editors' select: results 25–48 of 49

For two full days the sirens
realized their high notes
in the quivering saucers
stacked inside cupboards…

My eye never filled with blood.
I never asked why
was I drugged and held down. Taken away.
Mesmerized. I wasn't a two-headed dog…

In the middle of it, being riven
apart by a finger, by a stiff tongue probing
the blind bone tail of my spine…

It is both the depth of field and snow
that have shortened the telephone poles
by half or more.

I had a laughter & for that
you had fir trees.

And why not an equation? The numbers
          keep him warm at night, beg him to read stories.

They believe in him when his wife will not,
          when the forecast calls for snow, unending snow…

Not the northern lights or the atom's first splitting.
Not the backyard, the tree, or the fence.
Ladybugs landed all day in everyone's hair,
An invasion.

His cubicle wall shuddered for the third time in the last hour, and he automatically began fishing fallen thumbtacks and papers from the crevice where the wall met his desk. He'd tried talking to her. He'd tried making a joke of it. But no matter what he said, Patricia Trumble's enthusiasm, speed, and girth propelled her rolling desk chair into their shared wall space repeatedly each day.

What do you love the most?
      Say the reddish work of death
as it strolls through the fields…

If Cyclops Mary heard it.
If that sentence flew clean into the ear.
If the whole thing traveled pure,
unrustled by the pigeons.

I will wander afield as you shall pace a plot
made similar by the action of our actual soles,
treading the salted soil or goodly ice
in the sun's track…

In the dark early morning of a heavy snow there is the sound of metal against rock, a scraping, low at first but relentless, insinuating. It worms itself into my dream, insisting that I awake. Outside it is dark but I can make out the figure of a man with a shovel.

"Pat, you should start doing the wangs now so that the sass is nice and tacky," Tom says to me as he pumps the keg. Tom is wiry and handsome. I'm neither of these things.

Let us first think about our spines.
Twitching in the harmless outfit. See blades
& sockets, then dinosaurs. Then see the scar
of string through our center.

The blood stain on the chair
in our bedroom at the four-star hotel
does not bother me.

Ellie, barefooted, has just stepped on a wasp. She doesn't feel it at first—not for the quick pangs of summer heat radiating off the gravel drive—but soon an ache travels up her leg and she lets out a shriek…

Once again, we find
ourselves under the
anarchy of starlight…

He posed and I photographed him in our hallway on Mercer Street, so pleased by the fact that we had one. The microwave was shiny and white and built in under the counter, suspended, with bright blue numbers that kept time.

This hammock is strung for one, and it's so humid outside that we stink. If I concentrate, maybe I can weigh us down, till the netting is barely grazing the acorns below us. When we touch the ground I will orgasm. I'm preparing for it now, facing down while you sleep turned towards the sky, my breath moving your collar.

The party ended when someone threw the baby in through the window.