suayptalha/Poetry-Foundation-Poems · Datasets at Hugging Face

Unnamed: 0 int64 0 199	Title stringlengths 7 245	Poem stringlengths 4 88.7k	Poet stringlengths 2 57	Tags stringlengths 4 411 ⌀
115	W is for Walt Whitman's Soul	One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: "loot." WILLIAM DALRYMPLE It sits with a fork made from a lotus on an ivory chair eating an elephant steak in the company of bears and feral nautch girls on a monsoon evening incandescent w...	Divya Victor	Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity
116	J is for Jarasandha	There once lived a great king whose twin wives could bear him no children. A wandering sage saw the king’s grief and offered him a magical mango. She who ate the mango would be with child. As he had two wives, the king cut the mango into two perfect halves and offered one half to each wife. After nine month...	Divya Victor	Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends
117	M is for Michael Jackson and Malcolm X	In the epilogue to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley recounts meeting a pensive Malcolm at the Kennedy airport, watching newly immigrated children “romping and playing” in their sudden home. “By tomorrow night,” Malcolm says to Alex, “they’ll know how to say their first English word—nigger.” Before cabl...	Divya Victor	Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity
118	How It Worked	It was hard to sit there with my father, watching one of my sister's girls playing a set of tennis against my son or daughter because he'd forget himself and with a groan of disappointment or a grunt of sympathetic exertion make it clear that he was rooting for my sister's child and against mine. There...	Jeffrey Harrison	null
119	In Memory of My Heavy Metal Years	There goes the aluminum, the antimony, the arsenic the barium, the cadmium, the cesium, the gadolinium the lead the mercury the nickel, the thalium, and the tin. There goes that job spraying lawns with chemicals, driving the Merc three-quarter ton with a tank on the back and no brakes t...	Jeff Derksen	Living,Coming of Age,The Body
120	The Wall	Someone has opened a giant map and with the tips of our fingers, each of us suddenly blind, we track the black cold of this monument for names we know like finding a route home. Lost here this damp spring morning, the cherries exploding like the fourth of July, we wonder how many maps of Viet N...	Bruce Guernsey	null
121	Strict Diet	Though the doctors said no salt, salt was all my father craved. His body bloated, skin water-logged and gray, still he wanted potato chips, honey-baked ham, greasy slabs of Polish sausage from Piekutowski's. He begged for pepperoni pizza, garlic butter, ribs slathered in sauce. But when I did the sho...	James Crews	null
122	First Fall	I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark morning streets, I point and name. Look, the sycamores, their mottled, paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves rusting and crisping at the edges. I walk through Schiller Park with you on my chest. Stars smolder well into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks, the...	Maggie Smith	Living,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Fall
123	You Could Never Take A Car to Greenland,	my daughter says. Unless the car could float. Unless by car you mean boat. Unless the ocean turned to ice and promised not to crack. Unless Greenland floated over here, having lifted its anchor. Unless we could row our country there. Our whole continent would have to come along, wouldn't it? Unless we ...	Maggie Smith	Living,Youth,Relationships,Family & Ancestors
124	Parachute	Because a lie is not a lie if the teller believes it, the way beautiful things reassure us of the world’s wholeness, of our wholeness, is not quite a lie. Beautiful things believe their own narrative, the narrative that makes them beautiful. I almost believed it until the new mother strappe...	Maggie Smith	Living,Death,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors
125	What I Carried	I carried my fear of the world to my children, but they refused it. I carried my fear of the world on my chest, where I once carried my children, where some nights it slept as newborns sleep, where it purred but mostly growled, where it licked sweat from my clavicles. I carried my fear of the...	Maggie Smith	Living,Life Choices,Relationships,Family & Ancestors
126	The First Woman	She was my Sunday school teacher when I was just seven and eight. He was the newly hired pastor, an albino, alarming sight with his transparent eyelashes and mouse-pink skin that looked like it might hurt whenever she caressed his arm. Since Eva was her name, to my child’s mind it made great ...	Aleida Rodríguez	Living,Coming of Age,Youth,Activities,School & Learning,Religion,Christianity
127	History	In art, politics, school, church, business, love or marriage—in a piece of work or in a career— strongly spent is synonymous with kept. —Robert Frost She taught me the names of flowers: calendula, ranunculus, Iceland poppy. ...	Aleida Rodríguez	Living,Marriage & Companionship,Separation & Divorce,Love,Heartache & Loss,Realistic & Complicated
128	Little Cuba Stories/Cuentos de Cuba	V. A. There are no doors between the rooms. The archways bore through the house like a tunnel through a mountain. The room one falls into after my parents’ is the largest and serves as two bedrooms divided by an invisible wall. Half of it is my brother’s ...	Aleida Rodríguez	Living,Youth,Nature,Animals
129	The Invisible Body	Regla lesbia: Flexible rule that may be adjusted to any body to be measured. Compare regla fija: standard. —The Velázquez Dictionary I. In the garden, it’s there. Even when you’re inside you feel it, as though it were you standing naked...	Aleida Rodríguez	Living,The Body,Love,Desire
130	Trying to See Auras at the Airport	Recycled over and over people born look like parents, grandparents, sister or brother, or perhaps a throwback from an earlier ancestor, the hawk nose, a hard ridged forehead, the cleft in the chin or a blue birthmark on the arm, the stomach, the dainty fresh bum of a newborn each unique like a snow...	Angela C. Trudell Vasquez	Living,Growing Old,The Body,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors
131	Mark Twain	If the ashes of Mark Twain lie in the Mississippi River then I’m sure he does rise up some days emerge from dark polluted depths to walk over water to land and scans the horizon for change being a curious sort, he sees the crisis rise again another war on the horizon and shakes his craggy head to s...	Angela C. Trudell Vasquez	Mythology & Folklore,Ghosts & the Supernatural
132	[A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing]	A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare colors Too late the last express passes through the dust of gardens	John Ashbery	null
133	Ilulissat	Outside outside myself there is a world, he rumbled, subject to my incursions ...	Lesley Harrison	Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams
134	Nude	from Pia Arke's exhibition Arctic Hysteria at Greenland's National Museum & Archives, Nuuk, 2010 i. I am in my body. I am here, in front of you. I am the temperature in this room. I am undressed in my nudity; I am the light and shade you feel. I am more like other people than like you. I ha...	Lesley Harrison	Desire,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality
135	Eday, North Isles	GUITH a greylag morning, the sea a conscious blue. CALF SOUND orca in a sea blue room, breathing pearls that rise to the surface. GROATHA the plenum of the shed: every part infilled with flutter, ...	Lesley Harrison	Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams
136	In an Artist's Studio	One face looks out from all his canvases, One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans: We found her hidden just behind those screens, That mirror gave back all her loveliness. A queen in opal or in ruby dress, A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens, A saint, an angel — every canvas means The same one...	Christina Rossetti	null
137	A Triad	Three sang of love together: one with lips Crimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow, Flushed to the yellow hair and finger tips; And one there sang who soft and smooth as snow Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show; And one was blue with famine after love, Who like a harpstring snapped rang...	Christina Rossetti	null
138	From the Antique	It's a weary life, it is, she said: Doubly blank in a woman's lot: I wish and I wish I were a man: Or, better then any being, were not: Were nothing at all in all the world, Not a body and not a soul: Not so much as a grain of dust Or a drop of water from pole to pole. Still the world would wag on th...	Christina Rossetti	null
139	Winter: My Secret	I tell my secret? No indeed, not I; Perhaps some day, who knows? But not today; it froze, and blows and snows, And you’re too curious: fie! You want to hear it? well: Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell. Or, after all, perhaps there’s none: Suppose there is no secret after all, But only just my ...	Christina Rossetti	null
140	No, Thank You, John	I never said I loved you, John: Why will you tease me, day by day, And wax a weariness to think upon With always "do" and "pray"? You know I never loved you, John; No fault of mine made me your toast: Why will you haunt me with a face as wan As shows an hour-old ghost? ...	Christina Rossetti	null
141	A Study (A Soul)	She stands as pale as Parian statues stand; Like Cleopatra when she turned at bay, And felt her strength above the Roman sway, And felt the aspic writhing in her hand. Her face is steadfast toward the shadowy land, For dim beyond it looms the light of day; Her feet are steadfast; all the arduous way Th...	Christina Rossetti	null
142	Negative Space	1. I was born on a Tuesday in April. I didn't cry. Not because I was stunned. I wasn't even mad. I was the lucky egg, trained for gratitude inside the belly for nine months straight. Two workers welded bunk beds at the end of the delivery room. One on top of the other. My universe might have been the w...	Luljeta Lleshanaku	Living,Coming of Age,Religion,Faith & Doubt,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,History & Politics
143	Via Politica	I grew up in a big house where weakness and expressions of joy deserved punishment. And I was raised on the via politica with the grease of yesterday’s glories, a thick grease collected under arctic skies. I was lit up. My notebooks, my hair, my heart reeked of smoke. That’s when we saw each othe...	Luljeta Lleshanaku	Social Commentaries,History & Politics
144	Acupuncture	Among the personal objects inside a 2100-year-old Chinese tomb, archaeologists found nine acupuncture needles, four gold and five silver. Long before knowing why, ancient doctors knew that pain must be fought with pain. It’s quite simple: an array of needles pricking your arm for a properly functio...	Luljeta Lleshanaku	Social Commentaries,History & Politics
145	Homo Antarcticus	"The wild will keep calling and calling forever in your ears. You cannot escape the 'little voices.'" —Frank Wild 1. Here I rest, in South Georgia. A few feet of evolution away lie the graves of whale hunters, pointing north. A white fence shields them from elephant seals and their ...	Luljeta Lleshanaku	Living,Death,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Mythology & Folklore,Heroes & Patriotism
146	All the Dead Boys Look Like Me	Last time I saw myself die is when police killed Jessie Hernandez A 17 year old brown queer // who was sleeping in their car Yesterday I saw myself die again // Fifty times I died in Orlando // & I remember reading // Dr. José Esteban Muñoz before h...	Christopher Soto	Living,Death,Love,Desire,Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment
147	Heartbeats	Work out. Ten laps. Chin ups. Look good. Steam room. Dress warm. Call home. Fresh air. Eat right. Rest well. Sweetheart. Safe sex. Sore throat. Long flu. Hard nodes. Beware. Test blood. Count cells. Reds thin. Whites low. Dress warm. Eat well. Short breath. Fatigue. Ni...	Melvin Dixon	Living,Health & Illness
148	The Lord's Prayer	You can't fake it. You know when I fail to achieve the expected: palm the becoming- comatose bullfrog, legs collapsing as they may, and chuck it (we used to say) high as you can. Let it fly stone-like to the skylight in the low dome of fog—another requiremen...	Anthony Carelli	Living,Youth,Nature,Animals,Religion,Christianity,The Spiritual
149	I Look for You	I look for you early, my rock and my refuge, offering you worship morning and night; before your vastness I come confused and afraid, for you see the thoughts of my heart. What could the heart and tongue compose, or spirit’s strength within me to s...	Solomon Ibn Gabirol	Religion,God & the Divine,Judaism,Yom Kippur
150	Send Your Spirit	Send your spirit to revive our corpses, and ripple the longed-for land again. The crops come from you; you’re good to all— and always return to restore what has been.	Solomon Ibn Gabirol	Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Religion,God & the Divine,Judaism,Passover
151	Lord,	all my desire is here before you, whether or not I speak of it: I'd seek your favor, for an instant, then die— if only you would grant my wish. I'd place my spirit in your hand, then sleep—and in that sleep find sweetness. I wander from you—and die alive; the closer I cling—I li...	Yehudah Halevi	Living,Death,Religion,God & the Divine,Judaism,Yom Kippur
152	At the Hour of Closing	Lord of wondrous workings,grant us understanding— now at the hour of closing. A chosen few are called, their eyes toward you lifting— they stand exalted in their trembling now, at the hour of closing. They pour forth their souls; erase, then, their straying— and grant them, Lo...	Moses ibn Ezra	Religion,Judaism
153	Prayer	For all the pain passed down the genes or latent in the very grain of being; for the lordless mornings, the smear of spirit words intuit and inter; for all the nightfall neverness inking into me even now, my prayer is that a mind blurred ...	Christian Wiman	Living,The Mind,Religion,The Spiritual
154	[the target is a record of the past history of the target]	the target is a record of the past history of the target or forever hold your or told you so complacent mention repeats numerous trills in memory sugar and spice in the bag suppressed supposedly on an axis allow for the idea to rest	Jen Hofer	null
155	[a bullet has passed through]	a bullet has passed through spent the time elsewhere to need, tenderly, potential does not need to be bought, cannot in fact refute the cause, rather catches	Jen Hofer	null
156	Waiting For a Poem	I’m waiting for a poem, something rough, not elaborate or out of control, something undisturbed by curses, a white raven released from darkness. Words that come naturally, without aiming at anything, a bullet without a target, warning shots to the sky in newly occupied lands. A poem that will...	Luljeta Lleshanaku	Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict
157	Prisoners	Prisoners guilty or not always look the same when they are released— patriarchs dethroned. This one just passed through the gate head bowed despite not being tall his gestures like a Bedouin’s entering the tent he carried on his back all day long. Cotton curtains, stone walls, the smell of ...	Luljeta Lleshanaku	Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment
158	We Lived	We lived in the long intolerable called God. We seemed happy. I don’t mean content I mean heroin happy, donkey dentures, I mean drycleaned deacons expunging suffering from Calcutta with the cut of their jaws I mean the always alto and surely anusless angels divvying up the deviled eggs and ...	Christian Wiman	Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine
159	The Second O of Sorrow	Somehow, I am still here, long after transistor radios, the eight-tracks my father blared driving from town to town across Ohio selling things, the music where we danced just to keep alive. I now understand I was not supposed to leave so soon, half a century a kind of boulder that I’ve pushed...	Sean Thomas Dougherty	Living,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors
160	Biography of LeBron as Ohio	When is a poem one word? Even at 17 he was Baraka on the court, Coltrane gold toned, a kind of running riff, more than boy-child, man-child, he was one word like Prince. How back in those drunken days when I still ran in bars & played schoolyard ball & wagered fives & ten...	Sean Thomas Dougherty	Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity,Town & Country Life
161	The Welty Tour	In the next room, Peter’s gloved hands crack cordoned-off spines: he has been granted permission, his agent’s call his pedigree. So the tour itself is only the docent and me. He is docile, eager to please, leads me up the stairs and takes me to the bed.The coverlet is authentic, he says. He lectures me o...	Rebecca Morgan Frank	Love,Unrequited Love,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends
162	The Moon’s Magnetic Field Once Came from an Asteroid	When you walked in it was like recognizing the moon when he returns. His lover bites his cheek; she has no choice. All we see is the dissolution, then await the reconstruction. Each time, the sky yanks her into his orbit. I want to say I’m sorry. I want to sayYou win. Our bodi...	Rebecca Morgan Frank	Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Relationships,Men & Women,Nature,Stars, Planets, Heavens
163	Postscript from Mississippi	When you asked if it rained bees or poison you were asking the wrong question. Again. You still didn’t understand the difference between hurricanes and flooding. Thus between gods and humans. Between your slum- lordy digs and the shacks I pass that cling to old boards and huddle around each f...	Rebecca Morgan Frank	Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life
164	Being Serious	I. Serious smiles a lot. At least that’s what they say, His Mum and Pop Trying to be proud As all the nurses gather round To squint into the cloud Of little Serious on the ultrasound.It’s likely just the way he’s bent, The head nurse finally thunders Into the awe and argument Swirling through the...	Christian Wiman	Living,Life Choices,Love,Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine
165	Decline	It is not pain that holds me back, but time With its sad prefigurations and smell, Its flowers and echoes, rivers and crime. Even now, without a future, I tell Myself lies in future tense. As my hair Thins, I collect combs. When clocks chime, I groan. The falling world finds pleasure in despair Beca...	Joshua Edwards	Living,Growing Old
166	Leviathan	Love of air and water Joined in apprehension, Perhaps you know what's there By way of fear, for while Living in pursuit of And going always forth Toward something that trembles. Its knowledge is your mind. What do you think about The great ocean's sullen Aristocrats—these small Headache...	Joshua Edwards	Nature,Animals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends
167	Dissimilations	You hold onto life like a hostage. You're deeply embedded. You're an actor slipping into a new script. You're a comma Whose purpose is to mark the moment when prose is suspended, Where begins a poem's pensive silence or some dark drama. You're a Charles Dickens character in the opium den Of a long life...	Joshua Edwards	Living,The Body,Time & Brevity,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality
168	What Space Faith Can Occupy	I believe that witness is a magnitude of vulnerability. That when I say love what I mean is not a feeling nor promise of a feeling. I believe in attention. My love for you is a monolith of try. The woman I love pays an inordinate amount of attention to large and small objects. She is not described by...	TC Tolbert	Love,Romantic Love,Religion,Faith & Doubt
169	Thaw	You said I will pull you out of my body in 237 ways. What you wanted was beautifully to sever things. Here love: the same things. changed. Finally: a taxonomy of afterthoughts. As though you were the one who was sleeping. Breathing in the marrow of would. You, who are a valley of no, I hear the m...	TC Tolbert	Living,The Body,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer
170	Beg Approval	Because the only view we have is the one that looks down on the knees. Praise perspective. Praise shared disdain. Praise space made by connective tissue; the synaptic cleft; elbowroom at the dinner table; polite conversation; lies you push through your teeth. Because dissecting a dog's heart won't change...	TC Tolbert	Religion,Faith & Doubt
171	Into the Racism Workshop	For Alma Banda Goddard my cynical feet ambled prepared for indigestion & blank faces of outrageous innocence knowing I'd have to walk over years of media declaring we're vanished or savage or pitiful or noble My toes twitched when I saw so few brown faces but really when one eats raci...	Chrystos	Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity
172	Sometimes I Feel Like All Indians	For Kelly Morgan ever do is die Her brother was thrown out the window by Black men he was drinking with His cousin was stabbed near the store She got shot Nobody knows where he ended up She hasn’t heard from her brother in 17 years He killed himself when his wife left Her son was ...	Chrystos	Living,Death,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity
173	Sweet Scent	I can smell the sweet scent of my own sweat as I blow high with the breeze and swing, I pump my legs like a child again my skinny kid’s butt holds me down, keeps me grounded when adults threaten to pull me off. My chain breaks as I tempt to kiss the sun, my knees have a life of their own bending as if ...	Angela C. Trudell Vasquez	Living,Coming of Age,Youth
174	Identity	White-Mexican looks like a Latina, not my label a question from a Guatemalan student who's come undone in my ESL class, doesn't get my kind I try to describe how I grew up in Caucasian corn country surrounded by houses on cul-de-sacs that all looked the same, how we were alone in a town o...	Angela C. Trudell Vasquez	Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity
175	Something is Coming Toward Us	Flaunting in the atrium, ostentatious at the gates I saw a shooting star thru a window on Alcatraz Ave & cladding struck up against those who demand We stomach the stick and tend the commode They're selling trees in the paint store! trees in the paint store Datebook chips in the soft skin of our wrists O...	Alli Warren	Social Commentaries,Money & Economics
176	A Better Way to Zone	Habits accrue in circular pattern and living occasion swollen among what the dead have to teach us So, ear, be an instrument for thought Tide, bring some little green thing to dust behind my eyes Touch the hotpoint and drag the tongue over the fat belly of a flapping fish Sticke...	Alli Warren	Living,Life Choices,The Mind
177	I Want to Thank the Wind Blows	Sound of the rain so I know there's constraint sound of the train so I know commerce has not come to a standstill now they raise the barrier now they set it back in place What coats the bottom of the surface of the sound when the swifts come in when the clerks come home who will bathe the c...	Alli Warren	Social Commentaries,Money & Economics
178	Whole 30	After a winter of gluttony & grief I'm back on plan for good this time. I’ve ballooned to a specific kind of ugly the kind you hope to hide with body spray. But it gets worse after a winter of gluttony & grief. I’ve shown up for meatballs. For lemons whipped to weeping. Now I land my balloon ...	Kiki Petrosino	Living,The Body,Activities,Eating & Drinking
179	Thigh Gap	It's true: I have it though I hardly approve of anything it does. Supposed bend of light or smudge where two odd angles cross. I hardly see— can hardly do a thing with it. White zone of no flesh pressing into no. So low, I can’t scale or measure it. I used to think: OK! A clean shar...	Kiki Petrosino	Living,The Body
180	Witch Wife	I’ll conjure the perfect Easter & we’ll plant mini spruces in the yard— my pink gloves & your green gloves like parrots from an opera over the earth— We’ll chatter about our enemies’ spectacular deaths. I’ll conjure the perfect Easter dark pesto sauce sealed with lemon long cords of fusilli to ...	Kiki Petrosino	Activities,Eating & Drinking,Gardening,Nature,Spring,Trees & Flowers,Religion,Christianity,Easter
181	Wheels	how can I tell you baby, oh honey, you'll never know the ride the ride of a lowered chevy slithering through the blue dotted night along Riverside Drive Española poetry rides the wings of a ’59 Impala yes, it does and it points chrome antennae towards ’Burque stations rocking oldies...	Levi Romero	Love,Romantic Love,Activities,Travels & Journeys
182	Woodstove of My Childhood	woodstove of my childhood where potatoes cut like triangle chips were fried in manteca de marrano woodstove of lazy autumn smoke swirling away to nowhere woodstove of December evacuating the cold chill at sunrise woodstove of celebration and mourning of post-World War II Korea y V...	Levi Romero	Living,Youth,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Home Life
183	The Composing Room	I still see those men haphazardly standing around the comps’ floor, mostly silent, lost in their latest urgent jobs, looking up and down as if nodding yes from what they call their composers’ sticks as they set inverse words and lines of each page that could be taken for Greek scripture, declaring:...	Greg Delanty	Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets
184	The Alien	I’m back again scrutinizing the Milky Way of your ultrasound, scanning the dark matter, the nothingness, that now the heads say is chockablock with quarks and squarks, gravitons and gravatini, photons and ph...	Greg Delanty	Living,Birth & Birthdays,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Sciences
185	My Last Résumé	When I was a troubadour When I was an astronaut When I was a pirate You should have seen my closet You would have loved my shoes. Kindly consider my application Even though your position is filled. This is my stash of snow globes This is my favorite whip This is a picture of me with a macaw This ...	Joseph Di Prisco	Activities,Jobs & Working
186	Reasons Nobody Ever Called a Good Book of Poems a Page-Turner	Your first dog is ever your one dog And no story has a happy ending anymore. We have all wasted lives, sometimes we waste Our own. Some nights are long ones, some Never end at all. I don’t know how we canfall in love, which implies landing, Whereas love promises everything but. That’s why I like to liste...	Joseph Di Prisco	Living,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets
187	Emperor with No Clothes	If you care about yourself at all, come to your own aid while there's still time. Marcus Aurelius 3.14 Citizen of Rome, you are the center of the universe. Problem is, circumference is—take a guess—me. “Some things ar...	Joseph Di Prisco	Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends
0	from From "Brief Biography of an Imaginary Daughter"	#1 [COLLEGE] We packed your satchel with sweatshirts, Soccer equipment, and The Elements of Style, Loaded up the Hum Vee, a sad drive to JFK And the cross-country flight to starting college, where fortunately due to Advanced Placement Courses you’ve already ...	Joseph Di Prisco	Living,Life Choices,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Animals
1	Care Package, With Riddle As Missive	I found my father’s favorite Swiss army knife in a box he sent me with no note, just James Bond videos, nothing else. What was the message? The message was there wasn’t one. This world violent, full of sex, the movie’s zeitgeist, era after era, a new Bond double-o-seven-ing in. Divorced...	Elizabeth A.I. Powell	Relationships,Family & Ancestors
2	from From "Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances"	The goal of the Meisner acting technique has often been described as getting actors to "live truthfully under imaginary circumstances." Here are some acting games we have found useful. I. THE REPETITION GAME: The Moment is a Tricky Fucker	Elizabeth A.I. Powell	Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Theater & Dance
3	from From "Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter"	Prologue Willy Loman’s reckless daughter flies quietly,fluttering like a silk-moth behind me blocking my life, my scenesin whichever stage direction she wants. Sometimes at night I can feel her dialing into me,her ringing calls like an imperial decree. When she sleeps she crashes, like a carinto the guardra...	Elizabeth A.I. Powell	null
4	Luna	lunatuna fluttering below belly pasiones swooping down deep gathering storms treasuring rainergías pacíficas marítimas, montañescas abotona tu vientr...	Alurista	Living,The Body,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity
5	Pa' Césary Corky	what for the rush and bloody pain what for the blooming and the rain what for the quest and odyssey what for the swimming and the sea, see there b no sho...	Alurista	Activities,Jobs & Working,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity,Mythology & Folklore,Heroes & Patriotism
6	The Unfastening	As the father turns away from the thought of his failure, the hands remove his glasses and rub his eyes over and over, drying the nonexistent tears. Unknown to the one who is troubled about losing his hair, his fingers stroke his baldness as he speaks. The body, our constant companion, understa...	Wesley McNair	Living,Disappointment & Failure,Growing Old,Life Choices,The Body
7	The Poem	In the apparent vacancy beyond each line, you might sense the poem waiting to think itself. Imagine the surface of a twilight pond in wind, shifting and changing the sky, then going still as a concentrating mind, the far trees deepening in its reflection. Like the poem ...	Wesley McNair	Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets
8	Losses	It must be difficult for God, listening to our voices come up through his floor of cloud to tell Him what’s been taken away: Lord, I’ve lost my dog, my period, my hair, all my money. What can He say, given we’re so incomplete we can’t stop being surprised by our condition, while He is completeness itse...	Wesley McNair	Living,Growing Old,Sorrow & Grieving,The Body,Religion,God & the Divine
9	Parse	Dawn marks the wall a thin flange of off-blue An imagined silence Always an imagined silence The speed at which sleep’s fogged dialogue withers into the present noun-scape This rift valley A volley of seasonal beacons Window where mind finds orbit...	Joseph Massey	Living,The Mind
10	A Title for the Haze	In a patch of sunlight a decapitated grasshopper twitches. The sunlight twitches. Sky the size of a sky imagined. Squint to see the quarter moon —shallow gash on blue horizon. Squint to hear beyond windows wafting muzak. I’m half-awake in this field of turned-on particulars. A wreck of yell...	Joseph Massey	Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals
11	Illocality	To imagine a morning the first sounds from the street and the house, its halls scarifying consciousness Antique glass smudges limbs (more blue than green) flared out over a roof To imagine the raw circumference of a field as it wakes what we make of...	Joseph Massey	null
12	What I've Come to Discuss	What I’ve come to discuss is mostly about shadows and the airs left behind in caring, discarding, the long inhibitions of whereso and when. Alabaster, a dark quire, in its many pages and premises the maze, from which move tendrilled purples and contusions, magnificent fuchsia receivers of false content, ...	Karen Volkman	Nature,Trees & Flowers,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics
13	Bridge	1. Bridge’s absence gave the creek a new aspect. Uncrossable, irascible. Crosser stems on the bank with her will and form, extension “Phantom of incapacity which is me.” Bright roar of water, x of indomitability. 2. The bridge is not an x. It bridges nothing. The turmoil is only a porti...	Karen Volkman	Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams
14	Washing the World	with a mournful but driving feel, in Bm, 2/2 time in the dark, in the bitter wind listen to a dream grandmothers stand shoulder to shoulder, on the rim of a hill bend as one, and grasp one thing together ask them, in the dream world, why do they cry? they will show you in reply thei...	Anna Marie Sewell	Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,Gender & Sexuality
15	from The Splinters	(Skellig Michael) does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world…then (heading back) we were pursued by terrors, ghost from Michael… George Bernard Shaw I The ferry fur...	Greg Delanty	Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,History & Politics
16	In the Next Next World	That sound Arvo Pärt does with one piano note stars split, fade, wander in cosmic expansion— First responder’s genesis and torch of metadatacrunch tumbling in a burnt and weedy churchyard equal parts Lethe and lithe— Grass, is it hollow, hallow to wake no longer among mortals? The woman her dr...	Gillian Conoley	Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Time & Brevity,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Social Commentaries,History & Politics
17	The Present	It was a vertical time. It was the expression, a spirit giving way onto an electric barren. We circled and were encircled and had no cause. It was a time of the self come on in a field of apparatuses. It was vignetted by sleep, and the sleep was in its center breached. Cold moving through the smell of gas. The...	Ryo Yamaguchi	Living,Time & Brevity,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Money & Economics
18	The bottoms of my shoes	The bottoms of my shoes are clean From walking in the rain	Jack Kerouac	Nature,Weather
19	In my medicine cabinet	In my medicine cabinet the winter fly Has died of old age	Jack Kerouac	Living,Death,Time & Brevity,Nature,Animals
20	Useless! Useless!	Useless! Useless! —heavy rain driving into the sea	Jack Kerouac	Living,Disappointment & Failure,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Weather
21	Answer	I broke at last the terror-fringed fascination that bound my ancient gaze to those crowding faces of plunder and seized my remnant life in a miracle of decision between white- collar hands and shook it like a cheap watch in my ear and threw it down beside me on the earth floor and rose to my fe...	Chinua Achebe	Living,Life Choices,Relationships,Home Life,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics
22	NON-commitment	Hurrah! to them who do nothing see nothing feel nothing whose hearts are fitted with prudence like a diaphragm across womb’s beckoning doorway to bar the scandal of seminal rage. I’m told the owl too wears wisdom in a ring of defense round each vulnerable eye securing it fast against the darts of s...	Chinua Achebe	Religion,Christianity,Social Commentaries,History & Politics
23	Flying	(for Niyi Osundare) Something in altitude kindles power-thirst Mere horse-height suffices the emir Bestowing from rich folds of prodigious turban Upon crawling peasants in the dust Rare imperceptible nods enwrapped In princely boredom. I too have known A parching of that primord...	Chinua Achebe	Religion,Other Religions,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends
24	Itinerary	I don’t mind the ring roads or the strange intersections, filled in with radio music tarmac skirting streetlight and the dissolving moon. Wing mirrors tell of running trees. My heart races in the heave of the wind. In the pivot of glass everything is so small and man...	Jennifer Wong	Activities,Travels & Journeys
25	Koi	Among heart-shaped leaves the white fish gleams, red tail. Soft lotuses sleep.	Jennifer Wong	Nature,Animals
26	Gift	''At one time, I dreaded everything I was making.' Yayoi Kusama (Winter 1999) First it is just a measling of the tablecloth but soon it spills in all colours, all gaiety: desk floor lamp flowers tatami, my underwear then d...	Jennifer Wong	Living,Health & Illness,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Home Life

115

W is for Walt Whitman's Soul

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: "loot." WILLIAM DALRYMPLE It sits with a fork made from a lotus on an ivory chair eating an elephant steak in the company of bears and feral nautch girls on a monsoon evening incandescent w...

Divya Victor

Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity

116

J is for Jarasandha

There once lived a great king whose twin wives could bear him no children. A wandering sage saw the king’s grief and offered him a magical mango. She who ate the mango would be with child. As he had two wives, the king cut the mango into two perfect halves and offered one half to each wife. After nine month...

Divya Victor

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

117

M is for Michael Jackson and Malcolm X

In the epilogue to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley recounts meeting a pensive Malcolm at the Kennedy airport, watching newly immigrated children “romping and playing” in their sudden home. “By tomorrow night,” Malcolm says to Alex, “they’ll know how to say their first English word—nigger.” Before cabl...

Divya Victor

Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity

118

How It Worked

It was hard to sit there with my father, watching one of my sister's girls playing a set of tennis against my son or daughter because he'd forget himself and with a groan of disappointment or a grunt of sympathetic exertion make it clear that he was rooting for my sister's child and against mine. There...

Jeffrey Harrison

null

119

In Memory of My Heavy Metal Years

There goes the aluminum, the antimony, the arsenic the barium, the cadmium, the cesium, the gadolinium the lead the mercury the nickel, the thalium, and the tin. There goes that job spraying lawns with chemicals, driving the Merc three-quarter ton with a tank on the back and no brakes t...

Jeff Derksen

Living,Coming of Age,The Body

120

The Wall

Someone has opened a giant map and with the tips of our fingers, each of us suddenly blind, we track the black cold of this monument for names we know like finding a route home. Lost here this damp spring morning, the cherries exploding like the fourth of July, we wonder how many maps of Viet N...

Bruce Guernsey

null

121

Strict Diet

Though the doctors said no salt, salt was all my father craved. His body bloated, skin water-logged and gray, still he wanted potato chips, honey-baked ham, greasy slabs of Polish sausage from Piekutowski's. He begged for pepperoni pizza, garlic butter, ribs slathered in sauce. But when I did the sho...

James Crews

null

122

First Fall

I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark morning streets, I point and name. Look, the sycamores, their mottled, paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves rusting and crisping at the edges. I walk through Schiller Park with you on my chest. Stars smolder well into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks, the...

Maggie Smith

Living,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Fall

123

You Could Never Take A Car to Greenland,

my daughter says. Unless the car could float. Unless by car you mean boat. Unless the ocean turned to ice and promised not to crack. Unless Greenland floated over here, having lifted its anchor. Unless we could row our country there. Our whole continent would have to come along, wouldn't it? Unless we ...

Maggie Smith

Living,Youth,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

124

Parachute

Because a lie is not a lie if the teller believes it, the way beautiful things reassure us of the world’s wholeness, of our wholeness, is not quite a lie. Beautiful things believe their own narrative, the narrative that makes them beautiful. I almost believed it until the new mother strappe...

Maggie Smith

Living,Death,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

125

What I Carried

I carried my fear of the world to my children, but they refused it. I carried my fear of the world on my chest, where I once carried my children, where some nights it slept as newborns sleep, where it purred but mostly growled, where it licked sweat from my clavicles. I carried my fear of the...

Maggie Smith

Living,Life Choices,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

126

The First Woman

She was my Sunday school teacher when I was just seven and eight. He was the newly hired pastor, an albino, alarming sight with his transparent eyelashes and mouse-pink skin that looked like it might hurt whenever she caressed his arm. Since Eva was her name, to my child’s mind it made great ...

Aleida Rodríguez

Living,Coming of Age,Youth,Activities,School & Learning,Religion,Christianity

127

History

In art, politics, school, church, business, love or marriage—in a piece of work or in a career— strongly spent is synonymous with kept. —Robert Frost She taught me the names of flowers: calendula, ranunculus, Iceland poppy. ...

Aleida Rodríguez

Living,Marriage & Companionship,Separation & Divorce,Love,Heartache & Loss,Realistic & Complicated

128

Little Cuba Stories/Cuentos de Cuba

V. A. There are no doors between the rooms. The archways bore through the house like a tunnel through a mountain. The room one falls into after my parents’ is the largest and serves as two bedrooms divided by an invisible wall. Half of it is my brother’s ...

Aleida Rodríguez

Living,Youth,Nature,Animals

129

The Invisible Body

Regla lesbia: Flexible rule that may be adjusted to any body to be measured. Compare regla fija: standard. —The Velázquez Dictionary I. In the garden, it’s there. Even when you’re inside you feel it, as though it were you standing naked...

Aleida Rodríguez

Living,The Body,Love,Desire

130

Trying to See Auras at the Airport

Recycled over and over people born look like parents, grandparents, sister or brother, or perhaps a throwback from an earlier ancestor, the hawk nose, a hard ridged forehead, the cleft in the chin or a blue birthmark on the arm, the stomach, the dainty fresh bum of a newborn each unique like a snow...

Angela C. Trudell Vasquez

Living,Growing Old,The Body,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

131

Mark Twain

If the ashes of Mark Twain lie in the Mississippi River then I’m sure he does rise up some days emerge from dark polluted depths to walk over water to land and scans the horizon for change being a curious sort, he sees the crisis rise again another war on the horizon and shakes his craggy head to s...

Angela C. Trudell Vasquez

Mythology & Folklore,Ghosts & the Supernatural

132

[A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing]

A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare colors Too late the last express passes through the dust of gardens

John Ashbery

null

133

Ilulissat

Outside outside myself there is a world, he rumbled, subject to my incursions ...

Lesley Harrison

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

134

Nude

from Pia Arke's exhibition Arctic Hysteria at Greenland's National Museum & Archives, Nuuk, 2010 i. I am in my body. I am here, in front of you. I am the temperature in this room. I am undressed in my nudity; I am the light and shade you feel. I am more like other people than like you. I ha...

Lesley Harrison

Desire,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

135

Eday, North Isles

GUITH a greylag morning, the sea a conscious blue. CALF SOUND orca in a sea blue room, breathing pearls that rise to the surface. GROATHA the plenum of the shed: every part infilled with flutter, ...

Lesley Harrison

Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

136

In an Artist's Studio

One face looks out from all his canvases, One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans: We found her hidden just behind those screens, That mirror gave back all her loveliness. A queen in opal or in ruby dress, A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens, A saint, an angel — every canvas means The same one...

Christina Rossetti

null

137

A Triad

Three sang of love together: one with lips Crimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow, Flushed to the yellow hair and finger tips; And one there sang who soft and smooth as snow Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show; And one was blue with famine after love, Who like a harpstring snapped rang...

Christina Rossetti

null

138

From the Antique

It's a weary life, it is, she said: Doubly blank in a woman's lot: I wish and I wish I were a man: Or, better then any being, were not: Were nothing at all in all the world, Not a body and not a soul: Not so much as a grain of dust Or a drop of water from pole to pole. Still the world would wag on th...

Christina Rossetti

null

139

Winter: My Secret

I tell my secret? No indeed, not I; Perhaps some day, who knows? But not today; it froze, and blows and snows, And you’re too curious: fie! You want to hear it? well: Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell. Or, after all, perhaps there’s none: Suppose there is no secret after all, But only just my ...

Christina Rossetti

null

140

No, Thank You, John

I never said I loved you, John: Why will you tease me, day by day, And wax a weariness to think upon With always "do" and "pray"? You know I never loved you, John; No fault of mine made me your toast: Why will you haunt me with a face as wan As shows an hour-old ghost? ...

Christina Rossetti

null

141

A Study (A Soul)

She stands as pale as Parian statues stand; Like Cleopatra when she turned at bay, And felt her strength above the Roman sway, And felt the aspic writhing in her hand. Her face is steadfast toward the shadowy land, For dim beyond it looms the light of day; Her feet are steadfast; all the arduous way Th...

Christina Rossetti

null

142

Negative Space

1. I was born on a Tuesday in April. I didn't cry. Not because I was stunned. I wasn't even mad. I was the lucky egg, trained for gratitude inside the belly for nine months straight. Two workers welded bunk beds at the end of the delivery room. One on top of the other. My universe might have been the w...

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Living,Coming of Age,Religion,Faith & Doubt,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

143

Via Politica

I grew up in a big house where weakness and expressions of joy deserved punishment. And I was raised on the via politica with the grease of yesterday’s glories, a thick grease collected under arctic skies. I was lit up. My notebooks, my hair, my heart reeked of smoke. That’s when we saw each othe...

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Social Commentaries,History & Politics

144

Acupuncture

Among the personal objects inside a 2100-year-old Chinese tomb, archaeologists found nine acupuncture needles, four gold and five silver. Long before knowing why, ancient doctors knew that pain must be fought with pain. It’s quite simple: an array of needles pricking your arm for a properly functio...

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Social Commentaries,History & Politics

145

Homo Antarcticus

"The wild will keep calling and calling forever in your ears. You cannot escape the 'little voices.'" —Frank Wild 1. Here I rest, in South Georgia. A few feet of evolution away lie the graves of whale hunters, pointing north. A white fence shields them from elephant seals and their ...

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Living,Death,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Mythology & Folklore,Heroes & Patriotism

146

All the Dead Boys Look Like Me

Last time I saw myself die is when police killed Jessie Hernandez A 17 year old brown queer // who was sleeping in their car Yesterday I saw myself die again // Fifty times I died in Orlando // & I remember reading // Dr. José Esteban Muñoz before h...

Christopher Soto

Living,Death,Love,Desire,Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment

147

Heartbeats

Work out. Ten laps. Chin ups. Look good. Steam room. Dress warm. Call home. Fresh air. Eat right. Rest well. Sweetheart. Safe sex. Sore throat. Long flu. Hard nodes. Beware. Test blood. Count cells. Reds thin. Whites low. Dress warm. Eat well. Short breath. Fatigue. Ni...

Melvin Dixon

Living,Health & Illness

148

The Lord's Prayer

You can't fake it. You know when I fail to achieve the expected: palm the becoming- comatose bullfrog, legs collapsing as they may, and chuck it (we used to say) high as you can. Let it fly stone-like to the skylight in the low dome of fog—another requiremen...

Anthony Carelli

Living,Youth,Nature,Animals,Religion,Christianity,The Spiritual

149

I Look for You

I look for you early, my rock and my refuge, offering you worship morning and night; before your vastness I come confused and afraid, for you see the thoughts of my heart. What could the heart and tongue compose, or spirit’s strength within me to s...

Solomon Ibn Gabirol

Religion,God & the Divine,Judaism,Yom Kippur

150

Send Your Spirit

Send your spirit to revive our corpses, and ripple the longed-for land again. The crops come from you; you’re good to all— and always return to restore what has been.

Solomon Ibn Gabirol

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Religion,God & the Divine,Judaism,Passover

151

Lord,

all my desire is here before you, whether or not I speak of it: I'd seek your favor, for an instant, then die— if only you would grant my wish. I'd place my spirit in your hand, then sleep—and in that sleep find sweetness. I wander from you—and die alive; the closer I cling—I li...

Yehudah Halevi

Living,Death,Religion,God & the Divine,Judaism,Yom Kippur

152

At the Hour of Closing

Lord of wondrous workings,grant us understanding— now at the hour of closing. A chosen few are called, their eyes toward you lifting— they stand exalted in their trembling now, at the hour of closing. They pour forth their souls; erase, then, their straying— and grant them, Lo...

Moses ibn Ezra

Religion,Judaism

153

Prayer

For all the pain passed down the genes or latent in the very grain of being; for the lordless mornings, the smear of spirit words intuit and inter; for all the nightfall neverness inking into me even now, my prayer is that a mind blurred ...

Christian Wiman

Living,The Mind,Religion,The Spiritual

154

[the target is a record of the past history of the target]

the target is a record of the past history of the target or forever hold your or told you so complacent mention repeats numerous trills in memory sugar and spice in the bag suppressed supposedly on an axis allow for the idea to rest

Jen Hofer

null

155

[a bullet has passed through]

a bullet has passed through spent the time elsewhere to need, tenderly, potential does not need to be bought, cannot in fact refute the cause, rather catches

Jen Hofer

null

156

Waiting For a Poem

I’m waiting for a poem, something rough, not elaborate or out of control, something undisturbed by curses, a white raven released from darkness. Words that come naturally, without aiming at anything, a bullet without a target, warning shots to the sky in newly occupied lands. A poem that will...

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

157

Prisoners

Prisoners guilty or not always look the same when they are released— patriarchs dethroned. This one just passed through the gate head bowed despite not being tall his gestures like a Bedouin’s entering the tent he carried on his back all day long. Cotton curtains, stone walls, the smell of ...

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment

158

We Lived

We lived in the long intolerable called God. We seemed happy. I don’t mean content I mean heroin happy, donkey dentures, I mean drycleaned deacons expunging suffering from Calcutta with the cut of their jaws I mean the always alto and surely anusless angels divvying up the deviled eggs and ...

Christian Wiman

Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine

159

The Second O of Sorrow

Somehow, I am still here, long after transistor radios, the eight-tracks my father blared driving from town to town across Ohio selling things, the music where we danced just to keep alive. I now understand I was not supposed to leave so soon, half a century a kind of boulder that I’ve pushed...

Sean Thomas Dougherty

Living,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

160

Biography of LeBron as Ohio

When is a poem one word? Even at 17 he was Baraka on the court, Coltrane gold toned, a kind of running riff, more than boy-child, man-child, he was one word like Prince. How back in those drunken days when I still ran in bars & played schoolyard ball & wagered fives & ten...

Sean Thomas Dougherty

Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity,Town & Country Life

161

The Welty Tour

In the next room, Peter’s gloved hands crack cordoned-off spines: he has been granted permission, his agent’s call his pedigree. So the tour itself is only the docent and me. He is docile, eager to please, leads me up the stairs and takes me to the bed.The coverlet is authentic, he says. He lectures me o...

Rebecca Morgan Frank

Love,Unrequited Love,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

162

The Moon’s Magnetic Field Once Came from an Asteroid

When you walked in it was like recognizing the moon when he returns. His lover bites his cheek; she has no choice. All we see is the dissolution, then await the reconstruction. Each time, the sky yanks her into his orbit. I want to say I’m sorry. I want to sayYou win. Our bodi...

Rebecca Morgan Frank

Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Relationships,Men & Women,Nature,Stars, Planets, Heavens

163

Postscript from Mississippi

When you asked if it rained bees or poison you were asking the wrong question. Again. You still didn’t understand the difference between hurricanes and flooding. Thus between gods and humans. Between your slum- lordy digs and the shacks I pass that cling to old boards and huddle around each f...

Rebecca Morgan Frank

Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life

164

Being Serious

I. Serious smiles a lot. At least that’s what they say, His Mum and Pop Trying to be proud As all the nurses gather round To squint into the cloud Of little Serious on the ultrasound.It’s likely just the way he’s bent, The head nurse finally thunders Into the awe and argument Swirling through the...

Christian Wiman

Living,Life Choices,Love,Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine

165

Decline

It is not pain that holds me back, but time With its sad prefigurations and smell, Its flowers and echoes, rivers and crime. Even now, without a future, I tell Myself lies in future tense. As my hair Thins, I collect combs. When clocks chime, I groan. The falling world finds pleasure in despair Beca...

Joshua Edwards

Living,Growing Old

166

Leviathan

Love of air and water Joined in apprehension, Perhaps you know what's there By way of fear, for while Living in pursuit of And going always forth Toward something that trembles. Its knowledge is your mind. What do you think about The great ocean's sullen Aristocrats—these small Headache...

Joshua Edwards

Nature,Animals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

167

Dissimilations

You hold onto life like a hostage. You're deeply embedded. You're an actor slipping into a new script. You're a comma Whose purpose is to mark the moment when prose is suspended, Where begins a poem's pensive silence or some dark drama. You're a Charles Dickens character in the opium den Of a long life...

Joshua Edwards

Living,The Body,Time & Brevity,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

168

What Space Faith Can Occupy

I believe that witness is a magnitude of vulnerability. That when I say love what I mean is not a feeling nor promise of a feeling. I believe in attention. My love for you is a monolith of try. The woman I love pays an inordinate amount of attention to large and small objects. She is not described by...

TC Tolbert

Love,Romantic Love,Religion,Faith & Doubt

169

Thaw

You said I will pull you out of my body in 237 ways. What you wanted was beautifully to sever things. Here love: the same things. changed. Finally: a taxonomy of afterthoughts. As though you were the one who was sleeping. Breathing in the marrow of would. You, who are a valley of no, I hear the m...

TC Tolbert

Living,The Body,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer

170

Beg Approval

Because the only view we have is the one that looks down on the knees. Praise perspective. Praise shared disdain. Praise space made by connective tissue; the synaptic cleft; elbowroom at the dinner table; polite conversation; lies you push through your teeth. Because dissecting a dog's heart won't change...

TC Tolbert

Religion,Faith & Doubt

171

Into the Racism Workshop

For Alma Banda Goddard my cynical feet ambled prepared for indigestion & blank faces of outrageous innocence knowing I'd have to walk over years of media declaring we're vanished or savage or pitiful or noble My toes twitched when I saw so few brown faces but really when one eats raci...

Chrystos

Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

172

Sometimes I Feel Like All Indians

For Kelly Morgan ever do is die Her brother was thrown out the window by Black men he was drinking with His cousin was stabbed near the store She got shot Nobody knows where he ended up She hasn’t heard from her brother in 17 years He killed himself when his wife left Her son was ...

Chrystos

Living,Death,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity

173

Sweet Scent

I can smell the sweet scent of my own sweat as I blow high with the breeze and swing, I pump my legs like a child again my skinny kid’s butt holds me down, keeps me grounded when adults threaten to pull me off. My chain breaks as I tempt to kiss the sun, my knees have a life of their own bending as if ...

Angela C. Trudell Vasquez

Living,Coming of Age,Youth

174

Identity

White-Mexican looks like a Latina, not my label a question from a Guatemalan student who's come undone in my ESL class, doesn't get my kind I try to describe how I grew up in Caucasian corn country surrounded by houses on cul-de-sacs that all looked the same, how we were alone in a town o...

Angela C. Trudell Vasquez

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

175

Something is Coming Toward Us

Flaunting in the atrium, ostentatious at the gates I saw a shooting star thru a window on Alcatraz Ave & cladding struck up against those who demand We stomach the stick and tend the commode They're selling trees in the paint store! trees in the paint store Datebook chips in the soft skin of our wrists O...

Alli Warren

Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

176

A Better Way to Zone

Habits accrue in circular pattern and living occasion swollen among what the dead have to teach us So, ear, be an instrument for thought Tide, bring some little green thing to dust behind my eyes Touch the hotpoint and drag the tongue over the fat belly of a flapping fish Sticke...

Alli Warren

Living,Life Choices,The Mind

177

I Want to Thank the Wind Blows

Sound of the rain so I know there's constraint sound of the train so I know commerce has not come to a standstill now they raise the barrier now they set it back in place What coats the bottom of the surface of the sound when the swifts come in when the clerks come home who will bathe the c...

Alli Warren

Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

178

Whole 30

After a winter of gluttony & grief I'm back on plan for good this time. I’ve ballooned to a specific kind of ugly the kind you hope to hide with body spray. But it gets worse after a winter of gluttony & grief. I’ve shown up for meatballs. For lemons whipped to weeping. Now I land my balloon ...

Kiki Petrosino

Living,The Body,Activities,Eating & Drinking

179

Thigh Gap

It's true: I have it though I hardly approve of anything it does. Supposed bend of light or smudge where two odd angles cross. I hardly see— can hardly do a thing with it. White zone of no flesh pressing into no. So low, I can’t scale or measure it. I used to think: OK! A clean shar...

Kiki Petrosino

Living,The Body

180

Witch Wife

I’ll conjure the perfect Easter & we’ll plant mini spruces in the yard— my pink gloves & your green gloves like parrots from an opera over the earth— We’ll chatter about our enemies’ spectacular deaths. I’ll conjure the perfect Easter dark pesto sauce sealed with lemon long cords of fusilli to ...

Kiki Petrosino

Activities,Eating & Drinking,Gardening,Nature,Spring,Trees & Flowers,Religion,Christianity,Easter

181

Wheels

how can I tell you baby, oh honey, you'll never know the ride the ride of a lowered chevy slithering through the blue dotted night along Riverside Drive Española poetry rides the wings of a ’59 Impala yes, it does and it points chrome antennae towards ’Burque stations rocking oldies...

Levi Romero

Love,Romantic Love,Activities,Travels & Journeys

182

Woodstove of My Childhood

woodstove of my childhood where potatoes cut like triangle chips were fried in manteca de marrano woodstove of lazy autumn smoke swirling away to nowhere woodstove of December evacuating the cold chill at sunrise woodstove of celebration and mourning of post-World War II Korea y V...

Levi Romero

Living,Youth,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Home Life

183

The Composing Room

I still see those men haphazardly standing around the comps’ floor, mostly silent, lost in their latest urgent jobs, looking up and down as if nodding yes from what they call their composers’ sticks as they set inverse words and lines of each page that could be taken for Greek scripture, declaring:...

Greg Delanty

Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets

184

The Alien

I’m back again scrutinizing the Milky Way of your ultrasound, scanning the dark matter, the nothingness, that now the heads say is chockablock with quarks and squarks, gravitons and gravatini, photons and ph...

Greg Delanty

Living,Birth & Birthdays,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Sciences

185

My Last Résumé

When I was a troubadour When I was an astronaut When I was a pirate You should have seen my closet You would have loved my shoes. Kindly consider my application Even though your position is filled. This is my stash of snow globes This is my favorite whip This is a picture of me with a macaw This ...

Joseph Di Prisco

Activities,Jobs & Working

186

Reasons Nobody Ever Called a Good Book of Poems a Page-Turner

Your first dog is ever your one dog And no story has a happy ending anymore. We have all wasted lives, sometimes we waste Our own. Some nights are long ones, some Never end at all. I don’t know how we canfall in love, which implies landing, Whereas love promises everything but. That’s why I like to liste...

Joseph Di Prisco

Living,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

187

Emperor with No Clothes

If you care about yourself at all, come to your own aid while there's still time. Marcus Aurelius 3.14 Citizen of Rome, you are the center of the universe. Problem is, circumference is—take a guess—me. “Some things ar...

Joseph Di Prisco

Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

0

from From "Brief Biography of an Imaginary Daughter"

#1 [COLLEGE] We packed your satchel with sweatshirts, Soccer equipment, and The Elements of Style, Loaded up the Hum Vee, a sad drive to JFK And the cross-country flight to starting college, where fortunately due to Advanced Placement Courses you’ve already ...

Joseph Di Prisco

Living,Life Choices,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Animals

1

Care Package, With Riddle As Missive

I found my father’s favorite Swiss army knife in a box he sent me with no note, just James Bond videos, nothing else. What was the message? The message was there wasn’t one. This world violent, full of sex, the movie’s zeitgeist, era after era, a new Bond double-o-seven-ing in. Divorced...

Elizabeth A.I. Powell

Relationships,Family & Ancestors

2

from From "Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances"

The goal of the Meisner acting technique has often been described as getting actors to "live truthfully under imaginary circumstances." Here are some acting games we have found useful. I. THE REPETITION GAME: The Moment is a Tricky Fucker

Elizabeth A.I. Powell

Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Theater & Dance

3

from From "Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter"

Prologue Willy Loman’s reckless daughter flies quietly,fluttering like a silk-moth behind me blocking my life, my scenesin whichever stage direction she wants. Sometimes at night I can feel her dialing into me,her ringing calls like an imperial decree. When she sleeps she crashes, like a carinto the guardra...

Elizabeth A.I. Powell

null

4

Luna

lunatuna fluttering below belly pasiones swooping down deep gathering storms treasuring rainergías pacíficas marítimas, montañescas abotona tu vientr...

Alurista

Living,The Body,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

5

Pa' Césary Corky

what for the rush and bloody pain what for the blooming and the rain what for the quest and odyssey what for the swimming and the sea, see there b no sho...

Alurista

Activities,Jobs & Working,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity,Mythology & Folklore,Heroes & Patriotism

6

The Unfastening

As the father turns away from the thought of his failure, the hands remove his glasses and rub his eyes over and over, drying the nonexistent tears. Unknown to the one who is troubled about losing his hair, his fingers stroke his baldness as he speaks. The body, our constant companion, understa...

Wesley McNair

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Growing Old,Life Choices,The Body

7

The Poem

In the apparent vacancy beyond each line, you might sense the poem waiting to think itself. Imagine the surface of a twilight pond in wind, shifting and changing the sky, then going still as a concentrating mind, the far trees deepening in its reflection. Like the poem ...

Wesley McNair

Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

8

Losses

It must be difficult for God, listening to our voices come up through his floor of cloud to tell Him what’s been taken away: Lord, I’ve lost my dog, my period, my hair, all my money. What can He say, given we’re so incomplete we can’t stop being surprised by our condition, while He is completeness itse...

Wesley McNair

Living,Growing Old,Sorrow & Grieving,The Body,Religion,God & the Divine

9

Parse

Dawn marks the wall a thin flange of off-blue An imagined silence Always an imagined silence The speed at which sleep’s fogged dialogue withers into the present noun-scape This rift valley A volley of seasonal beacons Window where mind finds orbit...

Joseph Massey

Living,The Mind

10

A Title for the Haze

In a patch of sunlight a decapitated grasshopper twitches. The sunlight twitches. Sky the size of a sky imagined. Squint to see the quarter moon —shallow gash on blue horizon. Squint to hear beyond windows wafting muzak. I’m half-awake in this field of turned-on particulars. A wreck of yell...

Joseph Massey

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals

11

Illocality

To imagine a morning the first sounds from the street and the house, its halls scarifying consciousness Antique glass smudges limbs (more blue than green) flared out over a roof To imagine the raw circumference of a field as it wakes what we make of...

Joseph Massey

null

12

What I've Come to Discuss

What I’ve come to discuss is mostly about shadows and the airs left behind in caring, discarding, the long inhibitions of whereso and when. Alabaster, a dark quire, in its many pages and premises the maze, from which move tendrilled purples and contusions, magnificent fuchsia receivers of false content, ...

Karen Volkman

Nature,Trees & Flowers,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics

13

Bridge

1. Bridge’s absence gave the creek a new aspect. Uncrossable, irascible. Crosser stems on the bank with her will and form, extension “Phantom of incapacity which is me.” Bright roar of water, x of indomitability. 2. The bridge is not an x. It bridges nothing. The turmoil is only a porti...

Karen Volkman

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

14

Washing the World

with a mournful but driving feel, in Bm, 2/2 time in the dark, in the bitter wind listen to a dream grandmothers stand shoulder to shoulder, on the rim of a hill bend as one, and grasp one thing together ask them, in the dream world, why do they cry? they will show you in reply thei...

Anna Marie Sewell

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,Gender & Sexuality

15

from The Splinters

(Skellig Michael) does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world…then (heading back) we were pursued by terrors, ghost from Michael… George Bernard Shaw I The ferry fur...

Greg Delanty

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

16

In the Next Next World

That sound Arvo Pärt does with one piano note stars split, fade, wander in cosmic expansion— First responder’s genesis and torch of metadatacrunch tumbling in a burnt and weedy churchyard equal parts Lethe and lithe— Grass, is it hollow, hallow to wake no longer among mortals? The woman her dr...

Gillian Conoley

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Time & Brevity,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

17

The Present

It was a vertical time. It was the expression, a spirit giving way onto an electric barren. We circled and were encircled and had no cause. It was a time of the self come on in a field of apparatuses. It was vignetted by sleep, and the sleep was in its center breached. Cold moving through the smell of gas. The...

Ryo Yamaguchi

Living,Time & Brevity,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Money & Economics

18

The bottoms of my shoes

The bottoms of my shoes are clean From walking in the rain

Jack Kerouac

Nature,Weather

19

In my medicine cabinet

In my medicine cabinet the winter fly Has died of old age

Jack Kerouac

Living,Death,Time & Brevity,Nature,Animals

20

Useless! Useless!

Useless! Useless! —heavy rain driving into the sea

Jack Kerouac

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Weather

21

Answer

I broke at last the terror-fringed fascination that bound my ancient gaze to those crowding faces of plunder and seized my remnant life in a miracle of decision between white- collar hands and shook it like a cheap watch in my ear and threw it down beside me on the earth floor and rose to my fe...

Chinua Achebe

Living,Life Choices,Relationships,Home Life,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

22

NON-commitment

Hurrah! to them who do nothing see nothing feel nothing whose hearts are fitted with prudence like a diaphragm across womb’s beckoning doorway to bar the scandal of seminal rage. I’m told the owl too wears wisdom in a ring of defense round each vulnerable eye securing it fast against the darts of s...

Chinua Achebe

Religion,Christianity,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

23

Flying

(for Niyi Osundare) Something in altitude kindles power-thirst Mere horse-height suffices the emir Bestowing from rich folds of prodigious turban Upon crawling peasants in the dust Rare imperceptible nods enwrapped In princely boredom. I too have known A parching of that primord...

Chinua Achebe

Religion,Other Religions,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

24

Itinerary

I don’t mind the ring roads or the strange intersections, filled in with radio music tarmac skirting streetlight and the dissolving moon. Wing mirrors tell of running trees. My heart races in the heave of the wind. In the pivot of glass everything is so small and man...

Jennifer Wong

Activities,Travels & Journeys

25

Koi

Among heart-shaped leaves the white fish gleams, red tail. Soft lotuses sleep.

Jennifer Wong

Nature,Animals

26

Gift

''At one time, I dreaded everything I was making.' Yayoi Kusama (Winter 1999) First it is just a measling of the tablecloth but soon it spills in all colours, all gaiety: desk floor lamp flowers tatami, my underwear then d...

Jennifer Wong

Living,Health & Illness,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Home Life