blake kathryn
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KIROKAZE
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Noah Kahan
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Misplaced Lens Cap
Sweet Seals For You, Always
EXPECTATIONS
we're not kids anymore.
No title available
RMH
Peter Solarz
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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@freeversemadeprose
After his Death
It turned out that the bombs he had thrown raised buildings, that the acid he had sprayed had painfully opened the eyes of the blind. Fishermen hauled prizewinning fish from the water he had polluted.
We sat with astonishment, enjoying the shade of the vicious words he had planted. The government decreed that on the anniversary of his birth, the people should observe two minutes’ pandemonium.
A Toast to the Baltimore Oriole
Here's to your good looks and the neat way you shit, with a brisk bob like a curtsy, easy as song. Here's to your song, which, though "neither rhythmical nor musical" (The Birds of Canada), relieves me of all speech, and never deals with what is past, or passing, or to come. And, as a monument to the sturdy fragile woven scrotum of your nest, I hereby dedicate baseball.
Don McKay
Jeep Cherokee
You've never known a single Indian who wasn't painted onto a football helmet or branded in chrome on a tailgate, but there you go, off mashing the landscape like some edge-city explorer, flinging yourself toward new worlds beyond the driveway, Lewis and Clark with a seat belt. Go ahead, you trampling trooper, you goose-stepping little Godzilla, you shining beast of raging fashion, riding the big teeth of your tires, as if you would ever follow a dirt road anywhere but to a car wash. This is America, and you're free to drive anything you can buy, but I will tell you:
Hitler would love this car—a machine in which even the middle class can master the world, purchase their way through peril safely as senators. This is a car for a uniformed strongman, a one-car motorcade through a thatched village of strangers.
This is the car that will replace Prozac. This is the car that Barbie buys with mad money after the date with Angry White Ken. This is the car every KKK member wants to drive after dark. This is the car that makes it safe to be hateful in public.
Go ahead. Climb in. Look at yourself, way up there on the bridge of this thick-windowed ship of enterprise. Everybody knows the only way today is to buy your way through: be bigger, be better, be a bully, be a barger. Be sure you're safe from the poor. Bustle your way through each day's bombardment with the muscle of royalty. You've got the power to bring back the monarchy, four fat tires at a time!
Go anywhere. You're entitled. You have squasher's rights. Onward! Accelerate, you brawny bruising winner, you self-saluting junta on wheels, you reclaimer of gold-bricked streets. Democracy is for people stuck in small cars. And God has never rule through traffic laws.
Get used to the feeling of having your way. Each broad cut of the steering wheel is your turn at conquest, the power-assisted "triumph of the me" in heavy traffic. You are rolling proof that voting is stupid; that the whole damn machine is fixed before it leaves the factory; that fairness is a showroom; that togetherness is for bus riders; that TV has the right idea: there is just you in a small room on the safe side of the glass, with desire spread out before you like a ballroom without walls, and you will not be denied. You've got the moves and the view. You don't need government, unions, bank regulation, mercy, the soft hands of strangers. You've got 4-wheel drive and a phone, you've got the friendship of a reinforced chassis, you've got empathy for dictators without knowing it. You've got freedom from rear-view mirrors, you've got wide-bodied citizenship, you've gained Custer's Revenge: caissons packed with children and soccer balls coasting across the plowed prairie—history remodeled with one great blaring of jingles and horns.
Hail Citizen King! Hail the unswerving settler! Hail the rule of logo!
Hail Jeep Cherokee!
Bruce A. Jacobs
Encounter
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn. A red wing rose in the darkness. And suddenly a hare ran across the road. One of us pointed to it with his hand.
That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive: not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture. O my love, where are they? Where are they going? The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles. I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.
Czeslaw Milosz
The Poets Agree to be Quiet by the Swamp
They hold their hands over their mouths and stare at the stretch of water. What can be said has been said before: strokes of light like herons' legs in the cattails, mud underneath, frogs lying even deeper. Therefore, the poets may keep quiet.
But the corners of their mouths grin past their hands. They stick their elbows out into the evening, stoop, and begin the ancient croaking.
David Wagoner
Current
The third rail and the electric chair are charged with the current that glows tonight in the bedside lamp illuminating your body.
Stuart Dybek
Out There
The Chinese painters didn't use a vanishing point to show perspective. Washes of light and lighter color indicated distances—past cliffs, streams and humped bridges; past water falling from the lip of a rock into a gorge; out to farthest pales and shallows, where the Immortals ride great fishes and turtles, sporting in the unseen world.
Mark Perlberg
Warrant
I warrant that this poem is entirely my own work, and that the underlying ideas, concepts, and make-up of the poem have not been taken from any other source or any other poem, but rather originate with this poem. I further attest that no one except me, the author and party to this binding agreement, has any title, claim, or proprietary interest in the poem.
I hereby indemnify the publisher against any action that can be taken against the poem, warranted or unwarranted, including libel, defamation, or infringement on any trademark, copyright, or patent, irrespective of any intention, state of mind, or aesthetic philosophy. I further attest that this poem has not been previously published, in part or in whole, in any print or electronic form, or in translation, or performed as part of a reading, musical, review, lecture, or show.
I grant the publisher worldwide rights to the poem, including serial, periodical, newspaper, magazine, book, bookazine, poster, indoor and outdoor display rights; and also digital, paradigital, and postdigital rights, as well as the rights to use the poem in secondary publications and markets, including franchise and commercial applications.
The poem will be copyrighted in the name of the publisher, and the author forthwith, without prejudice or duress, and with full consent, agreement, acquiescence, and concurrence, relinquishes rights to republish the poem in any form, print or electronic, or perform the poem at any fair, show, reading, lecture, musical, or review, without permission, notarized and in writing, from the publisher.
I agree to furnish the publisher, at my own expense and expeditiously, an electronic copy of the poem, as well as one hard copy or printout. I agree to review proofs of the poem and return them, at my own expense, within 36 hours of their receipt. The proofs will be delivered any time from later today until 3 January 2010.
In exchange for granting the publisher the aforesaid rights, I will receive, as payment in full, and as full recompense against any claims, levees, fees, honoraria, emoluments, endorsements, rights, permissions, or royalties, domestic or global, printed or electronic, digital, paradigital, and postdigital, the opportunity to subscribe to the publication in which the poem will first appear at forty percent discount from the full subscription price. To exercise this option, I agree to make payment in full in the next thirty (30) days.
Charles Bernstein
A Jacquard Shawl
A pattern of curly acanthus leaves, and woven into one corner in blue block letters half an inch tall:
MADE FROM WOOL FROM SHEEP KILLED BY DOGS, 1778.
As it is with jacquards, the design reverses to gray on blue when you turn it over, and the words run backward into the past. The rest of the story lies somewhere between one side and the other, woven into the plane where the colors reverse: the circling dogs, the terrified sheep, the meadow stippled with blood, and the weaver by lamplight, feeding what wool she was able to save into the faintly bleating, barking loom.
Ted Kooser
Tariff
It takes time to appreciate how I once made a friend so unhappy, the next night, on the road from Chauncey to Amesville, Ohio, she steered her Fiat Spider head on into an oncoming truck.
Her boyfriend identified her waitress uniform. She's been dead now for more than twenty years.
What I did to hurt her, I won't tell you—so you're free to imagine any vicious, self-indulgent, hapless blunder or crime, while I go about turning this into a poem again. Turning over heavy marl, the garden in spring, and the wind picks up, flinging soil against my neck, behind my ears, into my teeth.
You have to get dirty: what appreciate means is to price.
After living a while, you understand the ways you have to pay.
Michelle Boisseau
Prospective Immigrants Please Note
Either you will go through this door, or you will not go through.
If you go through, there is always the risk of remembering your name. Things look at you doubly, and you must look back and let them happen.
If you do not go through, it is possible to live worthily: to maintain your attitudes, to hold your position, to die bravely. But much will blind you, much will evade you—at what cost, who knows?
The door itself makes no promises. It is only a door.
Adrienne Rich
Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along, and suddenly it started raining and snowing, and you said it was hailing. But hailing hits you on the head hard, so it was really snowing and raining. And I was in such a hurry to meet you, but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky, and suddenly I see a headline:
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
There is no snow in Hollywood. There is no rain in California.
I have been to lots of parties, and acted perfectly disgraceful. But I never actually collapsed. Oh, Lana Turner, we love you! Get up!
Frank O'Hara
A monster owl out on the fence flew away. What is it the sign of? The sign of an owl.
Lorine Niedecker
Christ climbed down from His bare tree this year, and ran away to where there were no rootless Christmas trees hung with candy canes and breakable stars.
Christ climbed down from His bare tree this year and ran away to where there were no gilded Christmas trees, and no tinsel Christmas trees, and no tinfoil Christmas trees, and no pink plastic Christmas trees, and no gold Christmas trees, and no black Christmas trees, and no powder blue Christmas trees hung with electric candles and encircled by tin electric trains and clever cornball relatives.
Christ climbed down from His bare tree this year and ran away to where no intrepid Bible salesmen covered the territory in two-tone Cadillacs, and where no Sears Roebuck creches, complete with plastic babe in manger, arrived by parcel post (the babe by special delivery), and where no televised Wise Men praised the Lord Calvert whiskey.
Christ climbed down from His bare tree this year and ran away to where no fat, handshaking stranger, in a red flannel suit and a fake white beard, went around passing himself off as some sort of North Pole saint, crossing the desert to Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) in a Volkswagen sled, drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer with German names and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts from Saks Fifth Avenue for everybody’s imagined Christ child.
Christ climbed down from His bare tree this year and ran away to where no Bing Crosby carollers groaned of a tight Christmas, and where no Radio City angels ice-skated wingless through a winter wonderland into a Jingle Bell heaven, daily at 8:30, with Midnight Mass matinees.
Christ climbed down from His bare tree this year, and softly stole away into some anonymous Mary’s womb again, where in the darkest night of everybody’s anonymous soul, He awaits again an unimaginable, and impossibly Immaculate, Reconception—the very craziest of Second Comings.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Step On His Head
"Let's step on Daddy's head," shout the children (my dear children!) as we walk in the country on a sunny summer's day. My shadow bobs dark on the road as we walk, and they jump on its head, and my love of them fills me with soft feelings.
Now I duck with my head so they'll miss when they jump. They screech with delight, and I moan, "Oh! You're hurting! You're hurting me! Stop!" And they jump all the harder, and love fills the whole road.
But I see it run on through the years, and I know how some day, they must jump when it won't be this shadow, but really my head—as I jumped on my father's head. It will hurt—really hurt—and I wonder if then, I will have love enough. Will I have love enough when it's not just a game?
James Laughlin
An Apology
Forgive me for backing over and smashing your red wheelbarrow. It was raining, and the rear wiper does not work on my new plum-colored SUV. I am also sorry about the white chickens.
F. J. Bergmann
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me—they were delicious! So sweet, and so cold.
William Carlos Williams