poetry

sideblog for billspreston-esq

[stephaniesays1968]

aubade beginning in handcuffs, torrin a. greathouse

[havingapoemwithyou]

Against Empire by Jim Moore

[havingapoemwithyou]

Syzygy by Yusef Komunyakaa

[sivavakkiyar]

Rilke and Borges

[aguard1ente]

Lunch Poems / Frank O’Hara

—St Paul and all that

[havingapoemwithyou]

Burn Lake 3 by Carrie Fountain

[apoemaday]

Onions

by William Matthews

How easily happiness begins by dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter slithers and swirls across the floor of the sauté pan, especially if its errant path crosses a tiny slick of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.

This could mean soup or risotto or chutney (from the Sanskrit chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions go limp and then nacreous and then what cookbooks call clear, though if they were eyes you could see

clearly the cataracts in them. It’s true it can make you weep to peel them, to unfurl and to tease from the taut ball first the brittle, caramel-colored and decrepit papery outside layer, the least

recent the reticent onion wrapped around its growing body, for there’s nothing to an onion but skin, and it’s true you can go on weeping as you go on in, through the moist middle skins, the sweetest

and thickest, and you can go on in to the core, to the bud-like, acrid, fibrous skins densely clustered there, stalky and in- complete, and these are the most pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare

and rage and murmury animal comfort that infant humans secrete. This is the best domestic perfume. You sit down to eat with a rumor of onions still on your twice-washed hands and lift to your mouth a hint

of a story about loam and usual endurance. It’s there when you clean up and rinse the wine glasses and make a joke, and you leave the minutest whiff of it on the light switch, later, when you climb the stairs.

[blnkverse]

ROBERT CREELEY

[havingapoemwithyou]

Dust by Dorianne Laux

[havingapoemwithyou]

So What by Kim Addonizio

[havingapoemwithyou]

Mothers by Nikki Giovanni

[havingapoemwithyou]

Not This by Olena Kalytiak Davis

[apoemaday]

The Death of Hansel

by Ron Koertge

Gretel enrolls in night school. A creative writing class. There are other women in their fifties. One keeps pointing her expensive breasts at the teacher. One has crazy hair and a pentagram. They’re nice enough, though.

Gretel likes to sit with the young people. The girls treat her like a mom, spilling all kinds of secrets. Their idea of an endearment is to give her a joint or two in a Sucrets box.

Gretel likes the class. The teacher is bigger than she expected, strong like a woodsman. She’s sorry when he hands out the last poem.

At home, she sits in the window seat and smokes. The marijuana makes her sleep and before that she feels – she learned this word recently – phantasmagorical.

The moon is either there or she knows where it is. A forest fills her little yard. A trail of white pebbles leads God-knows-where. She lets herself cry once a week and this is the time.

“Oh, honey,” she says. “I miss you so much.”

[apoemaday]

Incident

by Norman MacCaig

I look across the table and think (fiery with love) Ask me, go on, ask me to do something impossible, something freakishly useless, something unimaginable and inimitable

Like making a finger break into blossom or walking for half an hour in twenty minutes or remembering tomorrow.

I will you to ask it. But all you say is Will you give me a cigarette? And I smile and, returning to the marvelous world of possibility I give you one with a hand that trembles with a human trembling.

[blnkverse]

e.e. cummings

[blnkverse]

e.e. cummings

[lunchboxpoems]

NOVEMBER 1, 1975

My mother is white bones in a weed field on her birthday. She who would be sixty has been sixteen years absent at celebrations. For sixteen years of minutes she has been what is missing. This is just to note the arrogance of days continuing to happen as if she were here.

LUCILLE CLIFTON