H.C. Palmer: An Old Kansas Farm Boy’s Take on Gary Snyder’s “Hay for the Horses” or Why I Became a Poet
In the early 1950s I worked summers as a part of a team of 4 high school football players bucking bales of alfalfa hay for a local rancher in Southeast Kansas. We moved over 1,000 bales from his hay meadow to the loft in his barn each cutting.
Adrie Kusserow: Anthropocene Lullaby
Don’t tell me you didn’t get a bit edgy,
when capitalism tossed its blonde hair cockily aside,
its profit settling like plastic on the ocean’s floor.
Lisel Mueller: Monet Refuses the Operation
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see
Frank O’Hara: Autobiographia Literaria
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!
Lawrence Wray: In Line at the Butcher
Papers blow and clot the gutters. The faces are those I’m used to from as long ago as Calabria, Donegal, and Kyiv. New arrivals are a year maybe from Juarez … Continue reading
Robert Cording: Ghost Forest
Tonight, I’m not here
to pretend this place that has been lost,
can be saved, but simply to stand here,
at the edge of what once was
and remember the sound of wind in the pines