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poetry: results 193–216 of 735

Bohemian Hat Trick  by LORI LAMOTHE

17 June 2008
Vol. 8, No. 2

Last week, as you rode your bike home in rain

after cheating with a girl with hair the colors of hell,

you texted you'd been hit by spiritual lightning.

I want to be hit by spiritual lightning!

All evening I stood out on yellowed lawn

chanting in trimeter, holding a matched set of forks.

some pages from the book of Brussels  by CECILIA BORROMEO-AUSTIN

13 June 2008
Vol. 8, No. 2
prose poem

Suppose the night tasted like sugar and the streetlamps chimed the hour, would Flemish and French slang still matter? I was a little in love with you. The man scouring the Sunday market for vintage postcards. The child wailing after a drifting balloon. You made me forget how to count. But we danced flawlessly, our shadows spreading on the Belgian cobbles where tiny grasses grow in between.

Methought I saw my late espoused saint  by JOHN MILTON

Mine, as whom washed from spot of childbed taint

  Purification in the Old Law did save,

  And such as yet once more I trust to have

Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,


Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.

When I consider how my light is spent,  by JOHN MILTON

When I consider how my light is spent,

  Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

  And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent


To serve therewith my Maker, and present

  My true account, lest He returning chide;

Supplement  by KAREN LEPRI

5 June 2008
Vol. 8, No. 2

When I come, called, to the smallish

skylight, where a hornet huddles


in a cedar corner, trapped

by a metal sieve, wind entering


and leaving him, it is

a rough courtship.

A Tooth, A Child  by KAREN LEPRI

2 June 2008
Vol. 8, No. 2

Which one did you lose? Point to the black


cavern, sucked empty by the cell in need

of bones. And what else


did she thieve of skin stretched like loose


linen, and blood

turned water?

The Visitor  by RYO YAMAGUCHI

I wake up, and you are already gone. Every morning it's like this: my eyes flick open, and this punches me into the day…

Toy Story  by RYO YAMAGUCHI

Listen, friend, there is a proper way to hold the warehouse when its walls have been blown out like this, and it sits there, dumb in the field. Like so: imaginary sphere, bundle of noise. We are sitting; I'm wishing for a table to mark our spot in the hilly grass, and that's when we get the sudden feeling that we are to stand, that we are to do something, really do something, like torch our possessions and gather all the humanoid figures in the wood grain of the cabinets in Nancy's kitchen into a single line of sight, singing softly, little dirge as the day ends.

Driving back into the city  by KEETJE KUIPERS

9 May 2008
Vol. 8, No. 2

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

The Badger  by JOHN CLARE

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.

The Girls Approach the Fence  by FARRAH FIELD

5 May 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1

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.

Desperate Mothers Are an Easy Lay  by FARRAH FIELD

2 May 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1

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.

Losing Your Breasts  by JOY LADIN

29 April 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1

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.

Apocrypha #9  by RICHARD FROUDE

25 April 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1
prose poem

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.

The Scholar Gypsy  by MATTHEW ARNOLD

24 April 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1
classic, rhyme

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.

Dover Beach  by MATTHEW ARNOLD

23 April 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1
classic, rhyme

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Postcard from a Kitchen Window  by J. MAE BARIZO

17 April 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1

It is said that memory veils, eats men

for breakfast, is an ipecac;


a white bird also, flung far

across the Perry Sound…

Out of Sorts  by DAVID THORNBRUGH

10 April 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1

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.

The Yellow Absence  by MELISSA KOOSMANN

5 April 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1
prose poem

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.

Another  by MELISSA KOOSMANN

2 April 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1
prose poem

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;

Or Not  by JESSY RANDALL & DANIEL M. SHAPIRO

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.

Striped Cucumber Beetle  by MARK CUNNINGHAM

26 March 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1
prose poem

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.

Wedge-shaped Beetle  by MARK CUNNINGHAM

24 March 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1
prose poem

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.

When Cicadas Sing  by BENJAMIN MUELLER

19 March 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1

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.

 

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