2025
The Vegetarian's Nightmare
A speaker describes preparing a salad as though committing a gruesome massacre, assigning vegetables pain, fear and victimhood before announcing a campaign for plant rights—and then asking for blue cheese.
Poem archive
Poems
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.
2025
Hang On To Your Chairs (Ass Bomb)
Campana imagines returning to school to invent a bomb that kills nobody and merely knocks everyone in the world onto their backside, replacing mass destruction with a shared moment of ridiculousness.
2025
You Are Not What They Speak Of You
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
Free Admission
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
History of the Cosmos
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.
2024
A House Called Tomorrow
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.