POETS OF QUEENS 2

Francisco Delgado
The Meringue Sky Above LaGuardia


When I first wake up
and it could be
any day of the week,

I wait until it settles
on the right day.
Today,

when there’s a plane
flying through the meringue sky
above LaGuardia

and birds have returned
to the trees
outside my window.

I pretend these birds
are the same
that sang to us last year.

And the year before.
And the year before that.

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Near Your Mirror Home (Stay On)

by Paolo Javier

The dualities in Paolo Javier's deceptively slim new volume of poetry span the formal and topical, featuring a serial poem that revels in/reveals the slipperiness of desire and separation from place and language in the Dreaming, and a long poem that roars at white supremacy, misogyny, and horizontal hate in our nightmare moment of late US American empire. Oneiric and concrete, modular and incantatory, Near Your Mirror Home (Stay On) takes readers on a voyage to its depths, while signaling exciting new turns in the poetics of one of Queens County's more restless language artists.

Finalist for the Big Other Book Award for Poetry.
Check out CLMP's reading list for Filipino American History Month.
Listen to Paolo Javier on the Truth to Power Show episode 292.
Read Paolo Javier's work in poem-a-day

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Orpheus and Eurydice in New York

by Olena Boryshpolets (Author), Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko (Translator)

"Set against the world’s fragility and Ukraine’s fight for survival, Olena Boryshpolets’ bilingual poetry collection Orpheus and Eurydice in New York (Poets of Queens Press, 2024) is a journey into the harrowing separations war creates from nature, from homeland, and from oneself....these poems establish a new poetic architecture in which the brutality humans inflict on one another fuses with the saving grace inherent in the smallest of interactions between humanity and nature." -- Nicole Yurcaba, European Literature Network

Walcott Prize Short List, 2025

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More books by Poets of Queens

Past/Present and Other Poems by Robert Kaplan

Breakdown Dancer by Vijay R Nathan

A Little Before Twelve by Cynthia Andrews

Metal, Heavy by Micah D Zevin

Happy Lovers by Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko

The Sky Inside Your Body by Christina Turczyn