Safia Jama was born to a Somali father and an Irish American mother in Queens, New York. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, she has published poetry in Ploughshares, RHINO, Cagibi, Boston Review, Spoken Black Girl, and No Dear. Her poetry has also been featured on WNYC’s Morning Edition and CUNY TV’s Shades of US series. Jama is the author of Notes on Resilience, which was selected for the New-Generation African Poets chapbook box set series (Akashic Books 2020).
Read MoreAsiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird (Nightboat Books, 2018), a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry. Her other collections include day pulls down the sky/ a filament in gold leaf , written collaboratively with Okwui Okpokwasili (Belladonna/ Danspace, 2019) and Syncope (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019). No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. Asiya teaches poetry to children at Saint Ann’s School and occasionally leads an English conversation group for new immigrants at the Brooklyn Public Library. A member of the Belladonna Collaborative, her work has been supported by the Foundation Jan Michalski, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Danspace Project, Brooklyn Poets, Dickinson House, Mount Tremper Arts, and the New York Public Library, among others. Recent work appears in e-flux, BOMB Magazine, Poem-a-Day, Chicago Review, Social Text, FENCE, and elsewhere. Asiya is a 2019-2020 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Artist-in-Residence and also currently a writer-in-residence at Danspace Project. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she loves animals.
Read More“The Gap” is an aural odyssey, inviting guests on a narrated journey that navigates through intimate experiences of rupture and separation in an attempt to understand the ways we deceive ourselves and enchant through virtual connectivity and its discontents.
Read More“SeMutOnge” is a sound poetry piece that came out of my Works on Water/Underwater New York residency project, MuTonges. This piece was an experimentation with anagrams where I took each line of a previously written poem inspired by the enslaved Africans who were thrown overboard at sea during the Atlantic Slave Trade and rearranged the letters in each of the words to create a new language.
Read MoreA poem by Jared Harél
Read MoreThree poems by Arden Levine reimagines and transforms text from the New York City Parks Department's most recent Official Lifeguard Recruitment Brochure. Design by Rico Frederick.
Read MoreThey were part of something larger and escaped. They somehow made it down the Belt and down the main drag of Surf Avenue. Lefty wanted in on the action; Righty wanted to run and hide. Unarmed, and trying to communicate, they went eastward into the Land of Dreams. Passing Steeplechase, and The Wonder Wheel, Lefty said to Righty, “ I want thrill.” Then, Righty said to Lefty, “but we’re on the run and I miss her voice and her lips.”
Read MoreThe boardwalk transforms
every couple blocks.
The wood runs seaward,
shifts toward north
or goes missing
behind caution tape.
Perhaps this chain of events amounts to nothing
more than a malfunction: one million light bulbs
bursting in succession, a fire spreading rapidly
through the landscape of lath buildings.
Read More(a found poem)
Next to the bearded lady, premature babies.
Lined up under heaters, they breathed filtered air.
No more than three pounds. Infants in incubators -
part of the carnival; a quarter to see.
Read MoreTornadoes arrive in New York, Coney Island
roars in destiny but not destination and that’s the problem –
things bubble up in a dreamland with absolutely nothing
to celebrate except a temporary sentiment
that collapses in a fit of thunderous applause
Portrait of the Artist as a Headless Dutch Boy
I carried pails of water once, too.
Seawater, up along the shoreline
to dryer sand. I picked out seaweed and shells.
Dutch Doors open disjointedly: a dark Cartesian dream. Say hey: the head swings here without the body. While down below, a body beasts beneath the head: wild as the waters, beating its chest. All brawn: bah dum bum dum bum dum.
“Of all the sights a horse-rending plant offers to the world, a horse is not one"
-Plutarch
Read MoreWATER WATER EVERYWHERE my doll, my decapitation
is very political. My ass burns
on the roof of a Cadillac.
When the cars on the overpass see me
it will be out of context—knee deep in a bay
lined with horse bones sorting my nets
as one prepares the body for sleep.
Pink wind, cold sun. In this quiet light,
you watch her roam the bay. You produce
a solitary prayer—bodega rose, talisman.
Read More
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