Rachel Feder weaves together the sublime and the ordinary, the popular and the abstruse, the Romantic and the anti-Romantic. Really, how are celestial bodies and celebrities alike?

Drawing on breathless vernacular speech, richly painted images that seem to bloom and blow away as quickly as dandelion floss, and the rhythms and idioms of hip hop, Joseph Earl Thomas’s poem explores what it means to think and speak about other people in a few of the many languages of Black masculinity.

Kirsten Ihns’s ekphrastic poem, prompted by Kim Keever’s photograph Abstract 10245b.