pas de deux

and when you're gone, I'm godless.

[beguines]

American Poetry Review

[iphigeniacomplex]

There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.

[filmforwomen]

x

[havingapoemwithyou]

Why I Stayed by Traci Brimhall

[derangedrhythms]

Mary Szybist, Incarnadine; Invitation

[woundgallery]

Fanny Howe

June Jordan

[sivavakkiyar]

from ‘Said To Have Been Heard To Say Hush’, by Nathaniel Mackey

[feral-ballad]

When death beats its wings at the window I hope I am not standing alone in the kitchen with a cup and a hairbrush, watching doves on a wire. I want to curl up in that dim, disordered bed where all my loves lie, elbow to cheek; I want the brief reprieve as the angel who came for me pauses, uncertain, trying to distinguish one breath from another.

Kim Addonizio, from Wild Nights: New & Selected Poems; “Beds”

[beguines]

Eliza Griswold, Wideawake Field

[cloudswamp]

a lover’s discourse, roland barthes

[alwaysalreadyangry]

j.h. prynne, from the white stones

[beguines]

Rainer Maria Rilke, "Dies überstanden haben: auch das Glück", trans. Wally Swist

[violettesiren]

The tree azalea overwhelms the evening with its scent, defining everything and the endless fields.

Walking away, suddenly, it slices off and is gone.

The visible object blurs open in front of you, the outline of a branch folds back into itself, then clarifies—just as you turn away—

and the glass hardens into glass

as you go about taking care of things abstractedly one thing shelved after another, as if they were already in the past,

needing nothing from you until, smashing itself on the tile floor, the present cracks open the aftermath of itself.

A blurry photograph by Martha Ronk

[weltenwellen]

Now They're Saying Isolation Atrophies the Brain Maggie Smith

[pollen]

Jane Huffman, from "Six Revisions"

[havingapoemwithyou]

Love Letter from the Afterlife by Andrea Gibson

[beguines]

Jorie Graham, Killing Spree