Jordan Smith: Ducktail
if you want
A good story, he told me, I mean one
You can take to heart, don’t ask anyone
With one foot out the car door
Alison Hurwitz: My Son Runs Out of Time
Inside his syncopated thinking, there is only now:
a sound, and he’s a fox kit caught in sudden shift, head cocked,
one paw lifted from the leaves.
Tony Gloeggler: Minimum Wages
He’d talk about the summer
he worked behind a counter,
slicing meat, creating fully
loaded heroes like works of art.
Jane Kenyon: The Beaver Pool in December
The beavers thrive somewhere
else, eating the bark of hoarded
saplings. How they struggled
to pull the long branches
over the stiffening bank…
George Witte: Laurels
Garland me with pestilence,
blown in, unbidden, rooted out or burnt
with toxin, only to revive.
Michael Simms: The Crows
We barely recognized ourselves
But the crows knew
Who we were and where we’d been
Why we returned
Diane di Prima: To My Father
In my dreams you stand among roses.
You are still the fine gardener you were.
You worry about mother.
You are still the fierce wind, the intolerable force
that almost broke me.
Michael Daley: Desire
I saw the planets align tonight, then fog in sheets,
cloud in waves, whipped across Mt. Erie
and unburdened the night of its new worlds.
Joanne Durham: The Pulaski Skyway, 1970
I drove that massive maze, high as its trusses,
to make it out of New Jersey to New York’s smoky clubs,
to sit a table away from musicians soon to be stars.
Philip Terman: Two Poems
our daughter
rubbing softly and deeply,
her knowing hands breathing
into the pain their love
Wang Jiaxin: Two Poems
Walking down the scorching streets of Moscow,
Osip turned to Anna and said:
“I’m ready to die.”
Rimbaud said that every poem is the last.
Robinson Jeffers: Hurt Hawk
I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bones too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.
Stuart Dischell: Love’s Dominion
The cabdriver who is a wit
Does not really know that elephant
Tusks and gold bars are packed inside
Love’s trunk along with the bodies
Of Love’s family. Okay, it’s books…
Meg Pokrass: Three Poems
When I said, I miss America
I meant that what is nestled in my brain feels like a harbor.
