All Categories

Red Flag is more than just postcards!

We also publish digitally via the Poetry Express. This format gives us the freedom to publish work that may not 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 and check out all the great releases in our store!

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.

Comments

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.

Comments

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.

Comments

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.

Comments

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.

Comments

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.

Comments

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).

Comments

5/11/2023 Comments

Christy Wise: "A Biologist in Bliss"

A Biologist in Bliss

I met a plant biologist in Bliss,
Idaho at the Cloud Nine Café. He cruised
the West in a rusty Chevy pickup.

He subsisted in Bliss longer than wished.
Truck’s transmission, trashed,
biologist, short on cash.

Strange name for a town, he sniffed.
Maybe then, it was blissful, I said.
I doubt it, he dissed.

We kissed a bit; danced around
a romance. I was passing through.

Spent a couple days up to my chin
in steaming water, then blitzed
out of Bliss.

I want to believe biologist
broke free, found
Rapture in Indiana.

Christy Wise is a poet, essayist and author. Her chapbook, Tangible Terrain, will be published in March 2024. Her poem, Tony’s Cocoon, was a finalist in the 2022 Julia Darling Memorial Poetry Prize sponsored by Kallisto Gaia Press. A fourth-generation Californian, Christy is most at home walking along the Pacific Ocean or hiking in Desolation Wilderness. Stay connected with Christy’s work at www.christywise.com.

Comments

4/5/2023 Comments

L Favicchia: "I never said my fingers weren't brittle"

I never said my fingers weren't brittle

coal-crusted and clasped to collar bone
smudged black and holy, or flaking
on the floor where my uncertain hem
sweeps ashes under itself as it holds onto
what it’s picked up before: old crimson leaves,
fishing wire, monkey paws already used,
beard stubble, buttons and thread, portraits
of people I don’t know, cranberries fresh
from the bog—my gilded lion-pawed feet
somewhere under there too, treading
bare or paw-footed, who can tell anymore?
This brittleness I carry as porcelain,
kiln-fired, spun for a long time, each
thumb-print still visible, no maker’s mark,
I hold it out in front of me on fine bone
china—an offering, though my tired quill-plucked
arms will only try so many times,
will only wait so long—Earl Grey
cools off eventually and all that remains
is cold and bitter, florals
that must be drunk warm.

L Favicchia is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Kansas. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in North American Review, Post Road, and Gulf Stream, among others. Their debut collection of poetry is forthcoming from Main Street Rag, and more information can be found at lfavicchia.com.

Comments

7/19/2022 Comments

Jared Pearce: "She's grateful her neighbor's worse"

She’s grateful her neighbor’s worse.

She was selling her
gold, her retirement
silver, to cash in
a car for her new job,

folding hotel towels.
Her divorce made her
weep, caught knowing
right and loneliness.

Without sleep
aids and only internet
men, she keeps

hovering for God
to swoop in, put
her feet to bed.

Jared Pearce's books are Down Their Spears (Cyberwit, 2021) and The Annotated Murder of One (Aubade, 2018). Further: https://jaredpearcepoetry.weebly.com.

Comments