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"Southern Gothic"

by Rickey Laurentiis

About the dead having available to them all breeds of knowledge, some pure, others wicked, especially what is future, and the history that remains once the waters recede, revealing the land that couldn’t reject or contain it, and the land that is not new, is indigo, is ancient, lived as all the trees that fit and clothe it are lived, simple pine, oak, grand magnolia, he said they frighten him, that what they hold in their silences silences: sometimes a boy will slip from his climbing, drown but the myth knows why, sometimes a boy will swing with the leaves.

#rickey laurentiis #poem #poetry

"The Length of the Hour"

by Cynthia Huntington

New houses relax on the fields. Garage doors open soundlessly to admit the monster. Tires stretched over forty pounds of air pressure float across gravel. The boy closes the last storm door on the last evening paper and runs to the car where his mother waits. She does not answer him; the door slam freezes her dreams. It is January. A dog chained to a barn door keeps barking. Somebody’s angry, scared to let him go. On the other side of a forest past these fields, wolves sniff the hard snow of the tundra. I lay beside the only tree for warmth, there where the pack might find me. The house takes care of us now. Look at the meat browning under the light. The refrigerator switches on; ice crashes into the tray. Here are locks in case someone wants to do us harm. Remember how the police had to pound and pound to wake us that night a white Cadillac leapt from the icy road into the arms of our maple! It hung there, empty, doors flung wide— it was a great white petal of a car, breathing under the gas-lights, opening and opening.

#cynthia huntington #poem #poetry

"Angel"

by Angela Jackson

for Jerry Ward

I am the only one here.

I stand in my one place and I can see a good piece down the road. I am yonder, further than the chunk of your stone. Right now, directly, I am persimmon falling free and the prisoner opening up in me. Don’t come through my door and want to run my house. I am the angel who sweep air in and out my own dancing body. I got good eyes. I can see. A good piece down the road. Clear to God murmuring in me. My head is the burning bush. What I hold in my hand is the promised land. I set my people free in me. And we walk without wandering like people named after mere plants, because we are tree and high-stepping roots cake-walking in this promised place. Where I go is where I am now. Don’t mess with me: you hurt yourself. In the middle of my stride now. I am walking yes indeed I am walking through my own house. I am walking yes indeed on my own piece of road. Toting my own load and yours and mine. I tell you I feel fine and clear this morning even when it’s night and a full moon with my thumbprint on it. Everything is clamorous and quiet. I am the only One here. And we don’t break. No indeed. Come hell and high water. We don’t break for nothing.

#angela jackson #poem #poetry #travyon

"Codicil"

by Derek Walcott (1930- )

Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles, one a hack's hired prose, I earn me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles, tan, burn to slough off this live of ocean that's self-love. To change your language you must change your life. I cannot right old wrongs. Waves tire of horizon and return. Gulls screech with rusty tongues Above the beached, rotting pirogues, they were a venomous beaked cloud at Charlotteville. One I thought love of country was enough, now, even if I chose, there is no room at the trough. I watch the best minds rot like dogs for scraps of flavour. I am nearing middle age, burnt skin peels from my hand like paper, onion-thin, like Peer Gynt's riddle. At heart there is nothing, not the dread of death. I know to many dead. They're all familiar, all in character, even how they died. On fire, the flesh no longer fears that furnace mouth of earth, that kiln or ashpit of the sun, nor this clouding, unclouding sickle moon withering this beach again like a blank page. All its indifference is a different rage.

#derek walcott #poem #poetry #st. lucia

"If wishing made it so"

by Bob Hicok (1960- )

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

--George Bush, State of the Union address, 2003 I am the tallest sprinkler of parabolic flow. I keep a fist in each of my fingers. I can make a wolf with my hands and a lamp on a wall as big as Iowa. I selected from a catalog of days this sunny ha. I need only a thimble of plutonium to power my bark. I got to third base with the lake on our first date. Tongue and feeling her up and waves lapping at my pulled pork. I say go and you go and I say stay and you remain in the position of "I am a teapot" or whatever it is you do with your body in the deep sorrow of not being my body. I take a helicopter to work to rest my submarine. I am twenty-eight heads wired in parallel with double-pull double-throw switches. I aren't so required to know with words know one from if it quacks like a tractor then plow. Every three seconds, workmen staple different paintings to my eyes of wonderful trees and tall girls on the horizon waving suckle-me breasts. All it takes to make it to the parade is the gumption to put one boot on one genital at a time. Each of us wakes equally with gunk in our eyes of silver mostly. You can be anything I want if I try hard enough. What a life. Did I tell you my middle name is the same as the president's first name? Therefore the center of, the creamy goodness of, some spleen of me or intestines is president. I hold these truths to be self-evident. That my one mistake was to say I was wrong about the fire because look at all the smores everything burning down led to. Yum.

#bob hicok #poem #poetry #iraq conflict

"Unmediated experience"

by Bob Hicok (1960- )

She does this thing. Our seventeen- year-old dog. Our mostly deaf dog. Our mostly dead dog, statistically speaking. When I crouch. When I put my mouth to her ear and shout her name. She walks away. Walks toward the nothing of speech. She even trots down the drive, ears up, as if my voice is coming home. It’s like watching a child believe in Christmas, right before you burn the tree down. Every time I do it, I think, this time she’ll turn to me. This time she’ll put voice to face. This time, I’ll be absolved of decay. Which is like being a child who believes in Christmas as the tree burns, as the drapes catch, as Santa lights a smoke with his blowtorch and asks, want one?

#bob hicok #poem #poetry

"Crystal Meth Under Her Choir Robe"

by John Repp (1953- )

No surprise. Bills to pay, pain to obliterate, a favor to a friend desperate for more time before facing facts, or a reason less beholden to One-day-at-a-time or I-don’t-know-why or There-is-no-why- I-just-like-getting-high or Then-Jesus-spoke-to-me blather. Nothing’s enough, not even the moments when her voice — any voice, my voice — vanishes into the Voice the hymn wrenches from the throats of the spiritual paupers up there swaying in black satin. The God of the Garden is the God of Chemistry, too, a single sniff in a lifetime proof enough — nothing can slough errands or heartbreak so fast into the metaphysical ditch where all of it belongs. Weren’t we made for better than the Fall, if Fall this is? We all see what the Flood keeps doing. A little while dry, please, a little while with no chattering chimp between the ears & the Wizard once more in Oz. This is my mind, not hers. She’s a story I heard. I’m a story I can’t stop hearing. A plastic tarp in a monsoon may be her future. A plush ride home to havoc. A vision that delivers her from want, deserving or not.

#john repp #poem #poetry

"The Universe as Primal Scream"

by Tracy K. Smith

5pm on the nose. They open their mouths And it rolls out: high, shrill and metallic. First the boy, then his sister. Occasionally, They both let loose at once, and I think Of putting on my shoes to go up and see Whether it is merely an experiment Their parents have been conducting Upon the good crystal, which must surely Lie shattered to dust on the floor.

Maybe the mother is still proud Of the four pink lungs she nursed To such might. Perhaps, if they hit The magic decibel, the whole building Will lift-off, and we’ll ride to glory Like Elijah. If this is it—if this is what Their cries are cocked toward—let the sky Pass from blue, to red, to molten gold, To black. Let the heaven we inherit approach.

Whether it is our dead in Old Testament robes, Or a door opening onto the roiling infinity of space. Whether it will bend down to greet us like a father, Or swallow us like a furnace. I’m ready To meet what refuses to let us keep anything For long. What teases us with blessings, Bends us with grief. Wizard, thief, the great Wind rushing to knock our mirrors to the floor, To sweep our short lives clean. How mean

Our racket seems beside it. My stereo on shuffle. The neighbor chopping onions through a wall. All of it just a hiccough against what may never Come for us. And the kids upstairs still at it, Screaming like the Dawn of Man, as if something They have no name for has begun to insist Upon being born.

#tracy k. smith #poem #poetry

"Incubus"

by David Ferry (1924-)

At the supper for street people

The young man who goes about all muffled up from harm, With whatever he has found, newspaper pages Carefully folded to make a weirdly festive Hat or hood, down almost over his eyes. Everything carefully arranged to make him other. The paper-covered razor blade in his mouth, Or the bit of wood, like carrying a message. A fantasy so clever, outwitting itself, That it became what it was he was, and so He was what it was. The long loose shirt too big For him, the pantaloons too big for him Loose like the pantaloons of the circus clown, Some kind of jacket too big, he got it somewhere. His burden slept dreaming everywhere upon him. As if his whole body and the clothes he wore dreamed Of his condition and the dream came true. His clothes slept on him as if they were his lover.

#poem #poetry #david ferry

"Power"

by Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

Living in the earth deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old cure for fever or melancholy a tonic for living on this earth in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie: she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness her body bombarded for years by the element she had purified It seems she denied to the end the source of the cataracts on her eyes the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends till she could no longer hold a test tube or pencil

She died a famous woman denying her wounds denying her wounds came from the same source as her power

#adrienne rich #poem #poetry

"The President Flies Over"

by Patricia Smith

Aloft between heaven and them,

I babble the landscape—what staunch, vicious trees, what cluttered roads, slow cars. This is my

country as it was gifted me—victimless, vast. The soundtrack buzzing the air around my ears continually loops ditties of eagles and oil. I can’t choose. Every moment I’m awake, aroused instrumentals channel theme songs, speaking what I cannot.

I don’t ever have to come down. I can stay hooked to heaven, dictating this blandness. My flyboys memorize flip and soar. They’ll never swoop real enough to resurrect that other country,

won’t ever get close enough to give name to tonight’s dreams darkening the water.

I understand that somewhere it has rained.

#poem #poetry #hurricane katrina #patricia smith

"Immortality"

by Leigh Stein

At the gym, they told me I would not die, I would only get sexier, and I believed them. I spent my nights wondering if this was going to turn into something long-term, if this was what is meant by casual, or if this was just my annual catastrophic disappointment because if it wasn’t, then I would have to brace myself. I took my medication and looked at pictures of people who were not in love with me. I deleted their names from my cache, said hello to my cat over the phone, took more medication. Days passed. I learned it’s hard to measure your own increasing sexiness. I enlisted bystanders. I passed mirrors and pretended they were not mirrors, but clean windows, and I was not myself, I was a clean stranger. Some days I was sure she wanted to come home with me, and I had to let her down easy, through the window, like a priest. Once I’d been unleashed from thoughts of my own death I was free to be loved in the way I always knew I’d deserved: reciprocally, in Fiji, our bodies lithe and bronzed like gods, but at the same time I felt like a vampire, and none of my friends could relate. They were jealous of my book deal, my time spent at the ashram while they were here, suffering another winter, their unsexiness a flourescent sign that blinks all night.

#leigh stein #poetry #poem

"There Is No Word"

by Tony Hoagland

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack that should have been bagged in double layers —so that before you are even out the door you feel the weight of the jug dragging the bag down, stretching the thin plastic handles longer and longer and you know it’s only a matter of time until bottom suddenly splits. There is no single, unimpeachable word for that vague sensation of something moving away from you as it exceeds its elastic capacity —which is too bad, because that is the word I would like to use to describe standing on the street chatting with an old friend as the awareness grows in me that he is no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance, a person with whom I never made the effort— until this moment, when as we say goodbye I think we share a feeling of relief, a recognition that we have reached the end of a pretense, though to tell the truth what I already am thinking about is my gratitude for language— how it will stretch just so much and no farther; how there are some holes it will not cover up; how it will move, if not inside, then around the circumference of almost anything— how, over the years, it has given me back all the hours and days, all the plodding love and faith, all the misunderstandings and secrets I have willingly poured into it.

#tony hoagland #language #poem #poetry

"formalist performance poem"

by Urayoán Noel

abercrombie and nietzsche make a bad combination for the latter is always frothing in his bell tower while the former racks up the east coast’s dream receipts in airtight plastic bags mic check, fashion is a compound word from old dry lips shushing the scenesters nyc is corporate-tribal now but I still have big teleprompter dreams of ghetto-blaster sonnet sequences that always end in oye wassup loco? my word’s the upshot of two languages and one shot lung

#poem #poetry #nuyorican #urayoan noel

"Subway Seethe"

by J. Allyn Rosser

What could have been the big to-do that caused him to push me aside on that platform? Was a woman who knew there must be some good even inside an ass like him on board that train? Charity? Frances? His last chance in a ratty string of last chances? Jane? Surely in all of us is some good. Better love thy neighbor, buddy, lest she shove back. Maybe I should. It's probably just a cruddy downtown interview leading to some cheap-tie, careerist, dull cul-de-sac he's speeding to. Can he catch up with his soul? Really, what was the freaking crisis? Did he need to know before me if the lights searching the crowd's eyes were those of our train, or maybe the train of who he might have been, the person his own-heart-numbing, me-shoving anxiety about being prevents him from ever becoming? How has his thoughtlessness defiled who I was before he shoved me? How might I be smiling now if he'd smiled, hanging back, as though he might have loved me?

#j. allyn rosser #subway #poem #poetry

"The Second Coming"

by William Butler Yeats (1865-1935)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

#poem #poetry #yeats #w. b. yeats

"The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack"

by Tracy K. Smith

The first track still almost swings. High hat and snare, even A few bars of sax the stratosphere will sing-out soon enough. Synthesized strings. Then something like cellophane Breaking in as if snagged to a shoe. Crinkle and drag. White noise, Black noise. What must be voices bob up, then drop, like metal shavings In molasses. So much for us. So much for the flags we bored Into planets dry as chalk, for the tin cans we filled with fire And rode like cowboys into all we tried to tame. Listen: The dark we've only ever imagined now audible, thrumming, Marbled with static like gristly meat. A chorus of engines churns. Silence taunts: a dare. Everything that disappears Disappears as if returning somewhere.

#tracy k. smith #life on mars #poem #poetry

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