and smoked no spliffs
and sang songs that applied no pressure

when we ran out of bandages.
But some of those battles were spotless.

The signs said fuck 12, the seconds ticked past.
The thoughtless old ships rusted in the bay.

We lost we won we painted
new ships and faces on plywood,

and the birds wheeled and sang.
What's a victory, what's a garden?

We burned some cities,
we shattered some glass.
from the book BLUE IN GREEN / University of Chicago Press
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"Dear Ilium," is a poem that I wrote quickly, during the apex of the large-scale Black Lives Matter protests here in the U.S.  I don't remember Troy being personified in Homer's poem…but in my poem, a personified city was who I wanted to write to—for perspective, maybe, on how to make sense of the conflict. As one witness to history reaching out to another.
 
"Finding Poetry in Eavesdropping on Everyday Language"

"StartingBlock recently named its first artist in residence: poet and restaurant worker Sasha Debevec-McKenney. Her poetry is real and low-brow. It's her way of allowing readers into her manner of thinking and speaking, which ranges from meditations on her reality of being a woman of color in the Midwest; the humor that lies within food, and nostalgia; the existentialism within bad posture and yoga."

via MADISON 365
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"Jerzy Ficowski is perhaps best known for saving Bruno Schulz's legacy for us. The fact that he is also a great Polish poet in his own right is relatively unknown in the US. But Everything I Don't Know changes that. Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer's translations are a masterwork of clarity and precision."  
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