Robinson Jeffers: Rock and Hawk
Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.
Gary Fincke: The Double Negatives of the Living
I could talk
Two hours past midnight with
My father in the steelworker
Idiom of his city.
Tayve Neese: Prophecy of the Four-Legged
The horned things knew
the scent of blood usurping sweet hay
as the woman cracked and sang.
Earl S. Braggs: Such is the Love Story of Sally
It was not the first time that Thomas Jefferson asked
her to dance.
Kari Gunter-Seymour: That Spot where Raccoon Creek Meets Brush Fork
I wish I could say
I lay your body under the honeysuckle
the day you crossed over, let vine and wisp
hang nectar all around you.
Sharon Fagan McDermott: Three Ways of Looking at Beauty
When the hypnotherapist brought me out of my trance, I wondered about this deer, about my new vision of beauty—why had it changed? Something fundamental in me had shifted and reconstructed itself.
Rachel Hadas: Fire Pit
Gathered, we watched flames
flickering and drawing us together.
It was hard to pull our eyes away.
Video: A Small Antelope Horn
Sitting by the fire with a nomadic tribe, a physicist ponders the many shapes of wisdom.
Herman Melville: Art
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate…
Angele Ellis: Dances of Death | In Tango Below a Narrow Ceiling, an experimental young Syrian poet makes his book-length debut in English
What would happen in this vast dagger
If America stopped eating human flesh
For three days?
Jose Padua: A Short History of Monsters and Everything Else that Gives Substance to the Dream
in deference to the perverse dreaming
of the dwindling numbers of the upwardly mobile as
they trash and burn their merry way to their new luxury
condominiums decorated in beautiful pastel colors.
Judith Sanders: Feeding the Horses at Crystal Spring Farm
Out past the empty barn,
twin Percherons, tall as steeples,
canter across their meadow
to greet my small son and me.
Gregory Djanikian: The Aestheticians of Genocide
Along the Euphrates, some women
died in their own blood, and some,
holding their children close,
threw themselves into the river
Rosaly DeMaios Roffman: When Christina Called
And when he was little and screamed
because the circus in town was rained out
she then told him to wait–to please wait–
that old issue of trust in the steady gods
