A chronological archive of poetry published in Cleaver’s quarterly literary issues from 2013 to present …

BEING WHOLE AFTER A DIAGNOSIS by Anthony Aguero I. Diagnosis Someone likens your body to soured-meat, Flies swarming the thighs, ...
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THE SECOND STEP by Meggie Royer That night, the door so waterlogged with rain it stuck for hours, hinges flush ...
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AS TRANSPARENT AS IT GETS by Heikki Huotari Just because you're parasailing doesn't mean this call's not coming from ...
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DISSECTION by Amy Beth Sisson After school my teacher helped me pull the pink downy breast feathers to clear the ...
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HAVANA, ILLINOIS, AUGUST 2020 by Peter Wear White clouds, so many white clouds pause above August’s green cornfields– an armada ...
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WHERE I WAIT FOR YOU by travis tate The river before anything else, the glazed sun emerging gently from evening ...
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SPEAKING OF SUNFLOWERS by Evan Anders the world is bare bones an orphan after rage relinquishes her arrow. magnolias ago, ...
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my lover starts seeing by Lis Chi Siegel after a.b. yehoshua’s “facing the forests” my lover starts seeing our house ...
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THE PRICE OF HANDS by Brian Ellis You can try the gloves, but the gloves will work two hours tops ...
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THE ESPERANZA PROJECT Music by Richard Casimir "Antumbra" (poem) by Herman Beavers In classical music, a fermata is a pause ...
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FIELD NOTES FOR THE MAGICIAN: SLEIGHT OF HAND by Rosemary Kitchen I. Mother teaches me to read the ages of ...
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EIDOLON by Nicole Greaves She said there are some things you will always be, like Italian, some skills interchangeable: folding ...
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Blindness It began with a stove, burnt mahogany dissipates in, wishing the ember hinted the future: mother running out of ...
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Am I the only one in the Cleveland Art Museum today looking for mercy? I’m looking at an artwork about ...
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hands the swaddled child over. A dream is no place for a baby. She has seen revelers pour the baby ...
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out my window colored heads bound in swiftness. in their decision to bring about movement & motion. the snow is ...
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SIX STAGES OF GRIEF I. you are going to a Danish pastry down on Jung-gu road to sell your soul ...
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I have a mother who once said car, lake, who said, I couldn’t stand holding your sticky hands any longer, ...
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The fiery fist above slowly loses its hold / and the musky lungs of autumn grow dry. At last, fall ...
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He knew how it would be—should have.Forgetting the keys on the table, / doors locked, window’s open, returning / on ...
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Today has dawned a nude beginning. The male truck idles at the curfew and the bruisepaper waits on the porch ...
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Shouldn’t it let me buy everything and pay with negative interest? All those swirling golden stars teeming, unbalanced in the ...
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IN SOME ALIEN PRAIRIE the birds don’t circle the ways they do here collected in one large cloud a ...
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TWO POEMS by Jeremy Radin Ode to the Nectarine O secretive sunrise of an armadillo, won’t you please uncurl for ...
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He wakes back bent into a kind of platform for what is meant to be goodness ...
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Chits came in stapled packets, five yellow slips to a page, that ripped like postage stamps, perforated. Three’d buy a ...
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she scans a glossy creak lowland like wood floors creased with alluvial fans playas and alkali flats before sandy gravely ...
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LAST SUMMER AT SUMMERLAND by Dana Fang I When she trimmed the holly, when she trellised each lilac, her knuckles ...
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In one town, an apricot held in the mouth of a rabbit like a swollen tongue. In another, a pear ...
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DEAR CITY by Poul Lynggaard Damgaard I want to tell about the gap between houses and the way the windows ...
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When you don’t know what to expect you’re almost always expecting something, even if you’re mistaken, as when you expect ...
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I could be more perceptive. Beneath me, 750 ft., my wife is thinking. I fool no one. My sweater is ...
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The white car that lives in the white of the eye comes out of the sun behind the line of ...
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An animal, let’s say my dog, has issues with the end of the world. She’s lined the back porch in ...
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As of lately you said you have been strangely strange—a bit besides yourself, which you noticed when you take walk ...
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Green stripes only. No round, less square, don’t forget orange grapes. Stem-plant that table, soldier! Christ, where’s a pinstripe umbrella ...
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I caught you staring at that great Midwestern sunset sewn together with photons from the last six months in the ...
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Hunger was secret—hump on the back, the something else, the body insisting that it was present. Child head and child ...
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THE ANT LIEUTENANT TELLS ME OF HIS RETURN by David Callan Black soil collapsing onto rock. Beetles with shining blue ...
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No kissing, though we both know that we want to. You show up at my house wearing the exact same ...
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Forty millennia, and more, originating worlds, occasioning wines, wedges, plunder, and ( let’s guess, ) recovered and glassed, eyes around ...
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Wild blackberry bramble all along the edge. Himalaya? Or Cutleaf? Or Pacific? Thimbleberry? Let me try again, what net? We ...
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I've decided it's pigeons, not squirrels or worse, responsible for the ruckus— pigeons and some kind of metal fencing, chain ...
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Numbing forgiveness-salve slathered on eyes damned eyes, to sit across from this man praised for handling his bossy woman ...
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Leaning like a chiaroscuro, a man outside a bodega says, You only get one mother. I want my skin to ...
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I. Every night, we listen to his favorite songs. The kind of music you want to hear when your country ...
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Dip and paddle, bloom. A dragonfly barrels and darts. Hot afternoon balm rolls across the pond. The pending night wicks ...
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Morning with Cane Corsos Two black dogs are playing on a hill / in front of my grandmother’s church. Majestic ...
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We saw two barefoot boys walking down the double yellow lines, both holding their crotches in a two-hand grip, playing ...
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Fist above foothold, stay invisible; don't open your mouth and waste words on statues that may or may not love ...
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THE DAMAGE IS THE TRUTH by Roy White Ice on the stairs, brief flight, pain and an impossible angle. A ...
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How the body performs a blockade: I’m not here. Everyone wants to prove they can fight a tank. The Japanese ...
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The stage curtain of my dreams needs an alteration. Ka-Pow! Ambient billiard balls. “It’s always broccoli with you.” And it ...
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* You no longer bathe though a cold rain flows through one arm ...
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want to be that featureless dove tucked in the saint's armpit. I want to nest where his hand presses me ...
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Temporal weariness bought many women their milk,on condition that they would promise onlya small thing, some silent iniquity. They shuttheir ...
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Otto, Otto everywhere. That was how I felt for a while, biting into wax fruit, crafting crusades in miniature, many ...
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Born with multiple spinal malformations. Missing ribs on the left side—only flesh to guard the collapsed lung. One right lung ...
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Instead of violence Instead of the trees Instead of the brier Instead of regulation Instead of music Instead of jail ...
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the future is not Las Vegas yet here we are dying and newly alive glittering thunder dome of sweat ...
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Tall A woman grows taller and taller till she looms above her friends, brushes her head on door frames, grows ...
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My sight breaks up; orange rivulets drop down my eye; against my chest, a pain thwacks and clocks. I am ...
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I realize I do not wish to fall to the bottom of a well. With no one to hear my ...
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The ridiculous dissatisfaction with good fortune begins in shade, when every bit of luck pops up like a harlequin jammed ...
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For a time I felt harmonious and whole, if you know what I mean. Ringing bells alone could make a ...
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you can’t hold your man you can’t hit a jet going six hundred miles per hour with a .50 calibre ...
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The apocalypse goes to Stonehenge during the summer solstice and sings Joni Mitchell’s Blue while tripping on shrooms The apocalypse ...
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perched on spindles of the branching spring the wren with conspicuous brow, the buff sparrow with its white appetite, ravishing ...
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This was his third story, the one after the one about dinosaurs turning to glue and the ship trapped in ...
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TERMS AND CONDITIONS by Heather Holmes one month I am in philadelphia reading the Andrew Durbin book that describes this ...
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THE TOWER IN OUR CITY is always visible, no matter where we are, it doesn’t even matter what we’re looking ...
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No one bothered to tip me back into my own image. Now, I’ve got one eye seeing forever thru an ...
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Light Years: plurisy, renewed nostalgia for each moment as it goes, the dream returning as it’s escaping. / His wife’s ...
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THE REST by Kimberly Grabowski Strayer I slept with a kitchen knife in my bedside table as a little girl, I ...
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Whilst I was human I walked around with glitter in my eye I wrote it down I believed in magic ...
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In the sour aurora borealis of our political reveries every bruise dives together in a drink of lead paint pouring ...
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Once there was a clementine when I couldn’t speak and a late afternoon on the steps in the sun when ...
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Those that whispered stay in the corners unadorned, protecting their corners, pissing in their corners, un- willing to dance or ...
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Once I was so lonely, I spent all night talking to an android, her pursed lips whispering thick as a ...
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Twelve hours under the flood the putrid silt sacked every staging and support, the poplar plank with its larch cross-sections, ...
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Then it’s three years since—since displacement then it’s flesh on foil and planks spilling out oilcloth remnants—then we are formless, ...
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Holy men pitched tents on my grandmother’s farm land. They trickled into 1975 fed by an ancient spring, while everyone ...
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His smile is a Spanish quarter, lopsides us down Campania street inclines, dodging grime bullets. Cerussite silk plunges down to ...
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GIANT POSSUM DRAWS CROWD IN NICETOWN by Khaleel Gheba From the west, a swell arrives with pomp, its wet regalia ...
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Scrapped leaves, the orange the gold the crimson, scratch along, clump, stop. Crumble. Rot., Blow off where it all blows ...
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They did not believe us at the station. The voices weighing us as we stood naked in the south wind, ...
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where we come from by Patricia Hartland tiny springs meet the red red sand the sea we built our little ...
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“Daddy, can I watch you make?” I was following my father down our long hallway to the bathroom, pulling the ...
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ANATOMY OF A MONARCA by Antonio Lopez Emerging from the quilted cocoon of the brown monarcas is an infant who ...
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Bloody Mary was neither skull nor naked bone. .............Sister of blood and flesh they said your name 3 times, .............walked ...
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![[A BLOCKED VALVE FACILITATES PRAYER. A BLOCKED AIRWAY INSPIRES A] by Levi Andalou](https://www.cleavermagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/A-blocked-valve-400x267.jpg)
A blocked valve facilitates prayer. A blocked airway inspires a sudden reinvestment in the communicative powers of miming. A blocked ...
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those various yellows, golden-rods, butter-fat, chrysanthemum wax-wings ..sprung from thin etchings of faith, is it just random— ....the rabbit/sleeve disguised: ...
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moves in gravelly time, so that the words I say here have been said before, and my car is covered ...
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In the first motion, I wrapped everything in newspaper, emptied glass stones from the bottoms of fishbowls, recycled the recyclables, ...
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The world, I never thought, was worth its wake In my image alone, kicking storms about itself Like me, a ...
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In the silver heart of everything there is a constant quivering. We think the sky is boneless only because it ...
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There is a ceremonial volley over a grave I climb on the branch of an olive tree to peep at ...
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![[IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE BANJO –THIS CHAIR] by Simon Perchik](https://www.cleavermagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Nothing-to-do-with-a-banjo-400x267.jpg)
It has nothing to do with the banjo –this chair aches for wheels that will rust, wobble the way riverbeds ...
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A Civil War cannonball dug from a field near Petersburg now props open the door. He shows me in. The ...
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The hair the doctors cut to clear from underneath the stitches, long and light, marbled my black shirt. As with ...
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