Amiri Baraka: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.
Jason Irwin: Landscape
See the men break through the early morning mistlike phantoms from a dream; their hat brims
pulled low, shirt sleeves rolled above elbows,
boots caked with last week’s mud.
F.R. Foksal: The Indignation Parade
you ran the risk of
making your whole world
fall down on its
head
Louie Skipper: Yellow Dust
Is it true the moment of my dying (which has borrowed
so much brightness from the sun) will demand
such satisfaction from me that I will be
blinded by my own last words?
Video: W.C. Williams reads ‘By the road to the contagious hospital’
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind-
Christina Rossetti: The Plague
‘Listen, the last stroke of death’s noon has struck—
The plague is come,’ a gnashing Madman said…
Daniel Burston: John Prine, Working Class Poet (1947-2020)
John Prine was a national treasure, whose songs about love, loss and aging – many written while he was still a relatively young man! – reflect his working class roots. But even so, they have a universal and timeless relevance.
Robert Wrigley: Two Poems
they rise and form their three- or four-bird patrols
leaving the haunted campus behind,
until the priest raven perches alone and calls,
in search of the people none of them can find.
Majid Naficy: Morning Blend
Every morning my love
Brings me a cup of coffee
With a piece of dark chocolate.
Molly Fisk: The Lineage
the poets, tethered to each other
in the popular mind as if we were one
big family and we are
David Watts: Blessing in the Midst of Siege
We are cloistered in our houses
dodging a horrible virus
but it almost feels like blessing.
Michael Simms: Ten things to do before I start writing today
Read what I wrote yesterday — hate it. Read what Sam wrote yesterday — love it. Hate Sam. Think about 45-year friendship with Sam. Remember him stealing my girlfriend in college. No, wait that was me — I married her….
