Lessons from a Mirror, by Thylias Moss(2/6/2015)–Snow White was nude at her wedding, she’s so white the gown seemed to disappear when she put it on. Put me beside her and the proximity is good for a study of chiaroscuro, not much else. Her name aggravates me most, as if I need to be told what’s white and what isn’t. Judging […]
Let’s Get Out of Here, by Corey Zeller(2/7/2015)–The river is a fish and my tongue is white paper you draw your hand on and the sounds keys make on the waist of a janitor in an empty building on the night of your birth when the moon was a live bird pinned to a girl’s chest and the color of a beat-up […]
Lillian Gish Goes to Hell, by Richard Siken(2/8/2015)–But she has been there before, has a suite in fact, where she can swan and collapse on a series of fainting couches: velveteen, plush, gem-colored. In 1913, during the production of A Good Little Devil, Lillian collapsed from anemia. She took delight in suffering for art. Although not a religious man, Sartre was fascinated […]
Lisbon, by Eliza Griswold(2/9/2015)–We meet midway to walk white cobbles under a fish-flesh gray sky. Europe is collapsing; we are collapsing always and again no matter how hard we love one another. I don’t understand our failure, where the feed loops back and spits us into another country, another junior suite reenacting this same, same beat of a […]
Losing Track, by Denise Levertov(2/10/2015)–Long after you have swung back away from me I think you are still with me: you come in close to the shore on the tide and nudge me awake the way a boat adrift nudges the pier: am I a pier half-in half-out of the water? and in the pleasure of that communion I […]
Love Poem, by Dorothea Lasky(2/11/2015)–The rain whistled. A taxi brought me to your apartment building And there I stood. I had dreamed a dream Of us in a bedroom. The light shining upon us in white sheets. You were singing me a song of your sailing days And in the dream I reached deep in you and pulled out […]
Move to the City, by Nathaniel Bellows(2/12/2015)–live life as a stranger. Disappear into frequent invention, depending on the district, wherever you get off the train. For a night, take the name of the person who’d say yes to that offer, that overture, the invitation to kiss that mouth, sit on that lap. Assume the name of whoever has the skill to […]
Mint, by Elaine Terranova(2/13/2015)–Already, we’d be driving past those trees, that part of the forest. Even briefly, it refreshed you. It was like mint in August though that sting would be gone with summer. The ground tarnishing first, and soon the leaves. I thought then, men don’t stop. They want so much to get on. What we said, […]
Love Song for Love Songs, by Rafael Campo(2/14/2015)–A golden age of love songs and we still can’t get it right. Does your kiss really taste like butter cream? To me, the moon’s bright face was neither like a pizza pie nor full; the Beguine began, but my eyelid twitched. “No more I love you’s,” someone else assured us, pouring out her heart, […]
Moss Retains Moisture, by Matthew Rohrer(2/15/2015)–I never believed in bioluminescence before. Here in Moravia where all daylight hides the only illumination is whiskey. Names seem unimportant. Large are the memories growing elsewhere beneath themselves. Do hemlocks burn when stared at? Darkness always retains something shapely. Those leaves engender me. Bedding down in pine-covered nighttime I disappeared. Owls are silent. Bears […]
On Hearing That My Poems Were Being Studied in a Distant Place, by Hyam Plutzik(2/16/2015)–What are they mumbling about me there? “Here,” they say, “he suffered; here was glad.” Are words clothes or the putting off of clothes?” The scene is as follows: my book is open On thirty desks; the teacher expounds my life. Outside the window the Pacific roars like a lion. Beside which my small words […]
On The Bus Someday, by Jessica Greenbaum(2/17/2015)–Of that string of memories about our lost friendship I remember being invited places as a pair, like a comedy team; and after one party, our self-parody of our own stammering speechlessness when introduced to Henrik, the Swedish god auto mechanic; our twin, garish, purple-flowered swimsuits from Kmart, outlining, around Texas, our sameness and differences; […]
Quandary, by Louise Mathias(2/18/2015)–All night I flew the dark recess of God’s mind. It was arranged like Iowa fields– not a damn thing missing. You ask how I survived. I lived on a message, broad light at the end of the world. Words, they have so much in common with departure, the clouds elliptical & nervous. Why translate? […]
Room Tone, by Bill Berkson(2/19/2015)–Wrestling that old beauty “Body and Soul” To the ground The genus award for epochal comes besotted Complicity follows like caramel on a sponge mop Child-bearing babies on stilts I dreamed you were felled by an unspecified illness In yours I was rowing a leaky boat, even though The motor was foolproof and bore hairs […]
Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost(2/20/2015)–Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. […]
The dandelions in the moment and then, by CJ Evans(2/21/2015)–It is. And needles don’t fall; cones don’t fall. The soil keeps holding the grass seed and the dune sand beneath is still torn by thirsty, wooden hands. By bedrock is where will be my tenoned pine. And the grass seeds don’t split, their shoots don’t spill. The clouds remain, widely. That locked closet inside […]
|admin| New Available PDF: Ars Poetica(2/21/2015)– Go to PDF Downloads page Ars Poetica (Poetry Written On the Art Of Poetry): Ars Poetica.pdf Ars Poetica.docx CONTENTS: + A True Poem, by Lloyd Schwartz + Adam’s Curse, by W. B. Yeats + Always on the Train, by Ruth Stone + Ars Poetica (cocoons), by Dana Levin + Ars Poetica, by Anthony Butts + Ars Poetica, by Archibald MacLeish + Ars Poetica, by Dorothea Lasky + Ars Poetica, by Paul Verlaine + Ars Poetica, by Primus St. John + Ars Poetica, by Vicente Huidobro + Ars Poetica?, by Czeslaw Milosz + Arthur’s Anthology of English Poetry, by Laurence Lerner + Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry, by Howard Nemerov + Blue or Green, by James Galvin + Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks, by Jane Kenyon + Cockroaches: Ars Poetica, by Chad Davidson + Endnote, by Hayden Carruth + Envoi, by William Meredith + Five Poems about Poetry, by George Oppen + If It All Went Up in Smoke, by George Oppen + Languages, by Carl Sandburg + Light (an Ars Poetica), by Michael Cirelli + Mars Poetica, by Wyn Cooper + Stilling to North, by Arthur Sze + Take the I Out, by Sharon Olds + Teaching the Ape to Write Poems, by James Tate + The Indications [excerpt], by Walt Whitman + The Novel as Manuscript, by Norman Dubie
All Us Beautiful Monsters, by Alex Lemon(2/22/2015)–The entire world wants To pretend to be a foreigner In a big box store & wander The aisles shouting, endlessly— But I am pretty sure that today Is my day to not just be a guy But to be the guy. A baby grows In each drawer of the million- Drawered cherrywood cabinet That […]
Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley(2/23/2015)–I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet […]
Birds in the Night, by Luis Cernuda(2/24/2015)–The French—or was it the English?—government placed a plaque On that house at 8 Great College Street, Camden Town, London, Where in a room Rimbaud and Verlaine, a peculiar couple, Lived, drank, worked, and fornicated For a few brief stormy weeks. No doubt the ambassador and the mayor attended the dedication, All the same people […]
A Calculus of Readiness, by Liz Waldner(2/25/2015)–I, too, come from the city of dolls. A small palm is my umbrella. This takes care of above but below, the blind river of sadness rolls on and in it, a hand is always reaching up to pick fish from the night-time sky. The lines on the palm of the hand lure a trout […]
A Situation for Mrs. Biswas, by Prageeta Sharma(2/26/2015)–When I received the call I was in a store in Missoula, Montana. A store stocked with sparkling ephemera: glass fauna, tiny belfry bulbs, winter white birch and stump-lamps brandishing light cones, little shelves and branches hung with drops of ice and round silver baubles. I loved the store: it was cavernous, dark with wood […]
A Supermarket in California, by Allen Ginsberg(2/27/2015)–What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at […]
|admin| New Available PDF: Untitled Poems(2/27/2015)– Go to PDF Downloads page Untitled (Poems Without Titles): Untitled Poems.pdf Untitled Poems.docx CONTENTS: + [Untitled], by J. Michael Martinez + Untitled [1950 June 27], by Don Mee Choi + Untitled [A house just like his mother’s], by Gregory Orr + Untitled [and the moon once it stopped was sleeping], by Erika Meitner + Untitled [Back they […]
Another Poem on My Daughter’s Birthday, by Craig Morgan Teicher(2/28/2015)–There must be soft words for an evening like this, when the breeze caresses like gentle fingertips all over. I don’t know how not to write darkly and sad. But it’s two years today since my little girl was born, cut safely from the noose. We meant nothing but hope; how near death is to […]
Once a Day Poetry 