David Kirby: My Unhealthy Relationship with Life as We Know It
I’m fit to be tied, life. I’ve had it up to here. If you consisted of nothing but clichés, catchphrases, adages, old saws, mottos, slogans, and apothegms, we wouldn’t have … Continue reading
Barbara Hamby: Ode on Words for Parties (American Edition)
Why do we have so many words for parties, a slew
of them once you start looking: shindig, bash,
meet-and-greets, raves, blowouts, barbecues,
and more tepid functions, receptions, luncheons
Jose Padua: Blonde on Blonde
telling each other our secrets,
breathing in the sea salt air
and breathing it out again,
dedicating our lives to each other
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Anglo Saxon, Film Noir, and the Hundred Thousand Anxieties That Plague Me Like Demons in a Medieval Christian Allegory
Yo, Viking dudes, who knew your big-dog cock-of-the-walk
raping and pillaging would put us all here, right smack
dab in the middle of a decade filled with the stink
of war.
Traditional Poems from Pre-Modern South India
It was the very first night,
and the young girl showed surprising skill
in the arts of love
Mike Vargo: The Holiday Rant
Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve celebrate the three great indulgences of our culture: overeating, overspending, and getting overly intoxicated. The unifying theme is excess.
Rachel Hadas: 460 Riverside Drive
What ghostly messenger
was rattling away unseen
on the other side of the door?
Barbara Hamby: Mambo Cadillac
I’m talking to you, Mr. Magoo. Sit up, check
out that blonde with the leopard print tattoo. O she’ll lick
the sugar right off your doughnut and bill you, too, speak
French while she do the do.
Matthew J. Parker: Ban All Books But Mine
Ron DeSantis is doing a Model Press Conference with Florida high schoolers at P.S. 47, aka Our Lady of Stand Your Ground Middle School in Panacea.
Video: Soft Animals by Renee Zhan
In this wildly imaginative surrealistic narrative, two ex-lovers cross paths at a train station.
George Drew: Federico García Lorca, You Have Ruined My Day
this, in the end, might as well have been a poem about savage reckonings
Barbara Hamby: New Orleans Dithyramb
And Satan said unto the Lord, “You have your work
and I have mine, but there is no sin the world
cannot hold,” and the Lord, he laughed himself a big one
Chard deNiord: Turning 70
I know at last how to smile and not smile
at the same time in a way without trying that says,
“I’ve tasted ambrosia and mustard in the same bite
so many times my tongue’s lost its taste.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to My 1977 Toyota
Engine like a Singer sewing machine, where have you
not carried me—to dance class, grocery shopping,
into the heart of darkness and back again?
