Poem archive
Read poems by Arizona and Southwestern writers, plus classic work preserved in the AZPoetry literary archive.
Search by poem title, poet, or a phrase you remember. Each archive page is designed to lead readers toward more poets and related work.
2026
“WITH WILL THERE WAS ALWAYS A WAY” by Michael C. Ford is a poem centered on place and geography, memory, love and relationships. Its imagery is anchored in California. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“GROUNDING OUT IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA” by Michael C. Ford is a poem centered on place and geography, memory, family. Its imagery is anchored in Pasadena, California. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“I'm Going Through” by Jimmie Ware is a poem centered on love and relationships, family, identity. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“50 Deep Breaths” by Jimmie Ware is a poem centered on memory, love and relationships, family. Its imagery is anchored in Arctic Ocean. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“Time” by Jimmie Ware is a poem centered on love and relationships, family, nature. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“Uptown World” by Jimmie Ware is a poem centered on place and geography, love and relationships, family. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“Gentle Reminders” by Jimmie Ware is a poem centered on arizona, family, identity. Its imagery is anchored in Phoenix. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“In this Surreal Moment” by Jimmie Ware is a poem centered on love and relationships, family, music. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“UPTOWN” by Jimmie Ware is a poem centered on place and geography, memory, love and relationships. Its imagery is anchored in Chicago, Uptown Chicago. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“IJS” by Jimmie Ware is a poem centered on place and geography, memory, love and relationships. Its imagery is anchored in Alaska, Lake Michigan. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“Kitchen Conversations” by Jimmie Ware is a poem centered on memory, love and relationships, family. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“I'm Down” by Jimmie Ware is a poem centered on love and relationships, family, music. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“Wonder of Woman” by Jimmie Ware is a poem centered on love and relationships, family, identity. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“Epiphany” by Aaron Hopkins-Johnson is a poem centered on love and relationships, family, music. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“Astronaut” by Aaron Hopkins-Johnson is a poem centered on memory, love and relationships, family. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“When You Said I Wasn’t Perfect, You Were Right.” by Aaron Hopkins-Johnson is a poem centered on love and relationships, family, music. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“Lefty” by Aaron Hopkins-Johnson is a poem centered on place and geography, love and relationships, family. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“Burn” by Aaron Hopkins-Johnson is a poem centered on family, identity, aging. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“Life Boat” by Aaron Hopkins-Johnson is a poem centered on family, mortality and loss, social justice. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“A POEM THAT ASKS THE MUSICAL QUESTION: IS JACK KEROUAC REALLY DEAD IN AMERICA?” by Michael C. Ford is a poem centered on place and geography, family, mortality and loss. Its imagery is anchored in California. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“A FEW BARS ON A BAR-ROOM PIANO” by Michael C. Ford is a poem centered on place and geography, love and relationships, family. Its imagery is anchored in Los Angeles, California. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“I MET HANK IN 1968” by Michael C. Ford is a poem centered on place and geography, memory, family. Its imagery is anchored in Chicago, Los Angeles. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“INNER BLUES ON THE OUTER DRIVE” by Michael C. Ford is a poem centered on place and geography, memory, family. Its imagery is anchored in Chicago, California. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
A transgender speaker imagines a painful confrontation with his identical twin through the mythology of a Western showdown, casting himself as outlaw and his sister as sheriff while pleading for recognition, reconciliation and continued family love.
2025
Speaking as a bird, the poem recounts an attraction to a thru-hiker who repeatedly observes but never fully understands him. Their relationship develops through birdsong, nests, field guides, migration and binoculars until incompatibility becomes something the speaker must finally fly away from.
2025
A single sentence captures the ease—and emotional cost—of outwardly agreeing when one’s true answer is no.
2025
A childhood memory of collecting and spitting watermelon seeds turns unexpectedly into an encounter with bodily injury when the speaker scrapes a knee and looks inside the wound for seeds.
2025
A neighborhood experiences floods, deaths, home improvements and ordinary routines together, yet its residents gradually become emotionally isolated even while continuing the gestures of community.
2025
Graham looks back across generations of poetry slam, acknowledging its failures, rivalries, mythology and imperfections while arguing that poems need not transform the entire world to matter deeply to an audience—or even to one poet.
2025
The speaker celebrates extreme laziness as though it were a competitive achievement, describing an existence organized around sitting, sleeping, snacking and avoiding virtually every reason to get up.
2025
Abbey offers an unconventional blessing: may the reader encounter crooked trails, dangerous journeys, endless rivers, wild forests, red-rock deserts, storms, canyons and ultimately something more wondrous than imagination can predict.
2025
Two characters, Jojo and Loretta, are introduced as people who have moved away from where they supposedly belong, while the recurring refrain repeatedly commands them to “get back.” Jojo’s departure specifically begins in Tucson, Arizona.
2025
Bitsui moves through a rapidly transforming landscape of mountains, wind, reservation ghosts, uranium water, digital clouds, family, maps and dissolving bodies, creating a world in which environmental, technological and human boundaries continually collapse into one another.
2025
Urmy condenses Arizona into four monumental images: mesas and rock spires, canyons and heat, immense open spaces, and a silence that seems to preserve the land’s secrets.
2025
A desert thunderstorm advances across sunlit mesas, darkens the canyon and erupts into a torrent that floods the canyon floor.
2025
Hall presents the Sonoran Desert as a place governed by elemental powers: cactus, yucca, rock, sand, silence, stars, legends, and spirits. The landscape is not merely scenery; it holds memory and mystery.
2025
Attraction becomes a cosmic event as the speaker’s heart and mind debate whether to approach someone whose presence seems capable of reorganizing stars, memory, time and space.
2025
The speaker remembers seeing his parents’ shared grave marker twice—once for each funeral—and confronts the strange contradiction between memory, which proves they lived, and stone, which confirms they are gone.
2024
Two rowdy cowboys encounter the Devil, capture him with their ropes, brand him, knot his tail and send him away defeated in an exaggerated Western tall tale.
2024
The speaker compares her grandmother’s dementia with the supposed short memory of a goldfish, moving through repeated introductions, frustration, grief, fear and love as both women become trapped in different kinds of forgetting.
2024
Structured as a sarcastic Thanksgiving prayer, the speaker repeatedly offers “thanks” for episodes and institutions associated in the poem with destruction, racism, conformity, prohibition, consumerism and the corruption of the American Dream.
2024
Beginning with a warning from her mother and references to popular music, the speaker considers love, whiteness, American history, Indigenous presence and the desire to be valued by people outside one’s own community.
2024
Addressing a young person, Ríos imagines every individual as carrying generations of ancestors into the present and encourages the listener to use that inheritance to build a future of their own.
2024
A cowboy prays beneath the stars, finding God more readily in open plains, wind, horses and honest work than inside churches. He asks not for comfort or wealth but for freedom, generosity, integrity and guidance along life’s final trail.
2024
The speaker delivers a compact set of instructions for living boldly: take opportunities, work when nobody is watching, acknowledge mistakes, risk failure, recover from falling and continue forward.
2024
A rock-star persona turns an election campaign into a performance, repeatedly demanding to be elected while mixing patriotic imagery, celebrity swagger, promises and the language of popular entertainment.
2024
The Klute adopts the voice of a fictional Republican hip-hop performer and piles political references, slogans and caricatures into a satirical campaign performance modeled on rap and political advertising.
2024
A birthday casserole made by the speaker’s mother becomes a measure of time. What began as a childhood treat gradually accumulates associations with aging, nostalgia, changing tastes, and the enduring rituals through which family love is expressed.
2024
Addressing “Summer” as an intimate presence, Valence moves through childhood memory, injury, aging, love, mortality and survival in a rapid stream of images that treats human connection as shelter against impermanence.
2024
Flores takes a familiar stereotype about Mexican labor and progressively strips away its apparently complimentary surface, revealing exploitation, immigration pressure, inherited identity, faith, masculinity, and the human cost borne by the speaker’s father.
2024
Baca contrasts his preference for red chile with his grandmother’s devotion to green chile, transforming food preparation into a sensual family ritual connected to New Mexico’s landscape, labor, memory, and culture.
