Arlene Weiner: Catering the Office Party
Some couldn’t eat ham and some wouldn’t eat lamb;
some couldn’t eat sugar, some couldn’t eat seeds.
So what could I order for our office feast?
And how could I cater for everyone’s needs?
Baruch November: Beard 7
In its color alone,
my beard is the sun falling upon the evening
and some days
it is chaffing brambles, poison
sumac, creeping red vines everywhere.
Doug Anderson: Original Sin
I don’t know what I’ve done
but I’m guilty.
Video: Garage de soir (Garage at Night)
In this touching portrayal of lovable slackers, two brothers spend 12 months together in their family’s garage, learning from each other.
Video: A Love Poem for Lonely Prime Numbers
Performance poet (and math student) Harry Baker spins a love poem about his favorite kind of numbers — the lonely, love-lorn prime. He also has a complaint about Paper People. Here are two lively, inspiring poems from this charming performer.
Ace Boggess: Thirty Blessings for Poets
3) May the poem on which you’ve just given up be accepted by the journal you’ve forgotten.
4) May someone quote your work in a movie that has nothing to do with poetry.
Miriam Levine: Beauty Secrets of the Dead
Jen who never read anything
but bills and Sunday papers
comes back from the dead educated.
Meg Pokrass: Between Animals
I imagined climbing the Everest of his body, perching on the top of his belly like a sexy squid, dangling my breasts over the shelf of his face like fishing lines.
Doug Anderson: Writers Block
Fenster McGraw is crawling out the back window of his lover’s house and stumbling into the alley pulling up his pants, and is spotted by the ever vigilant widow Winnie Wildwood with her nineteenth century naval spyglass who’s had her suspicions about that Wilson woman anyhow
Video: Travelers in the Night
Working the lonely late shift, a gas station cashier shares a silly moment with a special kind of stranger.
Jose Padua: On the Loving Grace of Well-Oiled Machines
but maybe that’s how
patriarchy works,
so fast and efficient
when it comes to killing,
so in love with the magic
of finding beautiful new worlds
to destroy
Sydney Lea: To Sydney Lea, Whom I Found Online
You must get tired of requests from witless strange men to meet up.
James Wright: Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me
The old grasshoppers
Are tired, they leap heavily now,
Their thighs are burdened.
I want to hear them, they have clear sounds to make.
Theo Marzials’ ‘A Tragedy’: The Worst Poem Ever Published
Death!
Plop.
The barges down in the river flop.
Flop, plop.
