January 2012
4 posts
1 tag
'Sci-Fi' by Tracy K. Smith →
2 tags
'September Elegies' by Randall Mann →
1 tag
'Vision' by Erika Funkhouser →
December 2011
16 posts
1 tag
'Dependants' by Paul Farley →
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'Reprise' by Deborah Brown →
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'Becoming Weather, 21' by Chris Martin →
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'U-District Incident Report' by Heather McHugh →
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'Forever War' by Nate Pritts →
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'Confetti Allegiance: Love Letter to Jim Brodey'... →
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'Architectural Masks' by Thomas Hardy
I There is a house with ivied walls, And mullioned windows worn and old, And the long dwellers in those halls Have souls that know but sordid calls, And dote on gold. II In a blazing brick and plated show Not far away a ‘villa’ gleams, And here a family few may know, With book and pencil, viol and bow, Lead inner lives of dreams. III The philosophic passers say, ...
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'Their Sex Life' by A. R. Ammons
One failure on Top of another
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'Continuity' by A. R. Ammons
I’ve pressed so far away from my desire that if you asked me what I want I would, accepting the harmonious completion of the drift, say annihilation, probably.
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'A Brief Attachment' by Cate Marvin
I regard your affection, find your teeth have left me a bruise necklace. The lipstick marks leech a trail, ear to ear, facsimile your smile. Your 40 ounces of malt beverage, your shrink hate, your eyes dialing 911. The hearts you draw with ballpoint on my cigarette packs when I’ve left the room, penned in your girl’s cursive, look demented, misshapen approximations of what I refuse to...
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'Confessions: My Father, Hummingbirds, and Franz...
Every effort is made to bring the colonised person to admit the inferiority of his culture… —Franz Fanon And there are days when storms hover Over my house, their brooding just this side of rage, An open hand about to slap a face. You won’t believe me When I tell you it is not personal. It isn’t. It only feels That way because the face is yours. So what if it is the only Face...
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'Designer Kisses' by Major Jackson
I’m glum about your sportive flesh in the empire of blab, and the latest guy running his trendy tongue like a tantalizing surge over your molars, how droll. Love by a graveyard is redundant, but the skin is an obstacle course like Miami where we are inescapably consigned: tourists keeping the views new. What as yet we desire, our own fonts of adoration. By morning, we’re laid out like...
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'After Baby After Baby' by Rachel Zucker
When we made love you had the dense body of a Doberman and the square head of a Rottweiler. With my eyes closed I saw: a light green plate with seared scallops and a perfect fillet of salmon on a cedar plank. Now I am safe in the deep V of a weekday wanting to tell you how the world is full of street signs and strollers and pregnant women in spandex. The bed and desk both want me. The...
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'Heart Condition' by Jericho Brown
I don’t want to hurt a man, but I like to hear one beg. Two people touch twice a month in ten hotels, and We call it long distance. He holds down one coast. I wander the other like any African American, Africa With its condition and America with its condition And black folk born in this nation content to carry Half of each. I shoulder my share. My man flies To touch me. Sky on our side....
4 tags
'Antique' by Arthur Rimbaud
Graceful son of Pan! Around your forehead crowned with small flowers and berries, your eyes, precious spheres, are moving. Spotted with brownish wine lees, your cheeks grow hollow. Your fangs are gleaming. Your chest is like a lyre, jingling sounds circulate between your blond arms. Your heart beats in that belly where the double sex sleeps. Walk at night, gently moving that thigh, that second...
3 tags
'Here' by Wislawa Szymborska
I can’t speak for elsewhere, but here on Earth we’ve got a fair supply of everything. Here we manufacture chairs and sorrows, scissors, tenderness, transistors, violins, teacups, dams, and quips. There may be more of everything elsewhere, but for reasons left unspecified they lack paintings, picture tubes, pierogies, handkerchiefs for tears. Here we have countless places with...
November 2011
11 posts
1 tag
'The Double-Bed Dream Gallows' by Richard...
Driving through hot brushy country the late autumn, I saw a hawk crucified on a barbed-wire fence. I guess as a kind of advertisement to other hawks, saying from the pages of a leading women’s magazine, “She’s beautiful, but burn all the maps to your body. I’m not here of my own choosing.”
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'He Made This Screen' by Marianne Moore →
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'Love Is Not All' by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned...
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'Ambition' by Loren Goodman
When music moves away From dance, atrophy sets in When poetry moves away From music, atrophy sets in I want one of those Trophies
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'White Night' by Anna Akhmatova
I haven’t locked the door, Nor lit the candles, You don’t know, don’t care, That tired I haven’t the strength To decide to go to bed. Seeing the fields fade in The sunset murk of pine-needles, And to know all is lost, That life is a cursed hell: I’ve got drunk On your voice in the doorway. I was sure you’d come back.
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'War Poet' by Sidney Keynes
I am the man who looked for peace and found My own eyes barbed. I am the man who groped for words and found An arrow in my hand. I am the builder whose firm walls surround A slipping land. When I grow sick or mad Mock me not nor chain me; When I reach for the wind Cast me not down Though my face is a burnt book And a wasted town.
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'Your Brain Is Yours' by Natalie Lyalin
I am baptized by coins with a faint smell of elderflower. I transfigure, blink in one part of the house and then another. A holy night unfolds and stands weakly. A child chemist mixes a star in a test tube. Glass shatters lightly. I am a saint. I soothe with marmalade and tonic. I embroider a pillow and give it a squeeze. I attach a heavy gold necklace to a horse rump. We clang along across the...
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'First Light Edging Cirrus' by Jane Hirshfield
1025 molecules are enough to call woodthrush or apple. A hummingbird, fewer. A wristwatch: 1024. An alphabet’s molecules, tasting of honey, iron, and salt, cannot be counted— as some strings, untouched, sound when a near one is speaking. As it was when love slipped inside us. It looked out face to face in every direction. Then it was inside the tree, the rock, the cloud.
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'In Flanders Fields' by John McCrae
In Flanders fields the poppies grow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place, and in the sky, The larks, still bravely singing, fly, Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the dead; short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe! To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be...
October 2011
1 post
1 tag
September 2011
3 posts
1 tag
'Autumn' by Amy Lowell
They brought me a quilled, yellow dahlia, Opulent, flaunting. Round gold Flung out of a pale green stalk. Round, ripe gold Of maturity, Meticulously frilled and flaming, A fire-ball of proclamation: Fecundity decked in staring yellow For all the world to see. They brought a quilled, yellow dahlia, To me who am barren Shall I send it to you, You who have taken with you All I once possessed?
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'playing with fire' by Evie Shockley →
(I don’t like to offer commentary or give captions to the poems I post but holy fuck, this really blew me away)
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'To be the thing' by Dorothea Lasky
To be the name uttered, but not to have the burden to be To be the name said, but not heard To not breathe anymore, to be the thing To be the thing being breathed To not be about to die, to be already dead To not have to disappoint To not have the burden of being late Or punctual To not eat, to not have to eat To not feel anything To not be the one whose affect is criticized To not pick...
August 2011
10 posts
1 tag
'The Hurricane' by William Carlos Williams
The tree lay down on the garage roof and stretched, You have your heaven, it said, go to it.
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'Lighthouse' by Alfred Corn
Pilot at the helm of a hidden headland it steers free from convergence with the freighter when fog and storm clouds gather Sparking communiqué no full stop ends its broadcast performed in a three-sixty sweep the cycle burning up five solar seconds Midnight eye that blinks away invisibility a high beam revealing as it scans whatever seas or ships return terra firma’s landmark gaze
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'Bantams in Pine-Woods' by Wallace Stevens
Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan Of tan with henna hackles, halt! Damned universal cock, as if the sun Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail. Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. Your world is you. I am my world. You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat! Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines, Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs, And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.
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'Each year' by Dora Malech
I snap the twig to try to trap the springing and I relearn the same lesson. You cannot make a keepsake of this season. Your heart’s not the source of that sort of sap, lacks what it takes to fuel, rejects the graft, though for a moment it’s your guilty fist that’s flowering. You’re no good host to this extremity that points now, broken, back at the dirt...
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from 'The Book of Hours', by Rainer Maria Rilke
It’s as if I’m pushing through massive mountains through hard veins, like solitary ore; and I’m so deep that I can see no end and no distance: everything became nearness and all the nearness turned to stone.
I’m still a novice in the realm of pain, — so this enormous darkness makes me small; But if it’s You — steel yourself, break in: that your whole hand will grip me and my whole scream will...
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'Cruelty' by Lucille Clifton
cruelty. don’t talk to me about cruelty or what i am capable of. and i killed them. i took a broom to their country and smashed and sliced without warning without stopping and i smiled all the time i was doing it. it was a holocaust of roaches, bodies, parts of bodies, red all over the ground. i didn’t ask their names. they had no names worth knowing. now i watch myself whenever i enter a...
1 tag
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'Tsiang' by Sarah Tsiang
My name is a speech impediment. A thick tongue. It smells like fish; like cooking in closed quarters, hand-me-downs and the hung-head shuffle of names that don’t want to change for gym class.
Names that expose the black hair, the unfamiliar gait of a body that doesn’t quite fit.
My name is the new kid stuck at the front of the class, wishing for the anonymity of a desk while the...
9 tags
The Guardian online: poetry workshop - names →
Several great Guardian online poetry workshop poems about names.
1 tag
'Meat Council Pronouncements' by Judy Prince
Pork has chosen to call itself gammon exclusively. It has also marketed a new dish called Gammon Stew containing 90 grams of potato to 1 gram of gammon. These Gammon Stews sell especially well now that Pork has decreed peas and onions unnecessary. Beef continues to enjoy the name “Steak” despite being mostly fat and gristle. Steak and Mushroom pies pride themselves on not being ...
July 2011
15 posts
1 tag
'Trip Hop' by Geoffrey Brock
I’ll pack my toothbrush and my cyanide molar the iPhone the car-seats and a tactical stroller I’ll pack a snack-bag with the Kraft food groups and white flags for me and black for my troops I’ll pack a fresh pack of Shark double-edge blades my boy’s Razr scooter and my girl’s blue shades I’ll pack doses of patience and some Kevlar smiles check our air and our...
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'The Pressure of the Moment' by Dara Wier
The pressure of the moment can cause someone to kill someone or something The leniency of consideration might treat with more kindness Which is to be desired. Or at least often to be desired. But if my house is on fire and you notice, I wish you would kill That fire. But if my hair is on fire, while I’m sure you’ll be enjoying The spectacle of it, act quickly or...
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'The Bottom' by Denise Duhamel
I stopped drinking on my way down the hill to the liquor store when two guys pulled up and tried to drag me into their pickup. I crossed the street then ran in the opposite direction, puffing against the incline. The stranger thrust into reverse and, when I wouldn’t talk to him, threw a bag of McDonald’s trash at me, Stuck up bitch. I stopped drinking when I realized I was fighting for the...
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'Trigger Guard' by Joanna Fuhrman
Everyone I ever loved is standing on a platform with a gun. In the cartoon version, a flag pops with the word ‘bang.’ In the soap opera version, my face turns the color of merlot. In the haiku version, metal gleams in the narrow shadow. In the Republican version, two guns wrap themselves in a single flag. In the Langpo version. idolatry yips yaps paradigm the. In my diary...
1 tag
from 'Broetry' by Brian McGackin →
(I really want this book now)