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
“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
An Arizona Ranger rides into the town of Agua Fria to confront the outlaw Texas Red. Townspeople expect the Ranger to become the outlaw’s twenty-first victim, but their duel ends almost instantly when the Ranger proves faster.
2025
While waiting for a churro at a Renaissance fair, the speaker encounters an aggressively cheerful jester and spirals into an absurdly hostile internal monologue about forced merriment, historical reenactment and Punch and Judy.
2025
A cowboy rejects urban comforts in favor of horseback life across immense desert ranges, finding freedom in sun, mountains, coyotes and open space and imagining that even heaven should consist of riding a winged horse across the stars.
2025
Naughty A. Mouse repeatedly compares sugar with illegal drugs in order to connect an ordinary consumer product to histories of slavery, colonial trade, violence, profit and unequal definitions of criminality.
2025
Alone beneath western stars, the speaker asks the gentle mesa wind to carry kisses and memories to an absent woman. The surrounding landscape becomes a messenger for longing that cannot otherwise reach her.
2025
A cowboy mournfully describes an old partner who once embodied everything he admired about working cowboy life—skill with cattle, horses, ropes and practical clothing—before announcing that the man somehow “fell from grace.”
2025
Daniels revisits the beating of Rodney King and the speaker’s memory of encountering its images, using the recurring word “swing” and the number 56 to confront police violence, race, public witnessing and the persistence of the event decades later.
2025
Hepworth addresses Ritchie Valens directly, tracing a young Mexican American musician’s relationship with guitar, his shortened professional name, his rapid rise and early death, while insisting that his music survives attempts to reshape his cultural identity.
2025
After a long, smoldering summer, thunder brings rain from the mountains into the gullies and valleys. The speaker experiences the storm as both ecological renewal and personal comfort.
2025
Mabrey imagines revolution as a nearly imperceptible force moving through ordinary moments across history: a Vietnamese boy carrying shoes through gunfire, a child unknowingly playing with a fragment connected to racial violence, and a girl rescuing a book from a military fire.
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
Moonlight transforms the Arizona desert into a quiet, dreamlike world where the moon resembles a snowflake, cacti become guardians, and night unfolds like a desert lily.
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
Flemons remembers going to sleep on September 10, 2001 anticipating the release of Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft, only to awaken to September 11. The album becomes inseparable from the collision between an ordinary personal anticipation and an event that abruptly changed the surrounding world.
2024
Set at the Presidio of Tucson in May 1856, the poem depicts Chiricahuas being sold a barrel of whiskey near the Santa Cruz, presenting alcohol as both commodity and instrument within a violent frontier encounter.
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
Grey defines greatness not through fame or achievement but through the ability to endure loss, defeat, grief, anger and despair while continuing to choose love and faith in what may still come.
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
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
Shebala uses the language of sports fandom, commercial imagery and stereotypes to confront the contradiction between professed admiration for Indigenous people and the reduction of Indigenous identities to mascots, costumes, products and caricatures.
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.
2024
Monroe imagines a giant Arizona cactus as an ancient sentinel that has silently witnessed stars, mountains, civilizations and geological time while refusing to reveal what it knows.
2024
Foley offers a celebratory toast to Arizona through a catalog of its defining images: cactus, sun, cowboys, copper, agriculture, mountains, mesas, tourists, and heat.
2024
An empty Southwestern landscape is defined by absence: silent rivers, bare mesas, shadowed peaks, and wind carrying neither footsteps nor names.
2024
Wortley presents the Arizona desert through contrasts: fierce sunlight and purple shadow, silent mountains and calling mesas, harsh aridity and brilliantly blooming cactus and poppies.
