March 27, 2020
Grading Rubric
Trauma is weighted as follows:
Formal Essays (55-65%)
Write “Children of Immigrants” – 10% (doubled if undocumented)
Write “first generation” – 15%
...
March 19, 2020
Mirage drinking
It is true there is only
so much water you can
drink—but you can
drink fantasy liquid
forever.
There is more than one way
to drink in a chimera
with her red-desert hair
thrown to the wind,
her body piled
onto mesas of sand.
Your body is no...
February 28, 2020
Essay: On Delacroix’s The Shipwreck of Don Juan
Delacroix, now that’s one bleak take on things. My dark perspective
Has been criticized again and again; or, never mind me
Think of a writer like Charles D’Ambrosio in ...
February 14, 2020
Resolve
January - April, 2012: eleven Delaware teens take their own lives,
ano...
January 31, 2020
Kevin West is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of North Texas. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Pleiades, The Journal, The Boiler, The Meadow, and elsewhere.
January 17, 2020
The Moose and All
The table edge is all that keeps my elbow's heat.
Last winter a moose wandered from the mountain in
to eat the neighbor's trees. Walking home: hoofprints. Snow...
January 3, 2020
Hiruzen
& the horse-archers watched as I tried to tame the wild.
calculations of sleepless steps bent on becoming imprint:
because to speak my verse is to decipher my movements,
and if the stray arrow orients itself to my binding of skin,
let the wound te...
December 20, 2019
Magnified moments in the Prison art room
make sense, they build a culture; free. Bars become
a texture of rust sung decay outside the windows.
Staplers aren't weapons, they simply bond paper.
A guy asks about the value scale; he straddles a fence.
I talk...
December 6, 2019
Love Quarrel with Ixodes
I leaned into you.
My hands, my many bodies of desire
brushing tips of natal grass.
You pooled into me, devoured
nouns, verbs, shoes, lucidity,
the names of flowers, flowers
becoming things. Of all the things
you tried to teach...