Welcome to Forth’s Poetry section. Positioned as its own online poetry magazine, this area of Forth presents a variety of unique, exclusively published pieces of poetry writing by established and up-and-coming poets. Enjoy FORTH’s digital poetry journal!
“It’s the windows that make me saddest.” ~ Heba Ahmed. It is not we alone who forget. Time, blind eye, forgets. Time forgets when time does not Want to remember. Or maybe it does, secretly. Time, blind eye, has ears. After the face disappeared, The window Was as desolate as the star, That no longer…
Editor /
still, cloudless, hot day now cloudy with a cool breeze — should I remain naked? Gerard Sarnat is a physician who’s built and staffed homeless and prison clinics as well as a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO. He won the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated…
Swirling somber clouds in the western sky gather above impassable green foothills. To the east, sedate wisps of rose and gold rise through sunbeams spotlighting the fisherman seated in a brown canoe that glides on the shadowed Adirondack lake. A flick of his wrist. His line loops. Plop, his lure breaks the stillness, spreading rings…
You listen the way this stone senses when its prey no longer has a pulse and swallows it whole though your ears work like that widen for the embrace and quiet that afternoon still wandering the Earth as rain and those pebbles a child finds on the beach –one by one tossed at the sun…
Michelangelo delirious, painting that face of Jesus I walk in a mastery of this night and light my money changers walk behind me they’re fools like clowns in a shadow of sin, they’re busy as bees as drunken lovers, Sodom and Gomorrah before this salt pillar falls Rain He drove off the road edge. He…
To be (a matter) Or not to be ( ) To sing squatting straight On a lotus leaf in the Honghu Lake near Jingzhou To recollect the pasts, and mix them Together like a cocktail To build a nested of meaning Between two branches of Ygdrasil To strive for time Breadth & length and even…
Embouchure is the techne through which he tamed me he lit a cigarette looked away my eyes listened to the dream I stood inside the mouth of a doorway felt the ribbed frisk, perfect fit of his lipping to an instrument he played well when the hem of my dress became a smoke ring rising…
There is a Hell, said to me a shadowy figure on the street at dusk during my evening stroll And what about Heaven then There’s got to be one if Hell exists, I asked Nobody answered He was gone The sky darkened and the stars seeded the sky I wanted to find him and ask…
I knew as soon as we met that you were inconsequential to my sustenance and existentially irrelevant to my existence and yet talking with you over burgers made me think of the murmurs of monks and the untouched buns of nuns oops maybe I should not have said such a thing but our conversation was…
Remember how you used to catch a fastball right in the sweet spot. That pure, whip-crack sound going home. Or maybe those small birds swept in the eye of a hurricane, riding sunshine and stillness in the carnage. Right place, right time. The absolute focal point, like nirvana, a first kiss,…
Welcome to our collection of FORTH-curated verse. You may not realize it, but you've encountered poetry every day of your life. You read it in college, you hear it on the radio, you see it scrawled in alleyways, you feel it in the eyes of loved ones. FORTH is one of few online poetry magazines for the contemporary, future-wise poet. We’re not simply a poetry journal or blog, but rather one of the best poetry magazines online, featuring beautiful, diverse poems from all over the globe and curated right here in Los Angeles. At FORTH we also cover local poetry events, bringing you inside looks and interviews with today's burgeoning and established poets. Unlike many poetry journals, FORTH is open to verse of all styles and all themes. The one thing that all of our online poetry magazine submissions have in common, however, is a contemporary voice that strikes the modern reader. You can torture yourself through a classical anthology or lose your mind on Twitter; or, you can look to FORTH for poetry that remixes classic themes for the 21st Century poetry fiend. If you've got the verse, we've got the platform. Submit to poetry@forthmagazine.com.
