Alison Luterman Some girls can’t help it; they are lit sparklers,hot-blooded, half naked in the depths of winter,tagging moving trains with the bright insignia of theirfury.I’ve seen their inked torsos: falcons, swans, meteorshowers.And shadowed their secret rendezvous,walking and flying all night over paths traced like veinsthrough the deep body of the forestwhere they are trying …
Terrance Hayes – Pseudacris Crucifer
Terrance Hayes (November 18, 1971 -) The father begins to make the sound a tree frog makesWhen he comes with his son & daughter to a pailOf tree frogs for sale in a Deep South flea marketJust before the last blood of dusk.A tree frog is called a tree frog because it chirpsLike a bird …
David Whyte – Sometimes
David Whyte (November 02, 1955 -) Sometimesif you move carefullythrough the forest,breathinglike the onesin the old stories,who could crossa shimmering bed of leaveswithout a sound,you come to a placewhose only taskis to trouble youwith tinybut frightening requests,conceived out of nowherebut in this placebeginning to lead everywhere.Requests to stop whatyou are doing right now,andto stop what …
Jasmin Roberts – Self-Selection For Preservation
Jasmin Roberts My grandmother will tell you thatshe does not like white people,does not look them in the eye. W.E.B. Du Bois coined the term double consciousness in 1903.It refers to the psychological experience of viewing oneselfthrough the lens of a racist white society. He meant that to grow up black in Americais to be …
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Phillis Wheatley – Imagination
Phillis Wheatley Peters (c. 1753 – December 5, 1784) Thy various works, imperial queen, we see, How bright their forms! how deck'd with pomp by thee!Thy wond'rous acts in beauteous order stand,And all attest how potent is thine hand. From Helicon's refulgent heights attend,Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend:To tell her glories with …
Lisel Mueller – In Passing
Lisel Mueller (February 8, 1924 – February 21, 2020) How swiftly the strained honeyof afternoon lightflows into darknessand the closed bud shrugs offits special mysteryin order to break into blossom:as if what exists, existsso that it can be lostand become precious.
Neil Gaiman – After Silence
Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman (November 10, 1960 -) for Rachel Carson Seasons on seasons. The spring is signaled by birdsongcoyotes screech and yammer in the moonlightand the first flowers open. I saw two owls todayin the daylight, on silent wings.They landed as one and watched me sleepily.Oh who? they called. Or how, or how who?Then …
Barbara Lydecker Crane – Mother And Child
Barbara Lydecker Crane Portrait painting, so long out of fashion,was all I did. Not by commission—I’d aska friend whose face was lined by life and passionto sit. Then I’d distort a bit: a maskwould simplify and heighten their emotion.This Harlem neighbor’s eyes are spelling fearas she holds her baby tightly with devotionand protection from who …
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WS Merwin – Elegy for a Walnut Tree
William Stanley Merwin (September 30, 1927 – March 15, 2019) Old friend now there is no one alivewho remembers when you were youngit was high summer when I first saw youin the blaze of day most of my life agowith the dry grass whispering in your shadeand already you had lived through warsand echoes of …
Rabindranath Tagore – Joy
Rabindranath Tagore (May 07, 1861 - August 07, 1941) I slept and dreamtthat life was joy.I awoke and sawthat life was duty.I worked — and behold,duty was joy.
Emily Dickinson — The Only News I Know
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) The Only News I knowIs Bulletins all DayFrom Immortality.The Only Shows I see—Tomorrow and Today—Perchance Eternity—The Only One I meetIs God-The Only Street—Existence—This traversedIf Other News there be—Or Admirabler Show—I'll tell it You—
Dorianne Laux – Lord Of The Flies
Dorianne Laux (January 10, 1952 -) “Coronavirus Conference Gets Canceled Because of Coronavirus.”—Bloomberg News, March 10, 2020 I can already see the streetsfilling with corpses piledtenderly along the curbs.First the homeless, thenthe poor, then those whowere lost, depressed, lonely,alone. The rich will be last,top of the pile as they werein life. Dressed in their finery.Oh …
Marissa Davis – Singularity
Marissa Davis after Marie Howe in the wordless beginningiguana & myrrhmagma & reef ghost moth& the cordyceps tickling its nerves& cedar & archipelago & anemonedodo bird & cardinal waiting for its redocean salt & crude oil now blackmuck now most naïve fumbling planktonevery egg clutched in the copycat softof me unwomaned unracedunsexed as the ecstatic prokaryotethat would rage …
William Butler Yeats Down By the Salley Gardens
William Butler Yeats (June 13, 1865 – January 28, 1939) Down by the salley gardensmy love and I did meet;She passed the salley gardenswith little snow-white feet.She bid me take love easy,as the leaves grow on the tree;But I, being young and foolish,with her would not agree.In a field by the rivermy love and I …
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Erika L Sánchez – Instructions For Living
Erika L. Sánchez It was the way summer hunted me:a sequence of instructionsin the folds of a flower.How do I explain the hatred of the sun,the terrible wonder of being alive?Fuck the fucking birds. I lookedto the sky to join the storms. I couldn’thave imagined you, swift as the lightningI traced with my finger, a …
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Howard Nemerov – Figures Of Thought
Howard Nemerov (February 29, 1920 – July 5, 1991) To lay the logarithmic spiral onSea-shell and leaf alike, and see it fit,To watch the same idea work itself outIn the fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turnOnto his target, setting up the kill,And in the flight of certain wall-eyed bugsWho cannot see to fly straight into deathBut …
Galway Kinnell – When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone
Galway Mills Kinnell (February 1, 1927 – October 28, 2014) 1 When one has lived a long time alone,one refrains from swatting the flyand lets him go, and one hesitates to strikethe mosquito, though more than willing to slapthe flesh under her, and one lifts the toadfrom the pit too deep to hop out ofand …
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882) The tide rises, the tide falls,The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;Along the sea-sands damp and brownThe traveller hastens toward the town,And the tide rises, the tide falls.Darkness settles on roofs and walls,But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;The little waves, with their soft, …
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Anna Scotti – Whisk
Anna Scotti I told my grandmother I am afraid and she made that little wave, each plump finger brushing away my worries just the way she’d brush crumbs from around the toaster tray, the way she’d sweep the dog’s dry tracks from the trailer floor. Oh, now, it’s not so bad here, she said, but …
Rudyard Kipling – The Explorer
Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 18, 1936) "There's no sense in going further --it's the edge of cultivation,"So they said, and I believed it --broke my land and sowed my crop --Built my barns and strung my fencesin the little border stationTucked away below the foothillswhere the trails run out and stop. Till …
Jennifer Chang – Obedience, Or The Lying Tale
Jennifer Chang I will do everything you tell me, Mother.I will charm three gold hairsfrom the demon’s head.I will choke the mouse that gnawsan apple tree’s roots and keep its skinfor a glove. To the wolf, I will bepretty and kind and curtsyhis crossing of my path. The forest, vocaleven in its somber tread, rages.A …
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Robert Wrigley – Why Should There Be Stars?
Robert Wrigley (1951 -) Wallace Roney (May 25, 1960—March 31, 2020) No one to talk to but a little bird, firstdusky flycatcher of the year, on the final dayof an eternal March. There’s snow falling,and the bird’s unhappy about that. Perched on the lee side of the tree,it’s hunched and plumped,and I’ve opened the window …
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Rafaella Del Bourgo – Tasmania
Rafaella Del Bourgo The frigid waters of the Huon Rivertrudge along sodden banks,muscling aside grasses, and scolding saplings.Twin swans, crayon black with crimson beaks,hiss and feint at a six-foot snaketricked out in beige and chartreuse.The birds take off, slice the sky;the river licks the scallop pattern on its surface. My house, too, is cold, a …
Laura Foley – One Day
Laura Foley I didn't read the news.I raked a rainbowof pungent autumn leaves,played abroad with happy dogs,held my granddaughter in my arms,and sat beneath an amiable maple,attentive to current events.
Mark Jarman – Interesting Times
Mark Jarman (1952 -) Everything’s happening on the cusp of tragedy, the tip of comedy, the pivot of event.You want a placid life, find another planet. This one is occupied with the story’s arc:About to happen, on the verge, horizontal. You want another planet, try the moon.Try any of the eight, try Planet X. It’s out there somewhere, …
Jeffrey McDaniel – Wooden Bench
Jeffrey McDaniel I was sitting on a wooden benchwhen six men wheeled her on a gurney right past me,except she was inside a wooden boxand the lid was closed. She was on her wayto becoming a skeleton. My fatheris definitely a skeleton at this point.Death is confusing. Is my father the bonesthat sit inside a …
Natalie Diaz – Lake-Loop
Natalie Diaz (September 4, 1978 -) because there was yet no lake into many nights we made the lake a labor, and its necessary laboringsto find the basin not yet openedin my body, yet my body — any bodywet or water from the start, to fill a clay, start being what it ever means, a beginning …
Marge Piercy – The Low Road
Marge Piercy (March 31, 1936 -) What can they doto you? Whatever they want.They can set you up, they canbust you, they can breakyour fingers, they canburn your brain with electricity,blur you with drugs till youcan't walk, can't remember, they cantake your child, wall upyour lover. They can do anythingyou can't stop themfrom doing. How …
Walt Whitman – When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns beforeme,When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divideand measure them,When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured withmuch applause in the lecture-room,How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,Till rising and gliding out I wander' d off …
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Lisel Mueller – Late Hours
Lisel Mueller (February 8, 1924 – February 21, 2020) On summer nights the worldmoves within earshoton the interstate with its swishand growl, an occasional sirenthat sends chills through us.Sometimes, on clear, still nights,voices float into our bedroom,lunar and fragmented,as if the sky had let them golong before our birth. In winter we close the windowsand …
Margaret Atwood – Dearly
Margaret Eleanor Atwood (November 18, 1939 -) It’s an old word, fading now. Dearly did I wish. Dearly did I long for. I loved him dearly. I make my way along the sidewalk mindfully, because of my wrecked knees about which I give less of a shit than you may imagine since there are other …
WS Di Piero – Aubade
WS Di Piero Good morning to what’s left and what has gone.No more of my dense cries and heavy songsabout time’s hardships, my mood, gunfights in schools,our murderous American sunshine.I want a looser grip, a sweeter lightnessand grace and mercy around us, plainer talkwhile my neighborhood’s wild parrots squawkand flash their smart immigrant fineryand acute …
Mark Strand – Dreams
Mark Strand (April 11, 1934 – November 29, 2014) Trying to recall the plotAnd characters we dreamed, What life was likeBefore the morning came,We are seldom satisfied, And even thenThere is no way of knowingIf what we know is true. Something namelessHums us into sleep,Withdraws, and leaves us in A place …
