poetry archive

until trees can be landlords

[6peaches]

Sandra Cisneros - Peaches—Six in a Tin Bowl, Sarajevo

If peaches had arms surely they would hold one another in their peach sleep.

And if peaches had feet it is sure they would nudge one another with their soft peachy feet.

And if peaches could they would sleep with their dimpled head on the other’s each to each.

Like you and me.

And sleep and sleep.

- Peaches—Six in a Tin Bowl, Sarajevo by Sandra Cisneros

[6peaches]

Will Alexander - Torrential by Unknown Emergence

its bottoms mysterious ocean mirrors being that blaze that fail at spawned oxygen meters that rivet as spectral gladioli never by barren transmixture but by holographic mirrors that spiral & transmute by miraculous living pattern that forgo impasse by pure event not unlike hylic registration that abounds with deficit being amplification by wind by exploded crystallography sans formational shelter never scaled by poisoned algae by summoned mythical beckoning not riotous calligraphy or delimited doctrinal maze that tends to scramble its own mazes not as deficit or by torrential affliction but code beyond reversal not as philosophical expenditure being torrential by unknown emergence

[6peaches]

Marie Howe - Magdalene: The Addict

I liked Hell, I liked to go there alone relieved to lie in the wreckage, ruined, physically undone. The worst had happened. What else could hurt me then? I thought it was the worst, thought nothing worse could come. Then nothing did, and no one.

[6peaches]

James Tate - On the Subject of Doctors

I like to see doctors cough. What kind of human being would grab all your money just when you're down? I'm not saying they enjoy this: "Sorry, Mr. Rodriguez, that's it, no hope! You might as well hand over your wallet." Hell no, they'd rather be playing golf and swapping jokes about our feet.

Some of them smoke marijuana and are alcoholics, and their moral turpitude is famous: who gets to see most sex organs in the world? Not poets. With the hours they keep they need drugs more than anyone. Germ city, there's no hope looking down those fire-engine throats. They're bound to get sick themselves sometime; and I happen to be there myself in a high fever taking my plastic medicine seriously with the doctors, who are dying.

[6peaches]

Olena Kalytiak Davis - six apologies, lord

I Have Loved My Horrible Self, Lord. I Rose, Lord, And I Rose, Lord, And I, Dropt. Your requirements, Lord. ‘Spite Your Requirements, Lord, I Have Loved The Low Voltage Of The Moon, Lord, Until There Was No Moon Intensity Left, Lord, No Moon, Intensity Left For You, Lord. I Have Loved The Frivolous, The Fleeting, The Frightful Clouds. Lord, I Have Loved Clouds! Do Not Forgive Me, Do Not Forgive Me LordandLover, HarborandMaster, GuardianandBread, Do Not. Hold Me, Lord, O, Hold Me

Accountable, Lord. I Am Accountable. Lord.

Lord It Over Me, Lord It Over Me, Lord. Feed Me

Hope, Lord. Feed Me Hope, Lord, Or Break My Teeth.

Break My Teeth, Sir, In This My Mouth.

[methodseeking]

Adedayo Agarau - Marriott, Iowa

Only the delicacy of your body the whole night. We dig the earth into the soft pouch of our backs. Tom Odell’s “Stay Tonight” on repeat—you ask me about my other lovers. Something about the fingers strumming the guitar on the radio. Instead of music, my breath dissolves your rib cages. Now the trumpet of your body. Now my mouth full of air. For every hair stuck between my teeth, you say my name dearly. You ask if anyone ever loved me in a way that touched me. I’m touched by kindness, I declare. That anyone wants me is a miracle. Like silk, I spread you again. Enter. Tongue first. The ripples inside. Teeth on your shoulder to humor your bones. After you, I arrive heaving. Oh, the tossing coin in your lustful eyes. Your lips sniggering like dancers in the rain. We throw the pillows on the ground to make room for the silence. Talk about cats. Their paws. Still, the song on the radio, repeating like applause. You say something about my feet being beautiful as I search the room for water. You forget your eyes on my body & I feel heavy, like a cross. In bed, again, my teeth in your butter neck. I tell you of my plans to leave Iowa, then my fascination with flowers. Once, I forgot a petal inside Siken’s Crush. I do not tell you. I do not intend to crush you.

[6peaches]

Steven Espada Dawson - My Brother Stole Every Spoon in the House

[6peaches]

Mackenzie Duan - Aphelion

This day last year, we smoked pot on the pier. Filled the dark with more dark.

These days, I hate San Francisco. Old confetti. Fog as pale & filthy as condoms. The glittering sidewalk on Valencia where friends & their boyfriends & girlfriends scratch initials in hearts.

My heart either hypercaffeinated or breaking.

These days, I have the same dreams: a crashing sky. The tunnel bliss passes through. How the softest kill happened.

Late spring. Snails fucking. Soft, wet muscles crowding the sidewalks, each one squirming into the other’s exoskeleton. Thought of Exit to Eden: No matter what your sexual preference, true love is always the ultimate fantasy.

According to a friend, true love is a false idol but death is, like, super romantic.

According to the CDC, teen girls report record levels of sadness.

Rain again. Snail shells washed over in gesso.

These days, I love my mother late at night & only feel somewhat guilty.

Ophelia: Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.

Full disclosure: every time the car passes a bright field, I want to love it.

Every time I see my mother sleeping on the couch yellowed by pollen & dust, I promise to accept what’s passed.

Imagine true love with no one to feel it. Here are snails, to feel it. Here is a late kiss.

Wind chimes in the hills leaking slow desert light. All the horses sway their strong legs.

Can’t imagine living past seventeen & then I am.

Woke up. Frolicked in the morning after rain.

[6peaches]

These girls aren't wounded so much as post-wounded, and I see their sisters everywhere. They're over it. I am not a melodramatic person. God help the woman who is. What I'll call "post-wounded" isn't a shift in deep feeling (we understand these women still hurt) but a shift away from wounded affect: These women are aware that "woundedness" is overdone and overrated. They are wary of melodrama, so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-wounded women make jokes about being wounded or get impatient with women who hurt too much. The post-wounded woman conducts herself as if preempting certain accusations: Don't cry too loud; don't play victim. Don't ask for pain meds you don't need; don't give those doctors another reason to doubt. Post-wounded women fuck men who don't love them and then they feel mildly sad about it, or just blasé about it; they refuse to hurt about it or to admit they hurt about it- or else they are endlessly self-aware about it, if they do allow themselves this hurting.

—Leslie Jamison in "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain" (2014)

[6peaches]

Maggie Smith - Wild

I've talked so much about loving the world without any idea how to do it.

Something about turning the other cheek? Something, something, feeding the mouth

that bites you? The world I'm trying to love is all teeth and need, all gray mange,

but I can't resent the wolf for pulling the lamb down, even in front of his mother.

I can't be moved by bleating, a limp throat. The wolf has her own crying young.

I've talked so much about loving the world— is this how it's done? I am offering

the only thing I have. I am holding out my hand, feeding myself to the hungry future.

[6peaches]

Charles Simic - January

Children’s fingerprints On a frozen window Of a small schoolhouse.

An empire, I read somewhere, Maintains itself through The cruelty of its prisons.

[6peaches]

Christian Wiman - All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs

All my friends are finding new beliefs. This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees. In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew God whomps on like a genetic generator. Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon. Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine. One man marries a woman twenty years younger and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant; another’s brick-fisted belligerence gentles into dementia, and one, after a decade of finical feints and teases like a sandpiper at the edge of the sea, decides to die. Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees, high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt, sobrieties, satieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of  being … All my friends are finding new beliefs and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track of the new gods and the new loves, and the old gods and the old loves, and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives, and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness, and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends, my beautiful, credible friends.

[6peaches]

Ben Purkert - The Only Museum

by this point you must be hungry for God not the real thing only flecks of gold paint the marble bust of a half-bull half-man

today I took a visit to the only museum and every last gallery was packed with snow I mean this literally the whole place

frozen I didn’t stay long I was worried about melting the art I touched my eyes lightly to each flake and when I left

the museum I believed a bit more in God the strangest thing was I never shivered I knew love the whole time

[6peaches]

Leila Chatti - Ode to Ugly Things

God bless ugliness. There is beauty in every ugly thing. I don’t mean

those eyes and teeth drifted apart like untethered boats, because they are beautiful.

I mean your sister, third grade, her braces, each band

a yellow figure-eight, her favorite color, and trapped between the interstice

of her front incisors, a gleaming broccoli bud. I mean the beetle, crushed,

its husk cracked like a walnut, broken shell

sleek as obsidian just cooled. I mean fluff

of mold on two-week old pita bread, soft green bloom on the dark back shelf.

I mean soar of the eyetooth, slam of the door.

I mean blood, however it comes, always bright and shining.

The ambulance still screaming its wail life life life!

all its lights spinning. The car’s plunge

over the rail of the bridge, glint of sparks from metal wrenched,

sleeve of water opening for whatever enters it.

Your husband fucking another woman across town, the room paid in cash,

even there is beauty. See how they rise and fall. See how in their faces, for a moment, is something like joy.

[theoptia]

Salvatore Quasimodo, from “And Suddenly It’s Evening” tr. by Jack Bevan

Text ID: Each of us is alone on the heart of the earth / pierced by a ray of sun: / and suddenly it’s evening.

[6peaches]

Carl Adamshick - New year's morning

A low, quiet music is playing— distorted trumpet, torn bass line, white windows. My palms are two speakers the size of pool-hall coasters. I lay them on the dark table for you to repair.

[6peaches]

Nate Klug - Advent

In the middle of December to start over

to assume again an order

at the end of wonder

to conjure and then to keep

slow dirty sleet within its streetlight