browse:
poetry: results 121–144 of 735
27 March 2009
Vol. 9, No. 1
prose poem
After she left, I found the Collins glass of table wine on the windowsill. It counterweighed the nightbird's absence. After she left the second time, I lit a candle in our churchyard…
18 March 2009
Vol. 9, No. 1
Half or fast
asleep, two or three—
times my father pulls
up a wood chair and strums
the guitar, hums the bridge
over troubled water—
15 March 2009
Vol. 9, No. 1
Even as the outside world wilts in peculiar
greens, the hideous green of rotten fruit
soft and paunchy about the neck,
how a body goes in time.
Do you remember the promise we made,
lying half-naked in the thick of April?
8 March 2009
Vol. 9, No. 1
Pigment lingers
in the weave of thick paper,
the dusty blood ring
of the wineglass.
The kiss-traced napkins
tossed in piles
like the wrappings of secrets,
disappointingly empty.
5 March 2009
Vol. 9, No. 1
I was so high that I sat on my porch
looking and looking at the streetlights glowing.
The whole world was new.
By Saturday, I'm evacuating,
putting eye drops in as I drive,
feeling like a rat for abandoning Catherine.
She'd said, "It'll turn. I'll be fine."
I gave up. Left her to her fate.
2 March 2009
Vol. 9, No. 1
In July of last year my Hepatitis C
started up again. Maybe it come
from Vietnam, cause I was wounded
and had a blood transfusion in the army.
I don't know. One year I had a cold
and took aspirin and kept on working.
The next thing I know,
I can't breathe.
27 February 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
i dreamt i couldn't find
my spanish class like you
who have that dream of
finding not and failing who
i just the same
grandmother said
dream the i
& leave it out
but left is what
and what is who forgetting
20 February 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
prose poem
it is 7:30 am on the 4 train to the bronx we are heading fast uptown doors swinging rough out from their sockets rush of burnside fordham road kingsbridge terrace old armory dirt and trash mark the concrete below me rip of train i sit next to a woman with the number nine on her chest sprawling her breasts stretched her baby sleeps below sound
16 February 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
prose poem
Growing wild and rank, out in the grass. They asked me to bend down on my knees and rip the dandelions out with my teeth. Not just me. The group of us. Bend down, they said. Your teeth, they said.
15 February 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
classic, translation
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you.
14 February 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
classic, translation
again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers…
13 February 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
classic
What if I say I shall not wait!
What if I burst the fleshly Gate—
And pass, escaped—to thee!
5 February 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
The weeping women cause a scene at the post office.
No one stares,
exactly, but no kindness is shown. No door is held open as they struggle to exit.
2 February 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
His heart was colorless
until he discovered the cavity's
lavender cadence and its wildflower
breezed shapes, streaked with cool
witch hazel poultice.
29 January 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
ghazal
She watched my arm's arc as I heaved the stick.
I plumbed her eyes for something, and the dog retrieved the stick.
At the abandoned mine she put her hand on mine
To guide me first to second; awkwardly, I learned to drive stick.
22 January 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
I wanted a war in the sky.
I wanted to see the weak
slip through the air like dead
birds to the tempestuous water,
not that pathetic confusion—
the stupid shapes they make.
19 January 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
crown of sonnets, sonnet, rhyme
The birds I hear don't sound like opera, not
like flutes or piccolos at play. They sound
like birds. Sometimes the birds are all I've got.
There's nothing grand but wakefulness, the ground
I jump from; nothing but the shining air…
15 January 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
Each day less
room less water. What I wouldn't give
for roses and thorns for
roses. We drew straws
and she cried
that glass shod bitch birches
follow her home…
12 January 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
I am telling someone else's story.
This is not my magnolia
tree, and these are not
my shelled pecans.
I eat them anyway.
9 January 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
sonnet
Tonight, lightening amps the A-frames,
tilts the drone of my fridge and A/C—
surrounded by the daily buzz,
wonder if I percolate to the same
watt-worn beat. Lights go out,
storm pruning the trees, dark kitchen
good for thinking how too many shallow
currents run me.
6 January 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
Quails don't have chicks when it doesn't rain,
but I had you in a dry year of war when we fed
on bull nettle in eyebright and meadowsweet.
The footage is from Lebanon this time. You ask
if they fight the buildings down, and why.
23 December 2008
Vol. 8, No. 4
classic, rhyme
O my Luve's like a red, red rose
That's newly sprung in June:
O my Luve's like the melodie
That's sweetly play'd in tune!
14 December 2008
Vol. 8, No. 4
The sycamore mark on her inner thigh is a continent
about to divide itself into the angel
that sat in the votive light
of a fourteen year-old's cigarette, and the angel
that was never there…
11 December 2008
Vol. 8, No. 4
I'm nurse, nurturer, old
knife-girl drawing the moon like iron through the far skylight. The vents sliding
temperate breaths through metal.
I love an animal that'll open
like a girl—