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APPLICATION FOR A DRIVING LICENSE | MICHAEL ONDAATJE

Two birds loved in a flurry of red feathers like a burst cottonball, continuing while I drove over them. I am a good driver, nothing shocks me

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DIVORCE | JACK GILBERT

Woke up suddenly thinking I heard crying. Rushed through the dark house. Stopped, remembering. Stood looking out at bright moonlight on concrete.

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ANTILAMENTATION | DORIANNE LAUX

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read to the end just to find out who killed the cook. Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark, in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication. Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot, the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones that crimped your toes, don't regret those. Not the nights you called god names and cursed your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch, chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness. You were meant to inhale those smoky nights over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches. You've walked those streets a thousand times and still you end up here. Regret none of it, not one of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing, when the lights from the carnival rides were the only stars you believed in, loving them for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved. You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake, ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

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THE MAGICIAN'S POSTSCRIPT | BLANCA VARELA

Morning crept in through a rip in the curtain. There the two of them lay, wrapping each other in their sleep. They notched together, nose to nap, chest to back, knees to thighs, an asymmetrical coupling among sheets and disorder.

In her belly rested their first child who would see the light in two months: boy or girl? Flip a coin. Such certainties and others would be known in the fitting time.

Meanwhile that question mark lay curled in its liquid state, pure potential which arched her abdomen, waiting to burst out, a fullness which at times cramped her breathing.

Through his drowsy awakening, he extended a hand over that swollen vessel and awoke with a start at the touch of her taut firmness. Impulsively, his hand fumbled over her belly, checked her measured breath, recognized the features of life. Confident she would survive, he dropped back to sleep.

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THE LEAVING | BRIGIT PEGEEN KELLY

My father said I could not do it, but all night I picked the peaches. The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily. I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden. How many ladders to gather an orchard? I had only one and a long patience with lit hands and the looking of the stars which moved right through me the way the water moved through the canals with a voice that seemed to speak of this moonless gathering and those who had gathered before me. I put the peaches in the pond's cold water, all night up the ladder and down, all night my hands twisting fruit as if I were entering a thousand doors, all night my back a straight road to the sky. And then out of its own goodness, out of the far fields of the stars, the morning came, and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses just after it has been rung, before the metal begins to long again for the clapper's stroke. The light came over the orchard. The canals were silver and then were not. and the pond was--I could see as I laid the last peach in the water--full of fish and eyes

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DADDY | SYLVIA PLATH

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white. Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one grey toe Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich. I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene

An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygook. And your neat moustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, o You—-

Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do

But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I’m finally through. The black telephone’s off at the root, The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—- The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

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A THIN LINE | TAMURA RYUICHI

You are always alone There is something like a bitter light in the pupils of your eyes that have never shown tears I like it

To your blind image this world is a desolate hunting place You are the winter hunter who constantly chases down one heart

You do not believe in words There is a deep longing for fear in your footsteps that have murdered all the hearts It fascinates me

On the thin line that you walk the smell of blood is even on the top of the snow No matter how far we separate I can tell

You pull the trigger I die inside a word

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COFFEE CORNER | RON PADGETT

The large bowls of coffee at breakfast in France, the heavy porcelain cups in old American diners, the disposable brown plastic cups in motel lobbies, the feeling that you ought to drink the entire cup, the slight resentment you feel at feeling this way, the wondering why you do it then, the gratitude for someone’s making the coffee, the decision not to have a third free refill, the surprise of a really bad cup of coffee, the way it used to cost a nickel, then seven cents, then ten, and now anywhere from sixty cents to three seventy-five, sometimes a little more for decaffeinated, the brown print of it drying on the cup’s lip, the small amount left in the bottom, the rest of it sloshing inside you, sending its stimulation through tubes in your body, hello, let’s go, we’re late, do you have the keys, oh god I can’t find my wallet

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AS SUGGESTED BY THE CALCULATIONS OF COPERNICUS | JASON GURIEL

This first kiss on this cold street could have jailed Galileo for the heavenly point it proves but tonight, merely moves our two souls into steady revolution around and about the warm fixed fact of our brilliant lips.

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1999 | KEVIN A. GONZALEZ

We were driving to your funeral  & our father was not crying  because he has a way  of tying ribbons around grief.  It was the year we learned  the piercing that prefaces the blood  holds the most delicate of darknesses.  Then it was the year we opened  all our faucets & waited for the sea  to bleed to death. Then it was the year  we set fire to your mitt. Then, suddenly  the year we started to believe  every thorn was just a bridge.  Then the year all we talked about  was boxing. Then the year  my stomach hurt all year, & then  the year no one spoke of you.

If there were an antonym for suicide  we could all choose when to be born.  I would have been born after that day  so I could not remember you.  So my fingers would stop pointing  at all the things that aren't there.

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JAPAN | BILLY COLLINS

Today I pass the time reading a favorite haiku, saying the few words over and over. It feels like eating the same small, perfect grape again and again. I walk through the house reciting it and leave its letters falling through the air of every room. I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it. I say it in front of a painting of the sea. I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf. I listen to myself saying it, then I say it without listening, then I hear it without saying it. And when the dog looks up at me, I kneel down on the floor and whisper it into each of his long white ears. It's the one about the one-ton temple bell with the moth sleeping on its surface, and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating pressure of the moth on the surface of the iron bell. When I say it at the window, the bell is the world and I am the moth resting there. When I say it at the mirror, I am the heavy bell and the moth is life with its papery wings. And later, when I say it to you in the dark, you are the bell, and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you, and the moth has flown from its line and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.

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THE PORTRAIT | STANLEY KUNITZ

My mother never forgave my father for killing himself, especially at such an awkward time and in a public park, that spring when I was waiting to be born. She locked his name in her deepest cabinet and would not let him out, though I could hear him thumping. When I came down from the attic with the pastel portrait in my hand of a long-lipped stranger with a brave moustache and deep brown level eyes, she ripped it into shreds without a single word and slapped me hard. In my sixty-fourth year I can feel my cheek burning still.

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MY FATHER'S LOVE LETTERS | YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax After coming home from the mill, & ask me to write a letter to my mother Who sent postcards of desert flowers Taller than men. He would beg, Promising to never beat her Again. Somehow I was happy She had gone, & sometimes wanted To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou Williams' "Polka Dots & Moonbeams" Never made the swelling go down. His carpenter's apron always bulged With old nails, a claw hammer Looped at his side & extension cords Coiled around his feet. Words rolled from under the pressure Of my ballpoint: Love, Baby, Honey, Please. We sat in the quiet brutality Of voltage meters & pipe threaders, Lost between sentences . . . The gleam of a five-pound wedge On the concrete floor Pulled a sunset Through the doorway of his toolshed. I wondered if she laughed & held them over a gas burner. My father could only sign His name, but he'd look at blueprints & say how many bricks  Formed each wall. This man, Who stole roses & hyacinth For his yard, would stand there With eyes closed & fists balled, Laboring over a simple word, almost Redeemed by what he tried to say. 

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GHAZAL: NOTHING | MARILYN HACKER

You'll reap no whirlwind if you sow nothing— hungry yourself, you'll still bestow nothing.

Market-driven to live beyond my means,  my credit's no good if I owe nothing.

Today the doctor calls with the test results.  Nothing is settled if they show nothing.

What do I answer the friend who (like time)  Can tell me nothing but "I told you so"? Nothing.

My child's gone somewhere suddenly dangerous.  I listen for some fact on the radio: nothing.

Contained within that frame of words set down  like black and white stones in a game of Go: nothing.

Reading the titles on a library shelf,  it's liberating, sometimes, to know I know nothing.

What did Louise Labé write after she turned forty?  What's left, François, of all last winter's snow? Nothing.

Thyme and cornflowers, blackberries, figs hanging over the wall:  late summer harvest of those who grow nothing.

What have you been doing in your room for three hours  with the door locked, blinds drawn, music blaring? Oh, nothing,

At the center of the paisley swirl,  the heart of the elaborate intaglio: nothing.

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I'M SAD | RYAN MANNING

i'm sad i'm going to join eharmony it's lonely not being touched i don't want to be lonely anymore just let me fuck someone pretty and let it be good i'm sad i'm lonely i need to get laid celibacy is boring eharmony i'm depressed help i'm having a contest for being sad why am i having a contest i want to win or i'll cry rape isn't bad i feel lonely i want to simulate rape people will like me and i'll feel good i'm not trying to be cute it's hard not to smile i'm sad i want sex eharmony i'm depressed we should have sex pleasure is ordinary let me rape you whatever i'm about to say will be ordinary and make me sad a prostitute with wings flying in the sky is ordinary and makes me happy happiness is ordinary there’s not enough sex on my face come back and sex on my face again i'm sad i don't understand figurative language i want to copulate figures of speech hot piece of ass i just typed something ordinary i want me to get laid i can't stop having sex grammar is ordinary i'm going to fuck grammar and symbolism thinking is ordinary i'll fuck thinking if i had a dollar i could do things laws are confusing i like you what's in front of my face help i'm depressed rape isn't bad i'm lonely words lonely words are lonely i’m depressed fuck sex fuck sex sex sex orgasm sex desperate i am desperate don't tell me i'm not desperate look at this poem i am embarrassed at how desperate i am i'll rape you prostitute whore motherfucker i'll rape you sex say my name say my name say it fuck me harder i'm sad piece of ass orgasm sodomy personality report coitus

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FLYING AT NIGHT | TED KOOSER

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations. Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies like a snowflake falling on water. Below us, some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death, snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn back into the little system of his care. All night, the cities, like shimmering novas, tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

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DECEMBER 30 | RICHARD BRAUTIGAN

At 1:30 in the morning a fart  smells like a marriage between an avocado and a fish head. I have to get out of bed to write this down without my glasses on.