#ninth letter

[on-poetry]

My poem, "Lepidoptera," published in Ninth Letter's Winter 2024 "Praise" Issue

[agirlnamedbone]

pub. in Ninth Letter print edition Spring/Summer 2015

[bostonpoetryslam]

If Romantics persist, so must cellars, and snaking lines of poets at their doors, velvet ropes, burlap sacks for the sensual vocabulary sold there, big barrels of words—both Latinate and Anglo Saxon—scoops stuck in them. What would you like? Three blackberries, whirr, wax cylinder, oleander, floss, cacophonous horde spangled in swallows, ripe fig wallowing in a limpid pool, mélange of moss, palmful of snark.

Karyna McGlynn, “Sensual Vocabulary,” published in Ninth Letter

[lifeinpoetry]

So you know why I’m like this—why my rage is in a jar with berries from that

road, why I spread it like jam over pavement, dressed in magic and chiffon. Watch me as I terrify the best of you, still—that is the gift I offer from behind my eyes. Here: A little ocean we

knew is finding its way back to me, salting my veins. So I’ve got a new plague to shake out, an animal mouth, safe with nobody watching.

— E. Kristin Anderson, from “Find an Answer in Floorboards or Flowers,” published in Ninth Letter

[lifeinpoetry]

I carry him like a knife in my jacket pocket. When I try to tell someone what he's done, he crawls out from beneath my tongue and pierces it with an anchor.

— Jessica Lynn Suchon, from “Penumbra,” published in Ninth Letter

[bostonpoetryslam]

Remember the animal that after escaping, returns to captivity. Choice crushed my body into shapewear. Want for motion free of direction folded me into cars with strangers. I want when I want, and then I wish for corrosion.

Xandria Phillips, “Ode to a Vibrator Left On All Night,” published in Ninth Letter

[lifeinpoetry]

There are an awful lot of ways to be in love with the world, and none of them are easy.

Molly McCully Brown, from “The Animals” published in Ninth Letter

[agirlnamedbone]

—from Ninth Letter, Issue 12.1