poetry: results 289–312 of 735

Here, a closeness is lost in our morning rituals.

Some type of forgetfulness concerning

the risks we take, the casual violence inherent

to the most mundane of acts. That's what she liked,

I think. The rough slide of the blade.

Unlike the dress her mother wore, with long lace

sleeves and buttoned to the neck, a polite dress,

hers has a scoop neck not too low, filmy

fabric swaying with each step, a not too tight dress…

Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come,

For the woods are full of bluebells and the hedges full of bloom,

And the crow is on the oak a-building of her nest,

And love is burning diamonds in my true lover's breast…

The teacher's assignment: Stop making sense.

No problem; all along, we've only been half-baking sense.

Watched the dark come on, landing on rooftops, the civility of apartment windows & streetlights emerging with it, accompanying it like some harmony, which could only be imagined, or painted, by a Whistler, say, as far away from Lowell as he could get…

The minutes were read and we dealt with all at hand: the Club tea, Wright and his "Black Boy," alms to the poor, and the Urban League's request that all Negroes stay away from the State Fair.

We huddled in the fallout beneath the house

like we'd done each time before.

My brother and me.

The bass droned long enough for him

to unbutton my jeans.

It is found in everything given,

that the parts of our everything

are more than ever less in form

and only more in number.

I wanted to tell you there are mushrooms

sprouting from my toes

You said you were going to mow the lawn

I wanted to tell you there is a foot of snow

outside of Miami in the summer

The fisherman threatens to climb philodendrons with daisy cutters. Threatens to mount his motorbike barebacked. Ursula emerges from behind stacked bricks. Like hyenas they thrash in ghetto-rage.

In 1972 Stephen Hawking postulated the existence of bone-crushing black holes where nothing could escape, not even a gizzard, or light. Hawking has changed his mind. Now he proposes that information can escape, a radiation of a peculiar sort, one that can transmit bursts of black light like a Britney Spears concert.

Because his penis was there in my hand as a butter knife would have been in my hand if I was about to butter bread. I wasn't about to butter bread or say no but I was happy nonetheless. It was a little weapon, a toy.

What was it like?

It was like he wouldn't listen to me but listening to me the way our father would listen to us with his eyes closed nodding yay ya, yay ya.

Wrinkled new red body, startling in the empty air, once blanketed

by mother flesh, now swaddled tight in an imitating blanket.

For weeks, the visiting priest raged about the love of Cain and the sins of Adam

while, on break at the drugstore, I read letters to the editors of pornographic magazines.

So many young and horny housewives, so many sodomized waitresses!

High, I climbed Jim Corder's roof and watched his older sister skinny-dip.

In the living room is the built-in weather

from the air conditioner. The walls are

swollen in certain places away from her

reach. In the absence of miracles, the pot

simmers a new husband in the oven.

In the morning my face wears wrinkles. Pants face. Sleepy pants. Face of demonic possession and lack of caffeine. God then is the sound of the faucet, the coffee dripping.

I wish I could make you come

near, not worrying about fish or what your father

might think about the size of whatever's in anyone's pants. Our skin

peeling back like winter's slow walk across a continent.

Don't judge me if I love wine

if I like fire

when it's alive.

Today is ten days, which are one week and three days, of the Omer

Be compassionate for no reason

because you live in the middle of a sentence

at any point suspended…

If you love the sky as you become vastness, blue is no longer

a color separate from expanse. You have only to remember

to enter this aerial sanctuary.

I should be sorry to transport myself so carelessly.

Might some young Einstein not re-fuse this bleak-appointed nucleus,

Retool its quarks, by Bunsen's blue-tongued flame, into Florida?

Somehow, my organs are ordered and operating. But I always carry this

briefcase in my right hand.

This match-head's

halo of flame

is another, sudden wall. Outside the barn's

now lit follicle, you are face down

as if you had fallen without instruction.

A patrolman approaches. I pull a seam of sod underneath

the picnic table and hide the stash I was given. All of the milled

wood is rotten. The boardwalk is dark and spongy.