Established in 2002, revived in 2023
Listen to Jose Oseguera read “Ode to the Foreskin” from Shō No. 5 (Summer 2024). About this poem: In this poem, I meditate on the foreskin as a symbol of fragility, ancestral protection, and the body’s first encounter with violence—an aspect of male vulnerability that I feel is often hidden or dismissed in society. Inspired …
Listen to Becka Mara McKay read “Golden Shovel as Anthropomorphism (Song of Songs 2:10)” from Shō No. 6 (Winter 2024/25).
The fruit / hung bending the branches, like a hundred // small stomachs, bird-eaten and naked / where the beaks had pierced.
Listen to poems by Jae Nichelle, Saida Agostini, Ellen June Wright, Corey Baron, Mckendy Fils-Aimé, Erica Dawson, and Elontra Hall. These poems appeared in Shō No. 5 and Shō No. 6.
Listen to Maja Lukic, inaugural winner of the Sita Martin Prize, read “Your Mother Knew Many Words for Beauty and Used All of Them to Call You” from Shō No. 6 (Winter 2024/25). Audio recorded by Reed Turchi at Second Take Sound. Maja Lukic is a Brooklyn-based poet. She received an MFA in poetry from …
Listen to Ranudi Gunawardena read “Girl Cousins, Pixelated” from Shō No. 6 (Winter 2024/25). For this poem, Ranudi was honored as the runner-up of the Sita Martin Prize for Shō No. 6. Ranudi Gunawardena is a Sri Lankan poet whose work explores the wombscape, childhood in rural landscapes, and the uncanny in nature, among others. …
Listen to Jae Nichelle read “alternate timeline” from Shō No. 6 (Winter 2024/25). “I began this poem thinking about the cyclical nature of time, specifically relating to my matrilineage and my family’s fraught relationship with the bodies of water around us as Louisianians. We face the persistent threats of floods and hurricanes while relying on unsafe …
You should talk about the field of dying alfalfa, / the golden straws that scratch your grandmother’s / legs when she returns from the river, and the fleas / jumping to her swollen ankles.
Dear Ryuichi, I live in a universe where / the sound of rain is your fingers tinkering / with the keys.
you beautiful beautiful stupid haunted girl / you lawless thief of daddy’s face and mummy’s grief / you daughter of the pomeroon
prepared to be bare chested for the first / time in public. Fear I’ll be breaking / some cardinal rules.
My excised uterus cramps with a phantom / womb’s labor pain, hard as that is to fathom.
