Edgar Lee Masters: The Circuit Judge
I in life was the Circuit Judge, a maker of notches,
Deciding cases on the points the lawyers scored,
Not on the right of the matter.
Jason Irwin: Their Hands
All I remember were their hands holding me down: my mother’s father’s, a young nurse who gripped my left arm, and the doctor, who, before each prick into my skin, assured me it wasn’t a needle, just his finger.
Rachel Hadas:’What goes around comes around,’ or what Greek mythology says about Donald Trump
When I studied and taught Sophocles’ tragedy “Oedipus the King,” the stress was on hubris, irony, blindness. What wasn’t emphasized is that the play was written during and is set in the midst of a plague.
Tayve Neese: Inside her muscle, a blossom,
This is what the tumor had done,
reduced the whole world to nothing
but metaphor
Tony Whedon: Field of Vision | Blues and Greens
Between this and that, my wife, my dear little cowslip,
was misdiagnosed with heart failure and everything I loved
lost its pigment. The old reds weren’t red anymore,
the rose bushes on the path by the river had lost their pink
Adrian Blevins: Appalachians Run Amok
I’m impatient like you to get to the bottom of the problem
of what to call the vacant feeling of our long-ago deportation
from the goats & their creamy milk & the meadows & pastures
they would frolic in each Sunday when my father would
metaphorically herd them…
Michael Simms: Why you might be interested in my new book
Donate $20 or more to your favorite progressive cause or candidate, and Red Cedar Distribution will send you a free copy of my new collection of poems American Ash.
Denise Levertov: The Ache of Marriage
two by two in the ark of
the ache of it
Doug Anderson: Prancing
I remember sitting on the sofa in my grandparent’s house–my day care center–watching television with my grandfather.
Judith Sanders: Autumn Walk at Beechwood Farms
You said, Name the world.
So I said, I call this a spangle tree.
How about, you said, a rose-hued spangle tree.
That’s beautiful, I said.
Let’s name the world together.
Gerry LaFemina: A Room for Space Agers
At a certain age I re-aimed that telescope, first, to look into the window of the young widow across the street, she who made me feel atomic.
Martina Reisz Newberry: Passing a Deserted High School in the Nuclear Sunshine of a Fall Afternoon
I ought to study signs and portents.
Dawn Potter: Soul
Today, a bird invisible among the trees
cries Jericho Jericho Jericho O no O no
all the afternoon long.
Joan E. Bauer: Arcosanti
A dusty paint cloth of rust and ochre,
the desert before us as we pass shark fins
of agave & prickly-ribbed saguaro.
