Joan Swift: “Mushrooms in a Museum”
The eye leans out to those white wings / Molded in flight like waxen things / To slender stems.
All posts filed under: Poems
Weekly poems, selected by the editors. Featuring new work as well as poems from our rich archives.
Gary Snyder: “January”
the city’s not so big, the / hills surround it.
WILLIAM STAFFORD
Light, and My Sudden Face
In the night I strike a match, / one little glory, a flame / the world surrounds
William Jolliff: Two Poems
He parks the car—parallel, that never used to be / a problem—and walks, fearless, past seven bars
Michael Bazzett: “The Interview”
I was reading John Le CarrĂ© this past summer, the slender early volumes with such great momentum in which nearly everything crucial remains unsaid. There are no wasted words; you can really feel the thickness of silence in those books, the subtext. I’ve always been fascinated by tales of Cold War espionage, the hollow nickel holding microfilm, the wallpaper-pattern laced with blueprints. I won’t belabor the metaphor, but there’s no doubt a parallel between poets and spies: effective ones live invisibly on the margins and quietly alter the world. The whole idea is to get the right information to the right people. The poem began as interrogation and morphed rather quickly into a job interview, replete with awkwardness, jokes landing sideways and coded signaling. I thought the Horizon, as a shifting entity that is everywhere and nowhere, might make a good double-agent. But the espionage sort of fell away. This Horizon seemed a bit too yearning and honest, somehow. He simply wanted to get close to someone, to connect. It seems a dubious prospect, given …
NOMI STONE Two Poems
Iraq is ripe we carry / it through the simulacra of the woods
KAREN AN-HWEI LEE Say If Not a Moon
Eye without an iris / observes a faded world
COREY VAN LANDINGHAM Epithalamium
Because I’ve seen the way a body looks preserved, I turned away from you. That’s the most that I could do. Distance, dear, makes the heart grow weary. The scene where I’m your citizen, but am touching myself inside a stranger’s apartment as, in Yemen, an American drone kills 14 at a wedding, mistakenly. Mistakenly, I chose the hydrangea, whose large pink blush has been said to match the size of a sender’s heart. When not pruned properly, the flowers sag, begin to break. Once, you fed me heart on a skewer. After, I read the animal would be inside me forever, idea that made me sick for days. Now, my autoerotic display, while, in Yemen, vehicles still are smoking. Distance makes easy unmanning the hands. I hasten to compare the scene where I’m such a terror in that dress, where the flowers are all a mess, and I’m gussied up. I’m turned on by men I’ve never met. What a wedding photographer, as anyone poses candid for the drone. But, no, I’m only posing …
Emily Kendal Frey: “The Way Family Works”
Where is the audience / The glowing coverlet / The cup of water / The sleep / Where can you turn around
Rachel Rose: Two Poems
Ars Poetica It is hard won, it is fragile, it does not bring joy. It holds water, it holds air, it is its own reward. It is light as cobweb, it is tough as cobweb, it is barely visible. It is hollow as a victory in the battlefield. It is heavy as a baby’s coffin, great as a dolphin’s eye. It beckons, it whispers, it flickers in the wind. It is impractical, it is laughable, it wrestles. It is free, it is precious, it speaks the sound of water. It is mad, it is alchemy, it is fleeting and enduring. It can be studied but it can’t be learned by heart. It can be followed in the forest but only by its track. It can be followed in the city but only by its blood. It jumps fences, it embroiders, it ferries the dead. It can’t be captured and it has no price. It’s in the screaming alley, the ink-blot pines, the village well. On the threshold of your pain you may find it holding …