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poetry: results 193–216 of 735
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.
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.
12 June 2008
Vol. 8, No. 2
classic, sonnet, rhyme
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.
11 June 2008
Vol. 8, No. 2
classic, sonnet, rhyme
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;
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.
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?
30 May 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1
prose poem
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…
27 May 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1
prose poem
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.
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
8 May 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1
classic, rhyme
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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;
28 March 2008
Vol. 8, No. 1
collaboration
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.
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.
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.
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.