Jose Padua: Blonde on Blonde
telling each other our secrets,
breathing in the sea salt air
and breathing it out again,
dedicating our lives to each other
Mike James: Two Poems
Shopkeepers whistle while they empty
Their shelves. And the darkness goes out beyond
The store front arrangements and the small,
Blue houses and the empty fields never fully lit.
Sara R. Burnett: Primary Source
What do you live for? The quiet
before sunrise or the moments after.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Anglo Saxon, Film Noir, and the Hundred Thousand Anxieties That Plague Me Like Demons in a Medieval Christian Allegory
Yo, Viking dudes, who knew your big-dog cock-of-the-walk
raping and pillaging would put us all here, right smack
dab in the middle of a decade filled with the stink
of war.
Meg Pokrass: Like she is
he doesn’t like
this Earth so much that he might live
here and be ruined like she is he
says
Traditional Poems from Pre-Modern South India
It was the very first night,
and the young girl showed surprising skill
in the arts of love
Rachel Hadas: Sustainable Systems
Hummingbirds in the bee balm. Scattered showers.
What rubric, what barometer, what headline?
Tony Gloeggler: Goodbye
no one seemed to accept
or understand I love Jesse,
that the way he will never fit
in the world reminds me of me
Dawn Potter: Ode to the Haverford Park Apartments
Stubbed-out cigarettes & the Ramones playing loud at 2 a.m. on a stereo
that the guy you’re with paid for by flipping burgers all summer & it
has the best speakers he wastes so much time telling you how great
these speakers are & you are annoyed you are like Take my clothes off
but you don’t say it out loud because christ isn’t it obvious
Connie Post: Auto Immune
One part of the body
turns against the other
Naomi Shihab Nye: Jerusalem
He’s painting a bird with wings
wide enough to cover two roofs at once.
Tashi Nyima: Gratitude
With gratitude, I remember the people, animals, plants, insects, creatures of the sky and sea, air and water, fire and earth, whose joyful exertion blesses my life each day.
Kim Stafford: Wren’s Nest in a Shed near Aurora
Three tiny eggs in thistledowncupped in a swirl of grass in the pocket of the tool beltI hung on the wall of the shedwhen it finally stood complete—will be three … Continue reading
Liza Katz Duncan: The Uncles
I’m forgetting others, I know.
One had a scar near his eye in the shape of a bird.
One, a firefighter, had tattooed the word
mercy, and fed the feral cats.
