poetry: results 1–24 of 695

you show up with pockets full of water: but what everyone notices is your large ears: someone whispers donkey: and gets the reply you mean like in Midsummer's Night Dream?: so what if you are different: you resent people jumping to conclusions…

not sure. the sun. but we knew.

the afternoons became burdens.

something to throw away late

at night. along with certain

perishables. under the yellowing

light the pickle jar. then morning

peeled peaches. then a still

afternoon.

A smack of jellyfish gelatinizes

the beach: man-o-war

blue bottles pop from hot

sand: tide churns these alien

bodies: we wonder why we

gather and destruct

            When the train picks up speed, it sounds like a woman screaming,

one woman all over the city, releasing her heat in a high, steady wail,

            smearing her red mouth along the tunnel walls. I make and unmake

myself. When the doors open, anyone can come in, anyone does.

You're a trigger finger dug into the starting gun,

the smack as it fires, the tense stroke of hooves

pressing into a fresh track. You're the curiosity

of a flashbulb nibbling air, tricky camera lens

grabbing a mane as it quivers back. I'm a rising

overture of thighs. I'm dirt exploding midair…

New husband, I have no

faithfulness to spoon into

our morning coffee,

and our evenings

are predictable as

the instars of caterpillars.

You snore, offer nothing…

tell us about evening and about the bright

star tell us about the huge dark wall

where it is pinned so if no one is looking

the sky is really burning and tell me it is my eyes

that douse it all to soot, black branches

with one root in carbon and budding eternity.

We will chalk out where

your heart balked forever,

mangled into some kind

of a horseshoe, lucked

over for the very last time—

Old papers thrown away,

      Old garments cast aside,

The talk of yesterday,

      Are things identified;

But time once torn away

      No voices can recall:

The eve of New Year's Day

      Left the Old Year lost to all.

Crinkled like bad origami

Parched pores

Thirsty eyes

Along the grassy creek-bank—upstream a beaver's dam, cobbled rust black limbs—all fragrance sunk deep in brown. The mud spattered turtle inches, and down in the slow bubble, the glass black and pebble, an eye—a cold February eye. It shimmers there, blinks; I am the frog song, the shrill whine of insects—

I pull a dog tick fat as a blueberry

from the small of my brother's back,

watch it roll, blood drunk

in the cup of my palm.

                              The men in their ghost shirts before dawn.

                  Sunset swallowed like a snake's body

working on a smaller animal. River making the best of it.

                              You can see where garbage eddies in the shallows,

                  raccoon prints eroding from the silty banks.

Why do we love you? So easy:

You have many faces

And each one shines upon us.

The body was one thing we always had

in common, even when between us

a continent unfolded. Eric says,

"We scattered his ashes beneath the Japanese Maple

here behind the house." No ceremony,

as you wished, but this…

Not coop so much as aviary. The way

everyone thinks

the youngest two are twins

despite their differences.

This memory of a blue dress

the tall man called a cool drink of water.

Comes to me in the dream of Odin's eye

resting in smooth silt at the bottom of the Well of Wisdom.

She was one of three sisters, her head thrown

back in laughter. It was hard to look for very long.

Are there still coyotes roaming those fields? A name floats

in—white eyelet, a dress. An armful of daisies…

Note which figure the tree

triggers imperceptibly,

the night-blind awl,

the ingot of blood,

the face down grace

of grain…

Everything passes, said the Buddha,

and I saw it myself on the river—

tennis balls and condoms,

waterlogs and dead dogs,

styrofoam battleships,

the mastless schooner of a rubber sandal…

The glass was empty except

for the cherry… the TV showed

volcanoes in Ecuador.

And rain and rain

in the South of France.

Or let the answer be

that sweet scent of smoke

when in his special chair

he puffed then let out hummingbirds.

Cut, cut the envelope says.

Keep it deep

and hide

my father says.

I obey limits, green soup

and insomnia.

Fiction made desperately, to fence in God.

Oh swollen mercury

Oh swollen Oh

One mother used to boil orange rinds in sugar for hours to form a leathered candy. When her daughter was released from Dachau, she vowed no tears. Then the soldier tore the skin of an orange. Today, I read in the Encyclopedia of Birthdays that orange is a calming color for those born in April. I can't paint my walls this spring without picturing a mother boiling sweets for silenced tongues. I place my compositions in the corner. People think it isn't risky to be a satellite. My god, what I've never seen.