Poetry
Cambodia Lessons
there is life happening across this world, around it, inside it at the instant tea touches your lips in the morning; you: not alone in your husk, it is happening, right now, you, me, separated by our skins
Section
Poetry
Showing 217-240 of 671 pieces
Poetry
One Night Stand
He takes me to a bed where there is no rest I rattle with him His moans overpower the sirens of the street and shakes his body in a variety of motions
Poetry
Isle of Caves
Wall after wall, cave after cave, many armed, many legged, many headed desire dances its heart out. Liberated by the im- measurable devotion of anonymous hands.
Poetry
in memory of things that break
the love you feel when a baby is first born the night he left for college (the morning he returned but only because he forgot his hat)
Poetry
Unconfession in My Psychoanalyst’s Office
I tremble in a flower’s vocabulary— retract my hands like from a hot sky or suddenness dreams which pass through my body are no different from hands
Poetry
Driving the Skyway Bridge
You don’t see her, hair like wings ephemeral catching fire from Florida sun, wire fences no match for birds taking flight unnaturally.
Poetry
All the Howling
The night locked and cellular, the landscape grows increasingly perplexed at the Color aspects of American democracy,
Poetry
Rich People
There are plenty of seats on the summit. You can see the dark clouds amassing from miles away. I had a big wedding. I’ve stood beneath a waterfall.
Poetry
Stepping into the Dark
I imagined her soul, slipping into muted sleep, slowing its swirl, dimming its spectrum of colors – until like a photo, darkening to monochrome, she would become the very depth and quiet of her own shadow. Fire slowly dims, coal blackens, into night.
Poetry
Ode to Beets
Prisoners could enroll in college courses and some even taught. The people of Alabama often formed remarkable friendships with the prisoners and gave them many gifts, as well as invitations to their homes for a meal. After the war, many Germans brought their families to vacation in the South and to introduce them to their southern friends. These friendships lasted for decades.
Poetry
Waiting
The thing about a lake is the crazy men who fish there, in the copper- hearted flow where cold springs and greasy seaweed gather. Shimmer. Buckle. Fish bodies writhe beneath, more life always where one can’t reach. More life always where watching is not allowed.
Poetry
2 poems by Jane Marston
They were not deer, such as the men had known in Virginia or Vermont, but antelope whose haunches flashed when the heave of portage brought the men too near. The men believed they were something they needed to kill, not just for food or for the pleasure of pursuit, but from a need to supplement,
Poetry
Sooner Now
And so, it seems it only takes one summer without rain, a drift of weeks, the world gone mean, to make a start then, offer age assent. To give surprised consent, or to at least – time bossy, brooking no dissent – begin to know there is a change now on its way. Not today. Not right away.
Poetry
Loss of Little Things
I dream each night our house is burning, and I watch and watch. It consumes, I am consumed, by the pit in my gut, burning rubble. Spiders watch from the corners, with their wide shining eyes, but do not spin a line to save me-
Poetry
Ketsia
I stare. Pinks, grays, blank canvas politely obscure below her neck, hint at her thumb resting on her collarbone. I raise my hand to touch trust, let it fall.
Poetry
Figurin’
Anyway, they form a scooby-doo-esque gang of lovable misfits And solve the mystery of why I keep waking up unsure of who I am And why its so hard to explain what that means Entering your life from the outside can be a jarring experience
Poetry
Red Tail, an Epitaph
The yard you plotted then planted has come back wilder, the way seeming winterkill comes back wilder for its next life. So you think, pruning-time! — when, with a looming shadow and a gust of backwash, the ponderous bird alights, the porch rail trembles with its weight.
Poetry
Late Walk
a man must lean on his liquor getting through the prayer line walking fields with all colors flaring soft or fired with hard light the walnut shell his face is the tan smeared greasy eyes a mature man out of time
Poetry
Ode to Goibniu
Son of Esarg the axe-thrower, smelting and pin-lining coasts with bronze whirls, smoothed by Macha’s shawl. Forger of tools, lately found half-sunk in peat in a depthless bog, with his elbow crooked upward. The gases preserved his jacket, the raised sinew on his small finger, and the blazoned buckle he himself fashioned.
Poetry
Subtext
a window in the greenroom. a garden of trees. the opal sky. fractals of gold and violet, both. two salamanders suspended above the formless dark. liquid. speaking.
Poetry
Having Lost a Cowrie Shell
Madness is when the warrior god calls the initiates to the altar stone in a masquerade to play with death to prove their mettle
Poetry
Sanctum
What if this belly was where you buried your sorrows nestled into disappointment shame and fear. What if this belly resisted expectation conformity like the time you refused to stand and pledge allegiance.
Poetry
War
Words were eliminated from dictionaries— bridle, ruin, barricade, lapidaries, famine, clay, sparrow, genocide and yarrow—
Poetry
My mother, in the hospital—
My mind won’t place me there, not today, or tomorrow, or those four days in December, when the drive became a ritual and in the evenings, after the nurses said enough, it’s almost Christmas go home, sleep in your beds, not hunched over like a burlap bag of coffee beans on a storeroom floor;