2025
Green & Red
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.
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
it'll take the edge off they say
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
My 20th Birthday Haiku
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
The Laziest Man in the World
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 Human Heart
Missing someone causes the speaker to see a heart in a cloud—but not the polished symbol of greeting cards. Instead, he imagines an actual human heart: messy, vulnerable, compassionate and ultimately impossible for poetry to fully capture.
2024
Recipe For Greatness
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
Here's What You Do
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
Fancy Mac and Cheese
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
Letter To Summer
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.