Dion O’Reilly: Ecology of Fear
There’s a poet in your way. She’s pink as a newborn, bright as the one star that heats the planet. Such warmth, Iceman, of course you’re terrified.
Tony Magistrale: Family Man
For forty years a compliant prisoner
in his own home. Work his addiction and escape,
his only refuge against the daily humiliations,
the tedious boredom, the inane dinner chatter.
Carolyne Wright | Ghazal: Mid-Teens
My restless dreams and wakeful nights began—
At 3 a.m. I stalked down the hall. “You’re just sixteen,”
My father sighed—awake, too, in the living room.
William Palmer | The Glow Fills Something Inside: Lucille Clifton and Alma
among the rocks
at walnut grove
your silence drumming
in my bones,
tell me your names
Cesare Pavese: Passion for Solitude
Everything stands isolated before my senses,
which accept it calmly: a rustling of silence.
There’s nothing in this darkness I couldn’t know,
the way I know my blood is running through my veins.
Robbi Nester: Busker in the Subway
Coins begin to rain into his cigar box,
a few folded bills. Small children seek the deep source
of the sound. An old man with waist-length dreadlocks
puts down his heavy pack and sighs.
Dewitt Henry: On Grace
Economy and naturalness,
as in ballet, or basketball’s dunk,
or skater’s twirl, leap and glide.
Body’s flow seems effortless.
Lauren Camp: Sanctuary
That was Sunday. The village. I was a baby sugared
with indulgence. Fat and black-haired. Those years
of his unfolding wallet and the ongoing thorn
of origin.
Dorianne Laux: Spirit Level
I see how my whole life has been a dream,
one she built for me from the ground up,
her daughter, my mother the axe, beautiful
tool with which she shaped me, a house
much like the one she lived in, but smaller
Kurt Brown: A Moment
You stood before me, brushing your long hair,
stroke after stroke in the astonished air
while you talked of nothing, and I sipped my drink.
Delmore Schwartz: O Love, Sweet Animal
O Love, dark animal,
With your strangeness go
Like any freak or clown:
Appease the child in her
Because she is alone
Tony Gloeggler: Bridges (1994)
…he stops in front of you,
extends his hand and says,
“Satch Paige is my name.”
Catherine Gonick: Gazing at a Model of Australopithecus
She might have clung to her freedom
to live among leaves a while longer,
in paradise not quite lost.
Ma Yongbo: Three poems for Helen Pletts in English & Chinese
No one can walk here,
save shy deer, save wind and rain,
save those invisible wings
that can gently lift the whole garden
up to the constellations.
