poetry: results 1–24 of 722

As if weeds, as if gardener.

And the chimp's owner swore

to the reporter she'd do it again,

raise the creature as offspring until

the mauling, the demolished

face, the frenzy, the bullets

piercing the animal flesh,

again.

I pulled a pocket watch from one of the

bodies tonight. It looks very old, has

diamonds as white as the droppings of an

aspen married in ash to a new earth.

Our sweet extinct are cheering in heaven!

Touch me

querida,

Inanna;

I swear,

this time—

we'll explode

like a super

nova—

like the last

passenger car

in the train…

In 1994 you slung thirty dirty verbs and my sister's pacifier over

the cinder block wall separating our house from the neighbor's.

You might not remember, but then, you weren't the one who had

to climb over and salvage it, pal; I always had your back, I was

the fixer. And yeah, we've been through this—I know you don't

exist but I must admit, even 15 years later, when nobody's around

I sometimes stick my fingers in ugly places…

Whether you salt me or not

We swallow our mouths together.

We call states.

Name together the animals we'd kill

Singing O Dead Angels all the while.

In the book there is a bloody picture of the bird.

Two women stretch the wingspan.

They are gloved and smiling.

Here off the alley we fend for nothing.

We move barefooted silently on stairs that do not creak.

I and Pangur Ban my cat,

Tis a like task we are at:

Hunting mice is his delight,

Hunting words I sit all night.

The wind tugs at the loose treeline.

Dark skiers push through fog—

the snow adjusts its many shrouds

while blind sled dogs awaken beside the river.

NAS FUT 1012.0 ↓ 31.5. The birches

slice a dull sun.

Laura said it must be a vagina of cabbage

with an army of white ants.

The postman in knee socks

wears an aluminum-foil hat

over his long red locks.

The bats are leaving their caves

and with some haste we have discovered early evening.

They wear the clever hats

of the Dog Star, of vehrmacht palettes,

not, mind you,

the German officers, but the bears

who are the visitors!

the other night, i waited up

while the living room burned to ash.

i recalled the way a concussion feels

and how changes brand us.

the cushions on the couch smeared and singed when

i sat down, but this was hardly an interruption.

he was bound and stitched. they hadn't a need to cut him loose.

after many times of him slipping, worming his way, logically,

out of those predicaments—the ones where

he swallowed the oaks and unbecame himself—less predictably each go round.

now they've given him a place, or worse.

the windmill yawns and turns over. the brass chimes

grunt, half in sleep. from the house, someone sings

and i will never forget this sound, the openness of that voice:

the only song—

there is only here and there and gone.

the cotton grows wings and rises,

rocking chairs bare their wooden knees.

there are amphetamines in the horses' hay,

psychotropics in the cattle trough,

on the dinnerplate, styrofoam cornbread.

a porch with a mouthful of boards says hello

to a church steeple, who asks

what is this cheap oak table tarnish smell in the air?

This is the story of my grandfather Benjamin Simonds

who survived Auschwitz. He kept

a scrap. Torn label of a can of con-

densed milk. He took dictation. He

dictated. He flipped the dialectic flapjack. He was

a gambling man. People think prisoners don't gamble.

Gamblers are always and only prisoners.

Once he told me that the spine is a prison.

I was going to write a poem about giving birth,

about meconium and vernix,

the cubic zirconium

scattered on the floor tiles of the hospital room.

It would have been about false

windows that face false

walls, about

the tiny hamburger—the mustard too yellow and sweet…

is all about showing off how different it will be from

the old curriculum. The old

books point us to the new

ones won't matter when the old

ones point us to the

new. You, the new you

will learn one

less language.

A man spent time at the bottom of a vase. "Arrange me, please," he heard the air around him say. The man knew he should have a plan but he had none. One day he noticed a fly outside. It bumped its big slimy eye on the glass.

I drove my truck across groomed Texas to an enormous crucifix, the biggest one in the nation. I was alien, terrified. I'd gone there with a purpose but arrived to find the place barren. A cop drove by. I turned back on to the highway.

Lying on the floor of the place we'd just moved to in Portland—B. and I—listening to CDs, there was nothing there but the two of us, and the music.

1) Darkness (So lately I have these visions — the sky at a hover by the off-ramp, steam percolating off the half-thawed river like something vaguely of the body, threaded with frost, hibernatory and beating)

2) Hair Loss (and so all she wants is a cold one and maybe a booth with a view of the local scene but then there's this strung-out looking, mullet-headed guy out of nowhere and suddenly she's in this white van, okay, it's like something straight of out "Silence of the Lambs" and the lack of light is already making her skin do weird things, breaking out like crazy…)

3) Tenderness (the way the body reveals its single, herbaceous intent)

but why for the life of it the singing, why the lust-fed hands

like a pair of burning tongs, the table lacquered in moonlight,

why the moonlight, inky and desolate, why the lollygagging

in the snack aisle, the lying awake in the room beneath the all-night

fisticuffs of rain, why if not for the life of it the body, shaken but not

apterous, not ruined but ruminant, a dissonance, a fog, a humming…

I run out of songs for the piano

which has been making sounds all night

connecting me to her past

like humerus swelled to the tune of frozen ground

a field turned flame and fern

in ink a weather unexpected

The hero in this story was never born. If you never say never, you can't ever say nevermind. Say this is the beginning. Say this is the end. Say your princess is in another castle. Say the castle is made of sand.

Who are you? Tinkerer or whistler? Whisperer or pickpocketer? Specter or wren? If a riddle, then answer in static trapped in antennas or flash powder dissuading children away from the dark. If not, when weather registers music in our bones, then answer with glass antlers shattering or stars carved of paraffin. Once, I dreamed of paper targets of a prey rare or fleet enough to make me turn away the gun.