Only one way to get rid of the curse: kiss the tombstone and apologize. Speak the name of the dead.

Poetry in performance is about the full body on the stage. The tremor in the poet’s hands, their voice shaking, their mismatched socks.

Starling phalanx westward on the grass, jabbing the earth...

He grapples, words for the paltry effort of holding one’s heart out to another, whispering here....

I listen to the friend who tells me outrage is painful, but at least it spurs you to action...

My clawlike pleas for amnesty are met only with the bestial blueprints of a brooding ballroom Bluebeard

To be you is to be loved, in limitless capacity and direction...

Piss on the ashes of the Oval Office if it feels safe. Topple the archaic statues, Watch them sink under ice cold lakes. Go.

A legend tells you how to read a map. Not where you’ll trip and sprain your ankle, though...

There blows an ill wind where reality & contradictions converge, the wind that warns us not to dwell in the past, but to pay attention...

Let us not postpone the intent of our dreams. We’ve been chasing It so long

For many, words are sacrosanct only insofar as they are bluntly instrumental.  They must be instantly efficacious, dense as a rock...

Elaina Erola won the Maria Spiridonova Remembered Writing Contest with her essay "What Their Spirits Know," but check out the runners-up!

and she sends me videos of a possum eating as if i am not right here. her very own possum

from my tooth and claw warren where only truth rotates, dripping as a libertine fueled by Romanticism from my extending canines

When I allow my sandaled left foot to feel the dirt as I replant the Mexican petunias, hoping against hope and yet...

A suit case full of money. A superstar contract. A main event. A five-pound shine associated with heavyweight gold.

on stony floors, of terracotta hue, as the tallow bleeds in spines of white light, the crook-necked pores of our pressed skin shiver...

SUDDENLY i am a childless ewe with a running breast– my body knows something i cannot...

Both cruel and sharp, our words did fly, A twisted dance of pain, you and I. In the realm of dreams that might have been, Where hearts edged