Winter 2017 Issue
First Prize, 2017 Literal Latte Poetry Award.
Because men do what they want to
do, & the night just keeps skimming
quarters from the till…
Winter 2017 Issue
First Prize, 2017 Literal Latte Poetry Award.
Not the whole house, just the bed-
room where a dead boy still has not
quite died. Humming from posters…
Winter 2017 Issue
Second Prize, 2017 Literal Latte Poetry Award.
This place can break your heart says Phil Levine,
describing the soft light of eucalypti, the barking quail,
the overbearing odor of orange blossoms
at his home in California….
Winter 2017 Issue
Second Prize, 2017 Literal Latte Poetry Award.
You see it everywhere, in snippets and batches,
at the grocery store, in the bleachers during Little League,
but this morning it is as though I have been called to witness
the ritual of a remote tribe….
Winter 2017 Issue
First Prize, 2017 Literal Latte Poetry Award.
We didn’t know enough to be afraid
of ifs & buts & what some men do
at night out of boredom or under the
banners of their gods…
Winter 2017 Issue
Third Prize, 2017 Literal Latte Poetry Award.
Pen the giraffe inside the zoo of your poems.
Bury your poems in the mouth of a tree frog….
Spring 2017 Issue
First Prize, 2016 Literal Latte Poetry Award.
The stink of human garbage persists
almost all the way to ocean
past the empties in bags left
where they were finished….
Spring 2017 Issue
First Prize, 2016 Literal Latte Poetry Award.
Frank Gorshen – now he could smoke.
He would inhale the universe,
transfer it from thin air into his upper body
and let it sear through….
Spring 2017 Issue
Third Prize, 2016 Literal Latte Poetry Award.
When my father was twelve
he visited his sister at college,
sat in on art history classes
and ate with the underclassmen,
watched the way older kids moved
through that well-manicured world…
Spring 2017 Issue
Third Prize, 2016 Literal Latte Poetry Award.
A fascination with the blank spaces
keeps this city still — the quick
inhale of dawn, the white
between your words —