Billy Collins (March 22, 1941 -) The name of the author is the first to gofollowed obediently by the title, the plot,the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novelwhich suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbordecided to retire to the southern hemisphere of …
Cat Richardson – Northeast Corridor
Cat Richardson I’m on the horizon of a seven hour trip and it’s quiet.A man walks across the early highway, the sun is almost up.You’re far away and swimming. How many bodies of waterwill I cross before I solve myself. I’m going to a wedding. Being single is expensive,especially at weddings. I try not to …
Rachel Galvin – The Real Thing
Rachel Galvin It was interesting to be thinking of something.It was interesting to be thinking. To be thinking. To. It was interesting.It was then she heard the voice the one inside the voice the one she heard.It was then. Was it a poor imitation or was it the real McCoy. Was it.Did she know. Was …
Jane Hirshfield – Advice to Myself
Jane Hirshfield (February 24, 1953 -) The computer fileof whichI have no recollectionis labeled "advice to myself''I click it openlookscroll further downthe screenstays backlit and emptythus I meet myself againhopeful and uselessa mysteryprecisely as I musthave doneon August 19, 2010, 11:08 a.m.
Barbara Ras – You Can’t Have It All
Barbara Ras (1949 -) But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown handsgloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old fingeron your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful lookOf the …
Ellen Bass – Because
Ellen Bass Because the night I gave birth my husband went blind.Hysterical, I guess you’d call it.Because there’d been too many peopleand then there was no one. Onlythis small creature—her tiny cryno bigger than a sequin.Because I’d been pushing too many hours.Even with her soft skull plates shifting,the collar of my bones too slender.When I …
Cindy King – When Your Mother Asks If You’re Seeing Anyone
Cindy King It’s tough to find a cardiologist who datespatients from the Ward of Cracked Hearts, butthere’s always the bariatric surgeonwho thinks you could drop a few pounds. If it’s too latefor the death row inmate, try the child predator, you toocould date the would-be senator, or even the President of the United States.If you …
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Meghan O’Rourke – Apartment Living
Meghan O’Rourke So those despotic loves have become known to you, rubbing cold hands up your thighs, leaving oily trails, whispering, *Just how you like it, right*? Upstairs the sorority girls are playing charades again, smoking cigarettes, wearing shifts, burning pain into their synapses. Life is a needle. And now it pricks you: the silver …
Tao Writer – I Want
Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -) I want to write more than words that say I love you. I want to write poetry that fills your heart with ecstasy, your mind with wonder, your body with burning desire. I want to write words which move your eyes to tears, fill your ears with the sweetness of …
Wallace Stevens – The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winterTo regard the frost and the boughsOf the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long timeTo behold the junipers shagged with ice,The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to thinkOf any misery in the sound of the wind,In the sound of a …
Anna Belle Kaufman – Cold Solace
Anna Belle Kaufman When my mother died, one of her honey cakes remained in the freezer. I couldn’t bear to see it vanish, so it waited, pardoned, in its ice cave behind the metal trays for two more years. On my forty-first birthday I chipped it out, a rectangular resurrection, hefted the dead weight in …
Joyce Sutphen – The Poem of Your Life
Joyce Sutphen (August 10, 1949 -) Is waiting for you to come along— some spring (or maybe it's winter) in New York or Paris on your way to meet someone who will change everything if you take the right train, if you look up from the book you are reading, if you say hello. The …
Alan Harawitz – My Old Man
Alan Harawitz When my father picks up the violin, with its long neck and curved body, he holds it like a woman. His eyes close and his upper lip trembles slightly. His bow hand smooth across the strings. His fingers dance near the pegs. The sound is the sea or the sun or the tears …
Dan Chiasson – Father And Son
Dan Chiasson (May 09, 1971 -) Only much later did they see, the two of them, that, never knowing one another, there was nothing not to know; that not being to begin with meant those later, more drastic negations negated nothing; this was to be the poignant part of it. The nothing nevertheless would someday …
Philip Schultz – The Big Sleep
Philip Schultz (January 06, 1945 -) On Turner Classic Movies Philip Marlowe is grimacing at the slinky beauty of the woman who will become the wife of the actor playing him. The man playing me, up at three this morning, worrying about the cost of private school, health insurance, and the slow grinding away of …
Arielle Moss – Damn, You’re Tiny
Arielle Moss Do you know all the things you could do to me with just one hand? Palm my whole stomach? Circle both my wrists at once? Does that turn you on? Did you know my Vans are a size 3? Do you think you’re the first to notice? Did you know my band size …
WS Merwin – Young Man Picking Flowers
William Stanley Merwin (September 30, 1927 – March 15, 2019) All at once he is no longer young with his handful of flowers in the bright morning their fragrance rising from them as though they were still on the stalk where they opened only this morning to the light in which somewhere unseen the thrush …
Albert Haley – Barcelona
Albert Haley She was not the one who let you kiss her behind the fake palms at the wedding reception. She was not the one who went with you to Star Trek number whatever and your knees bumped together and struck intergalactic sparks in the back row. She was not even the one who did …
William Evans – I Will Love You Most When I Can Barely Remember Anything
William Evans My first two crushes are fifty yards apart in the same Ohio cemetery. They never knew each other but now I connect them like a bowstring. I keep memories like a modeled city, the tallest buildings erecting themselves between my shoulders. I have good neighborhoods and blocks that marked me. I have fires …
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Dylan Thomas – Shall God Be Said To Thump The Clouds
Dylan Marlais Thomas (October 27, 1914 – November 1953) Shall gods be said to thump the clouds When clouds are cursed by thunder, Be said to weep when weather howls? Shall rainbows be their tunics’ colour? When it is rain where are the gods? Shall it be said they sprinkle water From garden cans, or free …
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Mark Strand – When The Vacation Is Over For Good
Mark Strand (April 11, 1934 - November 29, 2014) It will be strange Knowing at last it couldn’t go on forever, The certain voice telling us over and over That nothing would change, And remembering too, Because by then it will all be done with, the way Things were, and how we had wasted time …
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Mary Oliver – One Or Two Things
Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) 1 Don’t bother me. I’ve just been born. 2 The butterfly’s loping flight carries it through the country of the leaves delicately, and well enough to get it where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping here and there to fuzzle the damp throats …
Léo Dangel – Memoriam
Léo Dangel In the early afternoon my mother was doing the dishes. I climbed onto the kitchen table, I suppose to play, and fell asleep there. I was drowsy and awake, though, as she lifted me up, carried me on her arms into the living room, and placed me on the davenport, but I pretended …
Katie Ford – November Philosophers
Katie Ford Nothing is nothing, although he would call me that, *She was nothing*. Those were his words, but his hand was lifting cigarettes in chains and bridges of ash-light. He said he didn’t want his body to last. It wasn’t a year I could argue against that kind of talk, so I cut the …
Rabindranath Tagore – Clouds And Waves
Rabindranath Tagore (May 07, 1861 – August 07, 1941) Mother, the folk who live up in the clouds call out to me- "We play from the time we wake till the day ends. We play with the golden dawn, we play with the silver moon." I ask, "But how am I to get up to …
Henri Cole – Sphere
Henri Cole (May 09, 1956 -) Sir, I don’t have no black tea, the waitress replied, so I ordered Black Label instead. It was summer and the fragrant white flowers of the black locusts had awakened, like faeries or obscure matter. A black bear clothed in thorns made a mess of the bird feeder where …
CK Williams – Exhaust
Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams (November 4, 1936 – September 20, 2015) My grandson wants a Ferrari. I buy one for him. Why not? The second a Mercedes. The third a Porsche. Why not? How things change—my grandfather wanted only the pickup one icy Rochester night the year before I was born he skidded through …
Donald Hall – The Things
When I walk in my house I see pictures, bought long ago, framed and hanging —de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore— that I’ve cherished and stared at for years, yet my eyes keep returning to the masters of the trivial: a white stone perfectly round, tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell, a broken …
Jane Hirshfield – Jasmine
Jane Hirshfield (February 24, 1953 -) Almost the twenty-first century — how quickly the thought will grow dated, even quaint. Our hopes, our future, will pass like the hopes and futures of others. And all our anxieties and terrors, nights of sleeplessness, griefs, will appear then as they truly are — Stumbling, delirious bees in …
Paul Kane – Time Was
Paul Kane (March 23, 1950 -) Still, I must not forget that I once managed to put these things into writing. — Blanchot When the high-pitched sounds of the August continuo circulated like breezes through the immovable heat, time was a single leaf drifting upwards, then down. In the emptying out, the vacating of routine, the …
May Sarton – Rinsing The Eye
May Sarton pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) Between me and everything I see. The glass is pain. How to slide it away, Unblur my vision? “We must rinse the eye,” My old friend, the poet, Used to say. But that was in Belgium Many years ago. Raymond …
Dorianne Laux – Mother’s Day
Dorianne Laux (January 10, 1952 -) I passed through the narrow hills of my mother’s hips one cold morning and never looked back, until now, clipping her tough toenails, sitting on the bed's edge combing out the tuft of hair at the crown where it ratted up while she slept, her thumbs locked into her …
Joy Harjo – Remember
Joy Harjo (May 09, 1951 -) Remember the sky that you were born under, know each of the star's stories. Remember the moon, know who she is. Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the strongest point of time. Remember sundown and the giving away to night. Remember your birth, how your mother struggled …
