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poetry: results 49–72 of 735

The Old Year  by JOHN CLARE

5 January 2010
Vol. 7, No. 4
classic, rhyme

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.

I Shoot Stars from My Veins  by JASON JOYCE

26 December 2009
Vol. 9, No. 4

Crinkled like bad origami

Parched pores

Thirsty eyes

Liebeslieder  by JOHN R. BEARDSLEY

23 December 2009
Vol. 9, No. 4
prose poem

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—

Stillwell, Oklahoma  by JOHNATHON WILLIAMS

13 December 2009
Vol. 9, No. 4

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.

Bibliomancy  by MIRIAM BIRD GREENBERG

10 December 2009
Vol. 9, No. 4

                              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.

Inari  by KATRINA ROBERTS

8 December 2009
Vol. 9, No. 4

Why do we love you? So easy:

You have many faces

And each one shines upon us.

Cartography  by KATRINA ROBERTS

6 December 2009
Vol. 9, No. 4

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…

The Farm-Labor Camp Is Just Down the Road  by KATRINA ROBERTS

4 December 2009
Vol. 9, No. 4

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.

Alessio's Hand  by KATRINA ROBERTS

2 December 2009
Vol. 9, No. 4

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…

Cover of a Country Song  by SEAN PATRICK HILL

23 November 2009
Vol. 9, No. 3

Note which figure the tree

triggers imperceptibly,


the night-blind awl,

the ingot of blood,


the face down grace

of grain…

Sermon to the Trash  by RICHARD SCHIFFMAN

20 November 2009
Vol. 9, No. 3

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…

Volcanoes and Whispers  by CAROLINA VARGAS

18 November 2009
Vol. 9, No. 3

The glass was empty except

for the cherry… the TV showed

volcanoes in Ecuador.

And rain and rain

in the South of France.

An Answer  by CAROLINA VARGAS

16 November 2009
Vol. 9, No. 3

Or let the answer be

that sweet scent of smoke

when in his special chair

he puffed then let out hummingbirds.

Don't Scream  by CAROLINA VARGAS

14 November 2009
Vol. 9, No. 3

Cut, cut the envelope says.

Keep it deep

and hide

my father says.


I obey limits, green soup

and insomnia.

Self-Portrait with Husk  by SOPHIE KLAHR

11 November 2009
Vol. 9, No. 3

Fiction made desperately, to fence in God.



Oh swollen mercury


Oh swollen Oh

Seminars in Art  by JESS BURNQUIST

2 November 2009
Vol. 9, No. 3
prose poem

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.

Servings  by JESS BURNQUIST

30 October 2009
Vol. 9, No. 3

The children have placed our eggplants

Beneath their shirts, purple boobs.


Earlier, daughter was pregnant

With a honeydew.

They Flee From Me  by SIR THOMAS WYATT

26 October 2009
Vol. 9, No. 3
classic

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

C:\>run laestrygonians.exe  by BRIAN OLIU

23 October 2009
Vol. 9, No. 3
prose poem

If there is something to be devoured, there is something to be devoured, this taste of whatever it is that makes things taste, the touching of tongues and the speaking of tongues in various languages, words that I have never heard, meanings that can never be parceled from the letters formed, these looping curves, these straight angles, up and to the left like angels circling above like buzzards, like vultures, all things holy and good…

Lucks, My Fair Falcon  by SIR THOMAS WYATT

21 October 2009
Vol. 9, No. 3
classic

Lucks, my fair falcon, and your fellows all,

   How well pleasant it were your liberty!

Ye not forsake me that fair might ye befall.

But they that sometime liked my company:

Like lice away from dead bodies they crawl.

Trained Ivies  by ELIZABETH HUGHEY

10 October 2009
Vol. 9, No. 3
prose poem

I'm carrying a black baby inside a white baby inside a floral blouse that serves as dress. I'm looking at a television through a shop window through which, by reflection, I see a floral blouse.

Questions for Emily  by ELIZABETH HUGHEY

8 October 2009
Vol. 9, No. 3
prose poem

Will a boy wake in the night and hear his way out of the dark room into a dark hall, past a painting of a pear too dim to see, like the picture of a sea horse inside a closed book. When he hears his feet on the carpet, will there be carpet? When he hears his father roll over in bed, will his father roll over? What about sleet tapping the window? Will his ears create the snowplow shaking snow from a bush? Or does the plow rev itself into engine?

Debt Etiquette  by ELIZABETH HUGHEY

6 October 2009
Vol. 9, No. 3

Never speak of it. Be silent as the little b. Lean into the graceful skewing

of the downward spiral. You can't stop the postman from delivering.

Millionaires at large in the garden are just as likely to pull up our fences.

Etiquettes  by ELIZABETH HUGHEY

4 October 2009
Vol. 9, No. 3

The tickets are for entering a new unimportance that insists it is all

made of glass, smooth enough to be skied upon, connecting

above water to below. You are connected to the Midwest

because your river is connected, but you are made up of non-river

elements, too. You can see how the water is also the skier…

 

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