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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.

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.

Brook J. Sadler: "Egg"

11/7/2018

Egg

Deftly, in one hand,
with one clean movement,
you cracked me right
open I slid
out of myself your
hands waiting for me
what would you make of me
what would I become for you

Brook J. Sadler, Ph.D. is a professor of philosophy and a poet. Her writing can be found in numerous academic journals and books, literary magazines, and at the Ms. Magazine Blog. Some of her poems appear online in The Missouri Review, ROAR, The Cortland Review, Causeway Lit, Connotation Press, and The Boiler Journal. She likes her eggs scrambled with cheese.

Zachary Fischer: "Finding Myself in College"

9/28/2018

Finding Myself in College

I found myself in the dirt
In the silt and clay
As I excavated a Native American village site
Among the debitage and fire-cracked rocks
I uncovered myself
With shovels, trowels, spoons, and chopsticks

I found myself
In stacks of books
Boxes of projectile points
Surrounded by skeletons in the faunal closet
Clinging to the smells of dust and dirt and rot

I found myself
Drunk with peers
With newfound friends
In love with learning about the past

I found myself
Crying tears of joy
In the Anthro Chair's office
When he said my change in major was approved

Zachary Fischer is a graduate of Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) who received a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology. Apparently he couldn't get enough of IUP as he will be starting the Applied Archaeology MA program this Fall. This is the first time his work would be published. He would like to thank all the wonderful people that made Lit Night at The Artists Hand an event that could build his confidence enough to share his work with others.

Patrick Kurth: "Joseph Garcia"

8/24/2018

Joseph Garcia
***
joseph garcia
awaiting his execution in a texan penitentiary
sleeps often and dreams always

he awakes into the nightmare of the prison's interior
its schedule
its cast
its cement abuses and sterile steels

in his dreaming
he envisages some other day
his tattooed palm prone
beside a birthday cake
a twist of opaque smoke
whispers from a centenary candle
pudgy fingers fondle
wearies stubbled in tortoise leather

perhaps joseph wakes festooned with family joys
live with the chevy wind blown over i-10
or at ease in the caulk-mute privacy of the shower

perhaps joseph elicits the nightmare's ellipse
only in the madness of sleep

mr. garcia, like joseph,
foretells, visions simmeringm
the crows' devouring a bread
he hangs in the balance
and delivers us all
from the machine we have wrought

Patrick Kurth writes mostly from the desk in his Brooklyn bedroom. While he took up verse without training or expectation, aiming mainly to make a record of his memories, he has come to find his work with words enriching. His first publication appeared last year, in volume 39, issue 02 of Watershed Review. You can usually find him making poor sketches of the Met's Rodin sculptures or cycling over some city bridge.

Juanita Rey: "Phone Call From La Ramona"

7/29/2018

Phone Call From La Ramona

It is my cousin on the phone.
I am stirring soup
while listening and talking.

The recipe is my mother’s
though I couldn’t find
a couple of the ingredients
in the store.

Between tears,
my cousin reports
how her father,
my favorite uncle,
is losing his sight.

He is the one
who read to me
from a book of fairy tales
when I was a child.

I should be there
doing the same for him.
Not stories of princesses and princes
and dragons of course.
But headlines from the newspaper.
Baseball scores.
The latest weather warnings.

Out of the blue,
I hear news
from the same past
I’m trying to recreate
in a pot on the stove.

The soup doesn’t taste half-bad
as my neighbor would say.
But why this soup
and not some other?
Only a blind man
would know for sure.

Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in the U.S. for five years. Her work has been published in Pennsylvania English, Harbinger Asylum, Petrichor Machine, and Madcap Poets.

Gregory Ramkawsky: "Funeral Observations"

7/10/2018

Funeral Observations
For Wesley

The snippets of conversation,
“He’s a preacher,” she said
Loudly, as though
Everyone else was deliberately
Or perhaps sublimely
Deaf to her observation;
Her “did-I-say-that-out-loud,”
Her “lack-of-internal-volume-control”
In the back row of grief

The picture of Jesus
Brown eyed (this time)
Staring, or gazing off to the left
In the slightly-too-narrow
Dissident hallway
Staring at sinners, but
Gazing at saints,
Mutely observing the grief
Just off to his left

The yellow legal pad
With frantic, yet precise
Seating orders and family names
Black ink D’Nealian
Scribbled upon its top sheet
Too cheery a color to write
The service order for the dead;
Altogether unfitting for a man
Who was anything but...

The wrinkled, grizzled faces
Each with resignation
Acknowledge deep down
They may be next in line
To welcome a group of aged,
Muffled greetings and farewells
From the other side of a box
Surrounded by flowers
Bearing well-meant condolences

The “untitled poem”
Read by the man who titled it,
The Vonnegut quotation
Assuring all the doleful
That “Everything was beautiful,
And nothing hurt”
Following a sermon,
Which, if applied, could
Render the prophecy
Of that quotation true

The shuffling people,
Not knowing quite what else to do
Gathered to remember
And also to forget
To lay to rest a man they knew
Or didn’t
Fumbling with sorrow
Like they would a set of keys
Just outside their car
On the way to somewhere else

Greg Ramkawsky lives in Central Pennsylvania with his wife and five children. He is the Associate Pastor of a local church and teaches High School English, where he is privileged to be able to teach others to read, write, and appreciate poetry. He would rather die than follow mediocrity, and he is passionate about serving others in practical, meaningful, lasting ways.

Faith Gibbons: "when the bloom doesn't happen"

5/22/2018

do not tell her that her ribcage
is bursting into flames,
she does not need reminded.
instead tell her that
her body is not a graveyard.
ensure her you will not hide the dead parts
of you inside of her, too
and let her cry without asking what
is wrong,
without trying to fix it.
you can't.
she has given birth to a heart that
is no longer beating and,
at this moment, she is still
in question as to
if it was hers.

tell me, did you hear what i said about me being afraid?
did you feel the nervousness inside of my body and
decide to try and make it easier on me?
do your "i love you's"
still sound like "i'm sorry?"
to love is easy,
to have is hard
to have
is not always promised

so instead i write poetry and
swallow it whole,
as if to still feel full.
as if to feel like we are still
coexisting in this.
and on nights where the emptiness feels
heavier than
the weight of empty space
it will spill out of my mouth, down
my body, to where
i last felt you.
i will read it back
---- like history page
like bedtime story
like obituary

until
all of me
is as undone
as you are.
- when the bloom doesn’t happen

Faith Gibbons is a 22yo poet & artist from Lakewood, NY. She has always had a deep interest and appreciation for art of all kinds, but poetry is what makes her heart beat the hardest. Her work can be found in Wild Violet Literary Magazine, and the Lavender Sisterhood. She is the founder and MC of a poetry group in her area, which allows people to express themselves freely & openly via performance art. She put out her first book of poetry, RAW: From Heart to Head, in April of 2017, which can be found on Amazon. Find Faith on Facebook and Tumblr, facebook.com/rhemapoetrygroup and d-apres-moi.tumblr.com.