Poetry Express

Red Flag is so much more than just postcards!

We also publish digitally, every other month, via the Poetry Express. This format gives us the freedom to publish work that won’t fit on a postcard but still needs to be shared with the world.

On this page, you will find all of our past Poetry Express poems with information about their authors. If you like these poems and want to get even more poetry delivered directly to your mailbox, head over to our subscribe page!

6/18/2025 Comments

Alora Young: "Dark-skinned girls with bad wigs aren't prepared"

Dark-skinned girls with bad wigs aren't prepared

They spoke patois on the patio
A Japanese fan from China cooled the air in the city
They would never know they were baking in a kindred kind of heat
The rooster stood by the door and looked at you
Like you told it to cocadoodledo
And he said “Make me”

A Spanish guitar sweats a little melody for a girl when nobody is around to listen
A brown-skinned woman wears a pink dress
And god smiles
Because god loves brown-skinned women in pink dresses
She( god) says “Ohh she’s too sharp” it's a shame they won't be allowed to wear that type of dress in public for another century in Earth years”

But in about a century,
A brown girl, tangentially related to this one, finds the dress at a thrift store in Harlem
And she wears it to the club
And gets disrespectful with a boy who ain’t no good in the bushes at the park at 3 am
Her ancestor,
Now in heaven,
Watches this happen on DTV (descendants TV, like MTV for Angels)
And sucks her teeth

The blue of the storm shades has greened over
And the rooster was dinner about 94 years prior to this happening
But the first woman still thinks
That boy is a bad wig
The kind you see in Tyler Perry movies that white people compliment you on
And he partakes in coonish behavior
And there is nothing for a brown girl
In the kind of man who tells you you're pretty for a brown girl
And then marries a white woman

Who will divorce him for never doing any labor
Physical or emotional
Around the house

And he fumbles out of her then fumbles all over her and doesn't apologize
And that is the moment when the second girl realizes what her ancestor has been telling her

A bad wig is not a Spanish guitar
It will never sweat you a song
It can only get nappy and tangled
And if you put it on your head
All it will ever do
Is make you look like a fool

Alora Young is the 2021 Youth Poet Laureate of the Southern United States. She is a presidential scholar of the arts, a two-time TEDx Speaker, a scholastic gold medalist, an Americans for the Arts Round Table fellow, a Young Arts winner in spoken word, and a recipient of the Princeton Prize in Race Relations, along with the Spring Robinson literary prize, the Lin Arison excellence in writing award, and the International Human Rights Day rising advocate award. She was also nominated for Best of the Net by Rattle magazine. She is the founder of AboveGround, an organization seeking to create equity in Nashville elementary schools through creative writing and neurodivergent education. She is an inaugural intern at the Center for Race Research and Justice at Vanderbilt University. She has publications in or upcoming in The New York Times, Rattle, Washington Post, Signal Mountain Review, Rigorous Mag, and Ice Colony Jornal. She was a poet in Lyric Fest’s production of Cotton and contributed to the anthology I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like. She won two Best Young Actress awards at the Rome and Madrid International Film Festival. Alora also has a degree in Spoken Word Pedagogy with a minor in Religion from Swarthmore College. As an actor, as well as a as poet she has performed on CNN, CBS, TIME, and many local channels in Nashville. Her book Walking Gentry Home was released by Hogarth Books in August of 2022. It received a starred review in Kirkus Reviews and it was nominated for a Goodreads Choice award. It won best debut in Nashville Scene magazine and Ms. magazine. She is planning to pursue a M.F.A in creative writing and a PHD. in neurodivergent creativity. She spends her free time writing and playtesting her two board games Girlboss and Fake Your Own Death. She has written ten books and thousands of poems many of which will be coming out in the following years.

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3/27/2025 Comments

Jennifer Handy: "Voter Fraud"

Voter Fraud

People in town, on ATVs and dune buggies,
they fly MAGA flags
and mutter loudly about elections stolen.

You might think it was a red state,
but that’s just on the surface,
the dust kicked up by dune buggies.

Everyone’s a communist out in the desert,
away from canals and power lines,
the inhabitants clinging to one another

to stay out of the whirlwinds and the heat,
the saguaro offering up part of its body
to the woodpeckers that nest inside.

Take the roadrunner, for example,
no respecter of space or property
when he flies inside my van,

strutting about the wooden countertop,
the wooden floor,
inspecting a fluttering curtain,

displaying his stripes, his fancy plumage,
like buttons upon a blazer,
his political affiliations unformed, unknown.

He doesn’t stay long, my temporary guest.
If I wanted to, I could chase him out,
but instead I play the role of host

and offer up a crust of bread,
which he point-blank refuses.
He asks for nothing but understanding,

for a moment of respite when passing through,
like the lizard that dives inside a random hole
at the approach of danger, of a snake,

sharing quarters for a time with a scorpion,
perhaps a spider, asking neither permission
nor forgiveness.

There are times when even people come together,
broken down on a lonesome highway,
the same people who fight for space in parking lots.

As for me, I leave the pavement,
escape the town, and take off
like the roadrunner, voting with my feet.

Jennifer Handy is the author of the chapbooks California Burning (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and Dirt (Finishing Line Press, October 2025).

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1/9/2025 Comments

Scott Silsbe: "The Poetics of Outer Space"

The Poetics of Outer Space

It may be
that our solar system
is shaped like
a jumbo shrimp
or a deflated croissant.

I like to be
in my own world
but I also like to be
a part of the world
that I inhabit.

Time is an accident
following motion.

Scott Silsbe was born in Detroit. He now lives in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. His poems have been collected in four books: Unattended Fire, The River Underneath the City, Muskrat Friday Dinner, and Meet Me Where We Survive. He is also an editor at Low Ghost Press.

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10/2/2024 Comments

Peter J. Grieco: "April in Harvard Yard"

April in Harvard Yard

“The task of a linguist is not to tell us
what sentences mean, but to explain how
they have the meanings speakers give them.”*

Striking symmetries & anti-symmetries
tedious anxieties, balanced utterances, moldy
ceilings, salient contrasts, loathsome spiders
rigid restrictions, despotic anguish:
It’s as if a well-made poem required
an identifiable pivot somewhere
between monstrueux & voluptueux.
“In other words, the relation between
an initial state & a final one is correlated
with the opposition between initial problem
& final solution.” Or else none of this goes
anywhere & I would not know what to do
with myself in Presbourg at six in the morning.

*epigraph from Jonathan Culler's 1975 book Structuralist Poetics

Peter J. Grieco is a retired English professor and former school bus driver. His poems have been widely published in small magazines on-line and in print. His book length series of poems include: “At the Musarium,” a collection of semi-procedural verse based on word frequency lists, “Misinterpretations of Dreams,” a series which interrogates Freud's seminal study of dream life, "Structuralist Poetics," which attempts to come to terms with post-structuralism, & "A Week on the Concord & Merrimac." celebrating Thoreau. His collection of ekphrastic verse, “The Blind Man's Meal,” is available from Finishing Line Press.

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8/5/2024 Comments

Chandra Alderman: "69 Love Songs"

69 Love Songs
for Silsbe

By that second
or third
love song
we got that first
awkward kiss

out of the way.

I stopped counting
songs
and kisses
as I began
to hear
the music
of your mouth
and hands.

Chandra Alderman lives in northeast Ohio. Her heart belongs to Pittsburgh, PA. Her writing and photography have appeared online at Thirteen Myna Birds, The City Poetry, Octopus Review, Trailer Park Quarterly and Live Nude Poems. She’s working on a collection of poetry and is still trying to compose a perfect bowl of soup.

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6/3/2024 Comments

David A. Goodrum: "Garden Commencement"

Garden Commencement

We are past time
harvest has moved north.

Birds fulfilled their summer contract
eating weed seeds and insects

now migrating
while we stay put

commencing preparations for spring:
you’re best at planting cover crops

while I’m left spreading manure
but I’m a natural.

David A. Goodrum, writer/photographer, lives in Corvallis, Oregon. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, The Inflectionist Review, Passengers Journal, San Antonio Review, Gyroscope Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, Tampa Review, among others. Other publications include a chapbook, Sparse Poetica (Audience Askew, 12/2023), and a book, Vitals and Other Signs of Life (The Poetry Box, 6/2024). See additional work (poetry and photography) at www.davidgoodrum.com.

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4/2/2024 Comments

Meredith Davidson: "Some Man's Folly"

Some Man's Folly

Somewhere between the teeth
grinding & the lines snorted in the
bathroom to foil the cries of drunk
girls mishued & the full on
constriction of the dichotomous –
we would like to rename the Prime Meridian.
And the land mass and the
conceptual “space” and the spin of a
CD worth thirteen dollars and fifty-two cents
we sought to speak sense
with all the sensibilities of all the east
of Eden, but all the idealism too.
But the speech was blinding in its
wax but in its wane.

I marvel at the cycles.
The thresholds to repeatedly cross to
expect anything but a blind cliff
upon foretold arrival.
I’m just drowning in the same verbs

I don’t approve of lakes without
lifelines to the oceans.
Is it so much to expect a foyer
or at least a foundation
something consistent with
blueprints, please, or what did we
hire you for?

I was in Ireland.
And at the bed & breakfast where my
sister spilled tea all across the fine
Irish linen there was a foyer.
Beneath the table directly across from
the entrance, a taxidermized
fox. And on the table to the left, a
bird of prey, and to the right another
immortalized corpse of a creature
and yet nowhere for one
to seat oneself.
Now, I’m not one to question
the recreation of psychopaths
––in fact I rather support it
in spite of the implications––
but it’s speckled the fine splayed
hairs of this lung with resin
and not even the craftsman can
recreate the original organ.
These creatures may rest in this
place, but have you prescient heart and
beating mind–you may not stay here.
Move through, your room is upstairs.

After arrival but before that
fine Irish linen’s destruction,
the innkeeper and I took a walk about
the property & came upon a
prodigious stone tower not unlike the
ruins of castles I’d come upon along
the inverse roads of the home country.
Marveling at its height and
architecture and plain existence, I
inquired as to the origins and
purpose of the tower.
“Oh that?” The innkeeper scoffed,
penetrably, “just some man’s folly.”

Meredith MacLeod Davidson is a poet and writer from Virginia, currently based in Scotland, where she recently earned an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Meredith has poems in Propel Magazine, Cream City Review, Frozen Sea, and elsewhere, and serves as senior editor for Arboreal Literary Magazine.

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2/8/2024 Comments

Ellen June Wright: "At the Dodge Poetry Festival, Waterloo Village, c. 1994"

At the Dodge Poetry Festival, Waterloo Village, c. 1994

More than two decades now, I stepped out of
   the rain and into the cabin in Waterloo

and passed the crowd and speaker following
   my instinct to be warm and dry and found

behind a pony wall a bench, a hearth, and logs
   aflame. And there in front of the fire,

I heard a man begin to speak.
   His voice was seasoned with the accent

of the Southwest. I fell into the arms of a phantom
   who spoke of learning to read behind bars,

of trying to hold on to love with the only thing he had--
   his words. He spoke of gangs and other worlds

I had never known. He drew me to him,
   and whenever I open his books, I hear his downy

voice again asking me to remember the fire
   and the crackling logs, remember the need for warmth,

remember how sweet it was to fall by fire's light.

Ellen June Wright’s poetry was most recently published in (or is forthcoming in) Plume, Tar River, Missouri Review, Verse Daily, Gulf Stream, Solstice, Louisiana Literature, Leon Literary Review, North American Review, Prelude, Gulf Coast and is forthcoming in the Cimarron Review. Her work was selected as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week for their website. She was featured in the article, Exceptional Prose Poetry From Around the Web: June 2021 by Jose Hernandez Diaz and she has received Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. She also hosts a weekly poetry workshop on Zoom for Black poets. Ellen can be found on Twitter and Instagram @EllenJuneWrites.

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10/16/2023 Comments

Deryck N. Robertson: "Scraps"

Scraps

Torn pages from a blue Hilroy coil notebook
Litter the dusty corners of my mind.

Crumpled paper tumbleweeds blow
Through my consciousness
Every now and then.

A scent
A melody
Words scribbled neatly on a lined page.

Your name.

Deryck N. Robertson lives and creates in Peterborough/Nogojiwanong, Ontario, where he is an elementary educator. Work has appeared with The Minison Project, Orchard Lea Press, Loft Books, and forthcoming with Vital Minutiae Quarterly. His first chapbook, All We Remember, was realeased by Alien Buddha Press in 2021. He is the EIC of Paddler Press and has a couple of songs on Spotify. When not writing, he can usually be found drinking maple roast coffee around a campfire or in the stern of his canoe in Algonquin Park. You can find him online @Canoe_Ideas, @PaddlerPress, and deryck.ca.

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7/10/2023 Comments

Ron McFarland: "Arachnophilia"

Arachnophilia

Miss Muffett, my wife opines, was no fool,
and if, as some scientists now say,
spiders dream, their much-loved nightmares
surely would frighten Georgia away.

Last night I dabbed pricey Clobetasol
to nine bites about her body: lower back,
inside left elbow, nape of her sweet neck,
six tiny blisters on her right forearm,

perhaps the sequential nips of a single
irked arachnid in search of some more suitable
nourishment—a common housefly, moth, or bee.
Why do they find Georgia so delectable?

Both of us had spent the past four days
scraping and painting our resurrected deck,
nurturing dreams of evening parties, wine,
soft music, occasionally enlightened talk,

not dreaming of whatever dark hunger drives
some spiders to dream of juicy human flesh.
And why, if these noiseless, patient spiders must
feast at times on the human beast, why not on me?

Ron McFarland lives & writes in Moscow, Idaho. He's an emeritus professor of English at the University of Idaho, where he taught nearly 50 years. He also served a 2-year term as the state's first writer-in-residence in the mid 1980s. His most recent books are Professor McFarland in Reel Time: Poems & Prose of an Angler (2020) and Gary Soto: A Career in Poetry and Prose (2022).

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YOUR CART

Alora Young: "Dark-skinned girls with bad wigs aren't prepared"

Jennifer Handy: "Voter Fraud"

Scott Silsbe: "The Poetics of Outer Space"

Peter J. Grieco: "April in Harvard Yard"

Chandra Alderman: "69 Love Songs"

David A. Goodrum: "Garden Commencement"

Meredith Davidson: "Some Man's Folly"

Ellen June Wright: "At the Dodge Poetry Festival, Waterloo Village, c. 1994"

Deryck N. Robertson: "Scraps"

Ron McFarland: "Arachnophilia"

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