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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.

Jules Gates: "National Coming Out Day"

10/28/2019

National Coming Out Day

All I remember is her name was Cindy
And she called herself a bulldog
And we were 2 innocent kids
Doing what kids will do
Because that was before homosexuality existed
So her mother would leave us alone
In the pool for 3 hours
And then reappear with sandwiches and lemonade
After we had quite exhausted ourselves
Swimming, probing, diving in and out
As we did on girl scout camping trips
Outside the building at Bible school
At the roller-skating rink
In my backyard and bedroom
And no one was the wiser
Because we were 2 young girls
Getting it on
On the down low

Jules Gates, Associate Professor of English in the EML Department at Angelo State University (ASU), has worked since 2002 on the ASU Writers Conference, conducted an interview with Terrance Hayes (2009), chaired the Conference for 2 years (Mary Karr 2010/Art Spiegleman 2011). Her poetry is widely published in Texas and throughout the country.

Joumana Altallal: "Self-Portrait"

10/1/2019

Self-Portrait
Wadi As-Salaam

The last time a body is washed,
scent of olive oil soap and tap water,
two inseparable corpses:
always a woman burying herself
with camphor, lotus leaves, a steady hand
in a land that swallows, all of Najaf
is a graveyard
of holy, holy, holy.

Afandi, Yusufi, Lalankee

When Yusuf Afandi brought mandarin saplings
from the island of Malta did he know
they would be given so many names?
to peel the skin of the afandi
is to peel language, to place it in the mouth
and let it run.

Okra necklace

Even after Taita dies, Jiddou remembers
to bring home bags of okra, dried and strung
onto necklaces of thread.

Talisman: Prophet Yusuf’s Shirt

When you (peace be upon you)
tied this shirt
around your brother’s hand
did you know it was written
the sun, the moon, and the eleven stars
bowing, to be thrown
in the well
and still rise
like water, to remember
despite the dismemberment.

Joumana Altallal was born in Baghdad to Iraqi and Lebanese parents. After completing her B.A. at the University of Virginia, she began her M.F.A at the University of Michigan, where she is currently a second-year candidate. She works with Citywide Poets to lead an after-school poetry program for high school students in Dearborn, Michigan. Her work appears in Poets Reading the News, Mikrokosmos, and Alternating Current, among others.

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.