Keith Flynn: Granularities
Each organ seems like a streetlight in a neighborhood
viewed from the mountaintop at midnight,
going out slowly one by one. “It’s all downhill from
here, Son,” he tells me, “‘til I hit the bottom.”
Linda Parsons: Two Poems
I’m not a healer, though maybe
I am—my ordinary hands laid on the scathing past
to cool its sear, my palms a bowl cupping
the last drop of day in blind descent.
Yehuda Amichai: God has Pity on Kindergarten Children
God has pity on kindergarten children. He has less pity on school children And on grownups he has no pity at all, he leaves them alone, and sometimes they must … Continue reading
Corrine Clegg Hales: Her Husband Wants Her Back
Marge has run again, hiding out
at one neon motel after another
with her three small children.
Lord Byron: Epitaph to a Dog
…all the Virtues of Man
Without his Vices.
Robert Wrigley: Cricket and Cicada
After an hour I can’t tell them
one from another. They’ve become
two parts of an uncommon harmony,
cricket melody then cicada melody
until there’s no melody at all
Shaheen Dil: Properties of the Number Nineteen
There are nineteen angels guarding the gates of Muslim Hell—
which seems odd—who would be trying to break into Hell?
Or is it to keep the residents from getting out?
Barbara Hamby: Mambo Cadillac
I’m talking to you, Mr. Magoo. Sit up, check
out that blonde with the leopard print tattoo. O she’ll lick
the sugar right off your doughnut and bill you, too, speak
French while she do the do.
Elizabeth Akers Allen: Rock Me to Sleep
Backward, turn backward, O time, in thy flight;
Make me a child again, just for to-night.
Michael Simms: Rhythm Benders | The Musicality of American Poetry
A poem is rooted in the rhythms of pulse, breath and movement.
Daniel Lawless: The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With
Was a cubit long and weighed half as much
As an average newborn U.S. baby.
Ellen McGrath Smith: Woman Standing for an Hour in Target Reading Greeting Cards to Herself
Rejecting some
for sounding nothing
like her, others for
sounding too much
like the way she feels
Doug Anderson: Charon
The boat came by my bed, Charon poling through the murk. Get in, He said, and so we drifted through a night of broken trees and burning cars.
Ippen Shonin: Sorrow
those things we have longed for most
have not been attained
