poetry: results 1–24 of 729

Bald white trunk & dead black bark, toc-toc. Small shrugs

in long black coats, their stripped pine whipping at the skyline…

swiftly unveiled, in twos and threes, ravens and the ideas

of ravens drip down onto the air, black silk scarves

pulling each other through the silk blue sleeves

in a wintry sky & out into the mind's eye to stall and dip…

Born under the sign of Stromboli, wrinkled

As the face of the two-thousand-year-old man

With skin cap tied with braided thong beneath

His chin, pulled from the bog with forceps, Ingrid

My mother, my father a guy who lived in the sky.

The shaman finds a mirror carefully slipped

beneath the water of a running stream

will open a window in the land of the dead.

Here, the yellow and umber leaves, doom boats

strapping the current, slip quickly over the dappled

bottom where rusted wheels and bent scaffolds backdrop

The Triumph of the Will as it simmers there, bubbling,

awaiting the buoys of resurrection.

How many public sinks left running for ghost hands?

Your change given in foreign coins and still

coming up short. Imagine all the salt shakers

loosened upon the world; names scrawled into sidewalks;

people who hate people and work in services

you have to tip; patrons making waitresses cry right now.

Poor dear, she'll never get to disappear

until we tire of her taste. Like the minute hand

that doesn't move, our eyes' formaldehyde

keep her glued. And our literature, like her,

stares forever back at nothing much left.

May you live long under our beds and in our closets,

in our washing machines and our quiet showers.

We undress for you like no one else.

May you breathe across me as I learn to sit with you…

Before leaving the shop,

                        my mother waves

the tailor back, asks

for the remaining fabric

after the alterations.

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.