Poetry should not always make you comfortable. On the contrary, it should take you somewhere or put you in another person's shoes so that you can share an experience or feel something that you never have felt before. These five poems below will take you on a trip trough various emotional conditions, good and bad. Above all, they will give you a new perspective into what it is like to be someone other than yourself.

1. Last Meal: Breakfast Tacos, San Antonio, Tejas by Laurie Ann Guerrero

Guerrero forms a lustful interaction between Spanish and English in her poem. By building metaphors between her body and Spanish cuisine, she projects her desire to be wholly consumed and had eternally. Watch out for undeniably sexy lines that will make your mind wander, such as “Let me be your last meal: / mouthfuls of my never-to-be-digested / face...”

2. English Mole by Anna Maria Hong

Comparing herself to a tunneling mole rat, Hong depicts her low and detached condition after a suicide attempt. The poem is mostly composed of sentence fragments and the grotesque images held within each, such as Hong’s description of the “raw pink claws” she uses to “patrol the worm-drench of / my thinking.” By the end of the poem, she is aware of the difficult task of recovering from her near-death experience, while trying to see herself as anything more than just “a noun or an entry.”

3. Down in the Valley by Joshua Mehigan

A girl returns home for winter break after her first semester of college. In this poem, Mehigan puts the reader in the girl’s shoes, from the downtown bar to the forest clearing after having “a drink or two.” It is not a happy homecoming, as the girl finds herself drunk and alone outside in the winter, overcome by emotions that “had been gone a lifetime.” All that we are left with is the last ominous line: “The worst thing that can happen happened here.”

4. El Salvador by Javier Zamora

The pains and perils of immigrating are centered front and clear in this poem. Zamora details his troubled relationship with his native country to give readers a glimpse at why people make the daily difficult decisions of leaving their homes. The poem delivers troubling lines, such as: “every day black bags, more and more of us leave.” Whether these “black bags” are for luggage or corpses, Zamora pleads with El Salvador to “Make it easier / to never have to risk our lives.”

5. Feeling Fucked Up by Etheridge Knight

The late Etheridge Knight gave us this unfiltered piece where he outlines the tribulations associated with the break up between him and his “woman.” Beginning with the cry “Lord she’s gone done left me” and moving onto him missing “her softness and her midnight sighs,” the poem rapidly shifts into an outburst of anger in which Knight drops the f-bomb fourteen times against anything and everything, from “Coltrane” to “all the animals that roam the earth” to “god jesus and all the disciples.” By the end, however, we sympathize with the desperate state that Knight has found himself in, as he surrenders his aggression and confesses “all i want now is my woman back / so my soul can sing.”