diVERSES Collective
Poets choose poets.
All of the voices you see below select the future poets you will see below.
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We do not accept submissions unless specifically noted. We are not a
paying market currently. Poets who appear below agree to sending us
audio, video, & written formats. We are best viewed on desktop/laptop.
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Welcome to the Collective.
Issue One
"UYP1"
Dior J. Stephens
Dior J. Stephens (they/he) wrote the chapbooks SCREAMS & lavender, 001, and CANNON! Their collection CRUEL/CRUEL is out with Nightboat Books. They're Managing Poetry Editor of Foglifter Journal and Press.
Twitter: @dolphinneptune
IG: @dolphinphotos
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"Viral"
Christopher Greggs
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Christopher J. Greggs is a poet, designer, and recording artist in Jersey City, NJ. He's a Cave Canem, Tin House, Callaloo, and Watering Hole Poetry Fellow, with work in places like TriQuarterly, Winter Tangerine, Texas Review. Instagram: @mynameisgreggs.
"abyss"
jaamil olawale kosoko
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jaamil is the author of Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts and recipient of the 2022 Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short film, 2021/22 MacDowell Fellowship, and 2020 Pew Fellowship in the Arts. IG @jaamil_means_beauty jaamil.com
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"Meditation on the Nature of Vastness and Its Limits"
Ariana Benson
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Her manuscript, Black Pastoral, won the 2022 Cave Canem Poetry Prize; she also received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the Porter House Review Poetry Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Ploughshares, and Poem-a-Day.
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"My mother and I" Ajanae Dawkins
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Ajanae Dawkins is an interdisciplinary poet, theologian, performer, and educator. She has been published in The Rumpus, Frontier Poetry, The Offing, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Ajanae, with an MFA from Randolpha, is currently a co-host of the VS Podcast and the Theology Editor for the EcoTheo Review.
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"UYP1"
Dior J. Stephens
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"Viral"
Christopher Greggs
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"abyss"
jaamil olawale kosoko
for Jordan Neely (1993-2023)
I have not been able to touch the destruction within me…
Audre Lorde, Power
Hell rose hot
and hungry
as a white chokehold
around another
Black neck.
Nostrils lit.
Eyes
and iPhones
clenched
at the sight.
The sheer lack
of air, the smell
of his last breath,
got Iblis
on brick. Thick,
it spit like lava.
By the time
the F train
conductor
snatched the lever,
turned grim reaper,
said,
you’re gonna kill ‘em!,
the three vigilantes
had already gone viral
orgying over
the 30 year old’s frame.
A fatal attraction.
No grammar
for the collision,
for the sirens
screaming
his body’s abyss
at a frequency
lower than death.
More and more lately, I find summer
thunder has become too sporadic
a lullaby. Even the stars don’t twinkle
so much as hesitate to glow, like bulbs
just before their filaments expire
and burst. I wonder if the sky
has finally given up on us.
***
In the desert, nature organizes itself
into patterns—clustered tessellations
with occasional breaks in form—
that our brains recognize as beauty.
Even the land seems to believe
that’s enough to make a waterless life
worth struggling through.
***
Studying astrology killed the wonder
of the stars, is the gist of a woman’s lament
I overhear on the bus. There is nothing
special at all about our galaxy, read
the first line of her textbook. I discover
a new fear: not of the notion itself,
but the comfort I take in accepting it as truth.
***
When I am making love, I don’t count
the space of the room in square feet.
When I am making a thing I love, I don’t
count my life in time. I’ve lived, now, just
long enough, to understand that some years
pass like minutes; others, decades. I’m saying
hell can have me only when it earns me.
***
I awaken from the nightmare: the war
hounds have been called back
to their cages. Vinegar bitters the roof
of my mouth. All that cosmic matter
burned to black, then light. What haunts me
is not mine, in the sense that I am not
mine, and so neither is anything else.
"Meditation on the Nature
of Vastness and its Limits"
Ariana Benson
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​
"My mother and I"
Ajanae Dawkins
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​
Perched on the dead wood and the wood still growing,
the crow lives in their sunday feathers. Funeral black
in all their dwelling. Stiff as the white of my knuckles
from the room next to my mother’s as she cries and caws.
My eyes are not so good as they have been as I can’t tell
if this is a crow or a raven. And I don’t know what it’s saying
to its family as it scans me for safety– the way I scan
any man who walks through the door or speaks. The crow
can hold a grudge and tell others of your birth marks,
your round face. A raven can mourn a death then comfort
their grieving. It’s the difference between a murder
and an unkindness, really. I kept all the scans
and cast irons ready. A man’s skull can be made
soft no matter how large he is. Crows have regional
dialects they can shift between. And my mother’s words come
slower now that she is bruised in the land of the undead.
A group ravens are called a conspiracy when not called
an unkindness. But are they either? Does it matter
that my mother is divorced instead of widowed?
And I, not yet an assassin?