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
“FAILURE TO LEAVE PHOENIX IN ORDER TO SAVE MY LIFE IN THE SUMMER OF 1968” by Michael C. Ford is a poem centered on arizona, place and geography, memory. Its imagery is anchored in Arizona, Tucson. 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
“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
“Untitled (“Some days I need to be baptized by the beat”)” by Jimmie Ware is a poem centered on love and relationships, music, identity. 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
“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
“Alzheimer’s Poetry Project” by Aaron Hopkins-Johnson is a poem centered on memory, love and relationships, music. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“Chameleon” by Aaron Hopkins-Johnson is a poem centered on identity, aging, nature. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“The Things That Break While Moving” by Aaron Hopkins-Johnson is a poem centered on arizona, place and geography, love and relationships. 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
“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
“Charlie Brown” by Aaron Hopkins-Johnson is a poem centered on arizona, music, 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
“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
“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
“A POEM THAT REFUSES TO BE CALLED DUSK” by Michael C. Ford is a poem centered on place and geography, identity, nature. Its imagery is anchored in San Diego, California. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“CROSS COUNTRY RUNNER” by Michael C. Ford is a poem centered on place and geography, identity, aging. Its imagery is anchored in Santa Fe, Nevada. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
2026
“YESTERDAY I SAW PENELOPE B” by Michael C. Ford is a poem centered on place and geography, love and relationships, mortality and loss. 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.
2026
The speaker imagines an imperfect relationship through playful exchanges, shared identities and inevitable breakdowns, ultimately proposing that if things must fall apart, the two people can at least face that descent together.
2026
Edwards maps running routes across Arizona onto experiences of race, sexuality, trauma, memory and personal safety. As running changes from sport to vulnerability and eventually survival, “winning” comes to mean making it home and living beyond yesterday.
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 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
Through a recurring question about whether he counts as American, the speaker contrasts his own beliefs and cultural preferences with conventional symbols and assumptions about patriotism, asking whether criticism and difference exclude someone from national belonging.
2025
The speaker rejects the reassuring idea that something can simply “take the edge off” physical pain because her experience of pregnancy and impending childbirth feels composed entirely of edges—bodily, emotional and psychological.
2025
On entering adulthood, the speaker considers his childhood dream of becoming Batman and discovers that instead of outgrowing it, he wants it even more.
2025
Fourteen numbered passages deliberately blur the language of romantic intimacy, farewell, memory and despair, making it difficult to determine whether each fragment belongs to a love letter or a suicide note.
2025
Cortez develops the drum as an extended metaphor for women, repeatedly asking why something capable of voice, rhythm and power is subjected to domination, violence and disrespect.
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
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
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
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
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
The speaker addresses a young person being bullied and urges him not to mistake other people’s cruelty for a truthful description of who he is. Drawing on his own experience, the speaker presents survival as evidence that the victim’s future can exceed the identities imposed on him.
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
Fox mimics the nonstop velocity of satellite sports television, combining multiple sports, announcer language and advertising until athletic competition, consumer products and television spectacle become one continuous broadcast.
2025
The speaker imagines her heart as an enormous public gallery filled with love letters, memories, damaged rooms, apologies, past relationships and one especially painful exhibit that continues to occupy the largest space.
2025
Speaking in the imagined voice of Lauren Bacall to Humphrey Bogart, the poem revisits their screen partnership, marriage, aging and Bogart’s death through the language of movies, scripts, cigarettes and Hollywood romance.
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
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
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
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.
2024
Cooper imagines growing up as an unforgiving video game called Outside. Childhood embarrassment, heartbreak, economic frustration, and generational conflict become failed dice rolls, impossible levels, fatalities, cheat codes, and eventually an invitation to rewrite the game.
2025
"The Tiger" by William Blake Tiger Tiger, burning bright,In the forests of the night;What immortal hand or eye,Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies.Bur…
2025
"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stoodAnd looked down one as far as I couldTo…
2025
"On His Blindness" or also known as "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent" John Milton, published in 1673 When I consider how my light is spentEre half my days in this dark world…
