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Red Flag is so much more than just postcards!
We also send one poem a month to your digital mailbox, courtesy of the Poetry Express. This email format gives us the freedom to publish great work that just won’t fit on a postcard.
On this page, you will find all of our past Poetry Express poems with information about their authors. If you like these poems, head on over to our subscribe page!
All Red Flag postcard subscribers are automatically added to the Poetry Express mailing list as a benefit of their subscription.

Dannielle McCain: "Immersion"

9/2/2019

--Immersion--

I want to immerse myself in your ocean
Engulfed by your flowing sea
Deep blue so far to explore,
I lose myself within.
I want to dive deep,
deep,
and find no bottom
And never be bored of the sound
Of your waves crashing around me.
—But there’s a chance I’m overestimating your depth
So desperate for Immersion
I drown myself in a puddle just to get my face wet
And maybe that’s the mistake being made
Searching for the ocean in a drinking glass
Looking for the cosmos in an ocean
Perhaps your glittering surface is nothing
But a reflection of my own marvelous galaxy.

Dannielle McCain is not published. She is not well known in the world of popular literature and fiction. She has not been accredited with numerous writing awards including the Hugo Award, Man Booker, and the Pulitzer Prize. She is not published, yet.

Elizabeth O'Donnell: "Controversy"

8/28/2019

Controversy
Prince, 1958-2016
When my mother saw Prince
In the ice cream aisle of a small chain
Grocery store, he wore
A sheer lavender scarf. The tassels
Feathered a freshly polished six string.
Mom’s knees buckled, sweat broke her brow.
She smelled his starfish and coffee
Permeating the frosted glass doors
All the way from the frozen pizzas
Where he stood, contemplating veggie or cheese.
Under the fluorescent lights
The lenses of his midnight sunglasses
Prismed across the linoleum, square
By square. He turned to her, index finger
Resting on a pouted bottom lip.
His upturned collar accentuated
Perfectly groomed chest hair, swept under
A half buttoned lilac silk shirt.
She reached for a pint of raspberry sorbet,
Hands glistening with nervousness,
Second guessing her desired flavor. Wavering,
She looked to Prince for safety
In this choice, and in that moment
She swears he mouthed the words
Act your age, mama, not your shoe size.

Elizabeth is 23 and got married this July to the inspiration of 63% of her poetry. She has been previously published by The Central Review, Temenos Literary Journal, and Third Wednesday. She is currently job searching in hopes of picking up a science teaching position this fall near Grand Haven, Michigan.

Jessica Henderson: "Daddy Issues Die Hard"

6/19/2019

Daddy Issues Die Hard

People sometimes go to Niagara Falls and jump,
commit suicide I mean. My first memory of you is a yellow shirt and useless
noise on the tv. It’s a soft brown sofa and a warm Summer day.
When I think of you, I think of a cherry red car and gravel;
of a purple face and a bottle of pills; of the realization that my five-year-old pleas
meant nothing.

It’s fall leaves on a green slide, a new and flat adventure;
nights where I would jump from the bed and dance along to a song about Fridays.
I remember the scent on the pillow,
the way darkness made me feel afraid.
I’m not sure when I became frightened of fireworks,
staring up into the sky and pretending
the arrangement of colors floating above me
was worth the pain inside.

And I recall the feel of strings between my fingers, the hardness
of maroon chairs and the smell of morning glories. It’s funny, to me,
how the flavor of a funeral home seems to be perfume and stale crackers.
As a kid, I expected the bodies to rise from their box, grab my hand
and whisper through their stitched mouth for me to fall.

My first memory of you is the sound of rushing, the aroma of bitter sweet
and the feeling of collapsing. When I think of you, I think of Niagara Falls.

Jessica Henderson is a Volunteer Coordinator for Court Appointed Special Advocates. She has had poems published in Water Soup Winter Two Thousand and Fifteen. She received a BA in Criminal Justice and a BA in Creative Writing at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, but she currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she writes in her spare time.

Hinnah Mian: "Pangea"

5/20/2019

Pangea

My parents loved without borders--
a love that knew no continents,
a love buoyant enough to never
sink on any sea.

My parents held hands across time--
fingers like nomads, ever-exploring,
jagged edges of border-walls nothing but
a test to prove how rugged their
hands have grown from breaking
down barriers.

My parents cut around fault lines,
creating edges that would
only fit perfectly with the other--
all to prove that there was
never any fault in their love
at all.

My love,
if oceans scare you,
remember my body
is made up of
the blood of maps.

I am a child of borderlines
and we are two lands,
carved differently.

Love is the way
we conquer:
boundaries, lands,
time, distance,
history.

It is the way
we were built.

Hinnah Mian is an award winning Pakistani-American poet and author of To Build a Home: Poetry and Prose. She currently lives in West Virginia with the love of her life, her dog, Felix.

Ken Tomaro: "Fifty Percent Cotton"

4/20/2019

Fifty Percent Cotton

Francis Francis of West Virginia
gave birth
to eleven children
four of which
made it to adulthood
and the ones who died
she buried one by one on the hill
by her house
one died when his nightgown burned
as he walked by the fire pit
another died when she coughed herself
to death
the four who had survived
made it to Ohio
Zelah whose name was from
a bible story
went to school with
the famous writer Toni Morrison
who was named something else
at the time
Francis was married to
Golden Mills, an alcoholic
and every week she went
down to the coal mine
to get his paycheck
before he could cash it
at the bar
and I tell you this now
before I am too old to remember
or maybe
no longer here to tell you

Ken Tomaro is an artist and writer living in Cleveland, Ohio. His work has been published in The Light Ekphrastic, Tipton Poetry Journal, Blue Lake Review,Sincerely Magazine, as well as several other literary journals. He has also published three collections of poetry: Your Dog Called, Your Wife’s on Fire; Drowning in My Shorts; and How To Tape a Snickers to the Wall (So You Can Take a Nap) available on Amazon. He writes with the bitterness of Charles Bukowski, the peculiarity of Harvey Pekar and his work centers around everyday life with a heavy dose of depression.

Anastasia Jill: "Little Taipei"

3/24/2019

Anastasia Jill is a queer writer living in the South. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fiction Anthology, and has been featured with Poets.org, Lunch Ticket, Five:2:One, apt, Into the Void Magazine, 2River, Gertrude Press, and more.

Little Taipei

I saw it with my body,
I saw it on a fish
born threadbare, or plastic
or falsified

to a psychosis of traffic lights,
cramped retail and decoration;
it was an incense, cleansed and
reborn through signs

made of plastic and mercury,
cautioning on goers to proceed
until concrete, bubblegum and
boot tip were snaked

together, mating the intro and
extrovert into crab air and
amethyst beads – where soup and
sandwich and yogurt are so calm

Being digested, so reserved
passing abandoned gas stations,
dead rat carcass, panhandlers,
and rainbow gutters

that are conditioned to be full,
or a casual cascade
for golden eyes that are meant
to be bought or sold,

but more often, sold
to the newspaper on the ground
that I seal and deliver
with my tongues.

I saw it in my body,
I sit here, on the ground
and will provincial ground
to suck me into its calcite utero.

Michael Pittard: "To Fall Asleep"

2/19/2019

To Fall Asleep

You could pull the white-down comforter over your head,
inhaling the carbon dioxide you exhaled just moments ago.
When you hear the things in the pillow burrowing,
remember that it is just the blood pressure of your ears;
the way the seashell remembers the ocean even while on your bookshelf.
It is the way that the mollusk, its former denizen, was plucked up by seagulls
and ground to a paste in the beaks of the birds with no teeth.

Michael Pittard is an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He graduated from Warren Wilson College with a double major in History and Creative Writing. In addition, he is a poetry editor at The Greensboro Review. His work has appeared in such publications as Tupelo Quarterly. He lives with his cat, Roosevelt.

Francine Rubin: "Subway Poems"

1/23/2019

Subway Message
Downtown Crossing Station, Boston, 7:30am

In the decrepit tunnel
filled with rusting metal,
waning electric light,
caution tape, I hear it
three times
from three mouths
to three different bodies:
"I love you"
“I love you”
“I love you”

These strangers’ love:
I bathe in it.

Orchestra
Downtown Crossing Station, Boston, 8:30am

Fingers strumming
lips, palm slapping
mouth oscillating
between O and <>,
the man's skeletal
arms moving
from his face to the air,
conducting himself
and the trains' vibrations.

Subway Seat
Red Line to Alewife Station, Cambridge, 7:30pm

A 15 pound bag of Nishiki Rice
sits as if it were
an egg or a small child,
recumbent but alert.

A young man
holding a grocery bag
stands facing it,
watching.

These three subway poems appear in Francine Rubin's forthcoming chapbook If You're Talking to Me: Commuter Poems, which will be published by Dancing Girl Press in the spring of 2019. Francine is also the author of the chapbooks City Songs (Blue Lyra Press) and Geometries (Finishing Line Press). She is online at francinerubin.tumblr.com.

Jessica Mehta: "3 Cancer Poems"

1/16/2019

Mark’s Tumor (When I Needed it Most)

“How quickly this life does go by.” Tonight
I wrote the last letters
to my poetry students. It’s always been hard,
dishing out compliments (unless I really,
really mean it). My mother died
halfway through the class, a term
dedicated to confession and yoking
sadness from fingertips. Tell me
your best sad secret. Write the love
letter you never sent, the one that hissed
a papercut into your flagina so you took
it as an omen. How do I rank choice
of line breaks and liberties
with pantoums while my mother burns
at 1,800 degrees? Tell the octogenarian
that his piece on alpaca butter is shit
or the Iowa dropout I should be the one
at his feet? You don’t, but the dead

are furtive messengers. The banker
sent it privately, a poem he’d been too shy
or wise to workshop
into neat numbness. He likened
his tumor to a peach beyond burst,
skin sloughing off like summer tans—and us,
our ridiculous grasping
of it all when in the end, “How quickly,

how quickly this life does go by.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My Mother(s) Remains

Do you want to go to the Bahamas? I opened
my mother's ashes and was taken
by the color. Somehow, I thought she'd be slate
but she was like Florida,

coarse and tawny. What remains
is heavier than you’d think, full
of bones and grit. The weight
tugs you down. As I spooned
her into the little glass
jar, I remembered being six,

my aunt packed tight
in a cardboard urn while the lot
of us boarded a shaky propeller
plane. The pilot never said
to hold it low, let the wind
lap what’s left—she swarmed
us like wild things, left a thick
coating and we licked her chars
from philtrums. Brackish and dry, she shot
to our innards, became a burrowing,

permanent part of us all. I thought,

I don’t want my mother
to stay. Haunt my organs,
blow like smoke through dreams. How long
can someone stick
to the familiar? Cling scared
to all we hate? Like the gold
beggar children in Mexico, I brushed
her from my skirt and held my breath
against her dust. Maybe,
if I sprinkle her in the turquoise
of the tropics, salt the rim
a little more, she’ll finally
(after so, so many years) release
those bitten nails and let me go.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
She Was Always So Thirsty

I packed my mom in Tupperware
from the dollar store. She always wanted
to go to the Bahamas, even before
she’d gone to sand—before her bones
could be mistaken for broken
shells. I don’t know if it’s bad
to divide ashes, leave a slice
of femur in the Caribbean foam,
a chip of coccyx in Oregon waterfalls
gushing like overdue orgasms.
How does a person want to be
after our skin’s burned to crisps,
the only organ capable
of holding all our worst messes
together? She never said but I felt
her wailing through my insides
demanding turquoise waters, a cleanse,
a starting over. But then again,
who’s surprised? She was always so thirsty.

Jessica (Tyner) Mehta, born and raised in Oregon and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, is the author of over one dozen books. She’s received several writer-in-residency posts around the world, including the Hosking Houses Trust with an appointment at The Shakespeare Birthplace (Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK), Paris Lit Up (Paris, France), the Women’s International Study Center (WISC) Acequia Madre House post (Santa Fe, NM), the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska City, NE), and a Writer in the Schools (WITS) residency at Literary Arts (Portland, OR).

Jessica received a Halcyon Art Labs fellowship in 2018-19 to curate an anthology of poetry by incarcerated and previously incarcerated indigenous women and is also a member of the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Incubator co-hort in Chicago. She is the recipient of a 40 Under 40 Award from the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development (NCAIED), received a Barbara Deming Award in Poetry, and was a Top 10 Pick from Portland Story Theatre for “Indian Burns.” She serves as the Associate Poetry Editor for Bending Genres literary journal and Exclamat!on peer-reviewed open access journal, and is the former President of the Board of Directors for VoiceCatcher journal and non-profit. Jessica has led writing workshops around the globe including at the International Women’s Writing Guild summer conference series and has taught poetry at various institutions including The Loft Literary Center.

Alexus Erin: "On the Occassion I Dreamt I Had Grown My Father's Teeth"

11/16/2018

On the Occasion I Dreamt I Had Grown My Father’s Teeth

My mouth,
full of pebbles, bone shards
First they knew nothing
Then, saw everything
Fall, predetermined: tumbled and sold
for 20 dollars each
Delivered by things with wings. My teeth were lit
the colour of the wallpaper
in rooms where they laid, sun riding through
as I lifted the barrier: this Schrodinger’s Box

of a pillowcase.
In dreams, I get my money’s worth
Anxiety is a lack of object permanence, sleepy
Milk teeth worn as truth teeth. Daddy’s teeth are on holiday,
yawn devoid of white doors- only sculpturature
suspended, pink
Blown as glass in the nightmare art museum
Its dim corner staircase made to rot, to walk through soles, to
circle the mind stupid, to outrun the cops, to
wake up late for early, broker stocks in Tokyo.

As house is to mouth: Grandpa flossed the pipes
clean through drywall- some weeping,
some gnashing. My father, far more quotidian-
mayor of this district trashpile,
broke all the washroom porcelain; a series
of accidents. I watched
unharmed, mostly: gumming, hoarding
winter into spring, having repurposed
liquor bottles into candelabra. The gnats,
like Icarus: talking shit
before he remembered the heat

Alexus Erin is an American poet, performer and relic of emo's third wave, living in the UK. Her poetry has previously appeared in Potluck Magazine, The Melanin Collective, The Nervous Breakdown, The Audacity, American Society of Young Poets, God Is in the TV, LEVELER, and a host of others. She was the 2018 Fellow of the Leopardi Writers Conference and a performer at Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2018). Her screen-play, American Lotus Project, won an award at Temple University’s Diamond Film Festival. When Alexus isn’t writing, dancing, singing, comedy-ing, or researching maternal and child health, you can find her growing plants in your walls as the co-founder of Wallflower Hydroponics. She is currently working on her first full-length poetry collection.