poetry: results 1–24 of 533

Here's what I'm trying to say: The deer coming toward us through the dark

      and we're unable to see them

The car passing over the bridge into the maw of the city like a willing moth

      suddenly wrapped in fire

They get a forked stick to bear him down

And clap the dogs and take him to the town,

And bait him all the day with many dogs,

And laugh and shout and fright the scampering hogs.

He runs along and bites at all he meets:

They shout and hollo down the noisy streets.

Detective, we think you're afraid of spiders. You'd be surprised

to know what things are in your shed. We think you should feed us.

No one will ever know. Preserves, beets—anything you don't want.

We'll put the crumbs in our pockets. We'll drink lime soda.

They usually treated Detective Summers as though he were brave

because they thought spending time with him would bring their children back.

Summers approaches some women by what they're willing to do

or outdo. They believe it themselves, a freedom with bunions.

It's easy to use someone's body.

When you look up the other breast is gone.

You have lost yourself yourselves I mean.

No–a breast is not a self.

A self isn't too large and too small

Doesn't give milk no matter whose lips are on it

Doesn't disappear every night the self

Isn't tender the self is not attached.

I would tell you this directly. I would assemble a presentation of Polaroids and morals, protract the particular angles of her refraction. Serve canapés and arias and make allusions to a definition rooted in shape: the deltoid, the ellipse.

Lacking an alphabet to appropriate this flexure (which is where she maunders): a fable whose protagonist is light, the outskirts of an oral tradition, these are anxieties indigenous to our region.

Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill;

  Go, Shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes:

    No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,

  Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,

    Nor the cropp'd grasses shoot another head.

      But when the fields are still,

  And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,

    And only the white sheep are sometimes seen

    Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanch'd green;

  Come Shepherd, and again begin the quest.

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

It is said that memory veils, eats men

for breakfast, is an ipecac;

a white bird also, flung far

across the Perry Sound…

I have a zebra in my neck

going the wrong way against

his stripes, like Venetian blinds

caught in the throat

of a late afternoon hotel room.

She couldn't resist the beauty of wood grain in floorboards so she spent days resting there, pooled out and bled in like a spill.

When the body does something right, a happiness gathers above and behind its left shoulder.

The body, sensing the happiness, knows not to catch it

but knows not that the happiness too knows not to catch the body, which as it happens feels more acutely feelings located outside itself;

I wield a potent vocabulary. You're pulchritudinous. I napped

through English class. You know. Like. Um. Ah. You're hot.

Do you remember what I said, that night in the car?

You don't? Me neither. But at the time, it was true.

For a few moments in the deep overcast of late afternoon, the creek-bank ferns and my Gatorade glowed the same green. The light from the Earth goes out into space, hits the sun, and makes it shine.

When I say, "I can feel the toxins in my brain," I know I'm wrong. There are no nerves in the brain. But the sentence itself is toxic.

My father sings in German when he does the dishes;

his wedding ring clicking on glass cups and plates,

a metronome keeping a beat for some quiet counterpoint,

muted by the suds, the soapy water, and the singing.

what comes to pass

at the pass

of stitches, of interstices

of wet weather on sandy rocks?

in maiz, in maiz, gentle, ease

y with the cutlass easy maiz,

steady with the cutlass gentle

boarding axe, plank by plank

Swiss, great-grandmother says "blood" to the row of the riverboat gently covering its tracks. Father defends their western terms, "I'm no wagon, no horse." Anchored—land, land ho—grandfather's in the motor, radio, hull, in the rain. Aunt J says "he touched it, it's ruined" and pops bread from a bread pan. Uncles talk Canada, a state away, with its good hunting, fishing.

Say, "remove your red bandana" and even her doll's eyes blink—

even the Mekong stops flowing,

even the small Khmer orphan.

The throw-away camera aims, and shoots an expression, arm-distance away.

He called

my thumb the knuckled tornado; called me

darling when we hid in the closet,

giggling, fumbling, splendid. That was the roast,

the rest was gravy.

In black branches hanging

over the roof, four or five

crab apples, overripe. Even

when no one is looking, walls

exhibit images made by the troubled hands.

Washed from my hands

a thin film after shelving

jars filled with leeches pond

lilies green stems so when

the time comes to extract

bad blood mixing with the good

I feel nothing…

Because your water is discovered by clouds

rising into the rapt blue abyss of sky,

now your body is love, on the rise, a mist.