My body is no way to behave.
“All Hooves and Teeth,” Jane Benoit
Oh touch me, touch me, good woman!
That’s not a scar you feel under my shirt, that’s
a letter of recommendation, folded up tight,
from my father:
“All the same, he’s a good boy, and full of love.
“A Letter of Recommendation,” Yehuda Amichai
Source: poetryfoundation.org
Cast a cold Eye
On Life on Death
Horsemen pass by
W.B. Yeats’ epitaph
“The Way The Dizziness Comes In,” Shimmy Boyle
Is this great or not great? Smoke and mirrors? Just a list of pretty sounding words and interesting images?
A woman full of plywood
and buckshot, like the pheasant everyone
fought for and nobody ever won
“Risk Management Memo: Hello, Afterlife,” Mary Biddinger
Source: bloodlotusjournal.com
O my beloved
what. O
my beloved what. O my
beloved shovel-nosed mole
can I clean the soil
from your black, sightless eyes
“Hour,” Christian Hawkey
WHAT do you remember? When I looked
at his streaky glasses, I wanted
to leave him. And before that? He stole those
cherries for me at midnight. We were walking
in the rain and I loved him.
“Duck/Rabbit,” Chana Bloch
Source: poetryfoundation.org
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, not look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books. You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, you shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
There is this feeling I get when I am with you. There is our future house burning like a star on the hill. There is our dark flickering shadow. There is my hand on fire in your hand on fire, my body on fire above your body on fire, our tongues made of ash.
“The Fire Cycle,” Zachary Schomburg
Source: poetryfoundation.org
This is not America, this is the cover version:
sun, sex, sin, divine intervention, death and destruction,
welcome to The Sodom and Gomorrah Show.
“The Gargantuan Muffin Beauty Contest,” Julian Stannard
The stars know everything,
So we try to read their minds.
As distant as they are,
We choose to whisper in their presence.
-Charles Simic, “Autumn Sky”
Source: hubblesite.org
All beautiful boyfriends are transitory
They have no souls they’re shiny brown flesh
Tomorrow they’ll turn into purple festering corpses
Fissured gored by a myriad flies…
What do I smell but the perfume of transience
Crushed calyxes rotting phloems
Let’s write pretty poems pretty poems pretty poems
Masque stale pogroms with a sweet whiff of oblivion
From “Beautiful Boyfriend,” by Marilyn Chin
Source: poetryfoundation.org
Our falter, whose art is Heavy,
Halloween be thy name.
Your kingdom’s numb
your children dumb on earth
moldy bread unleavened.
Give us this day our
wayward dead.
And give us our
asses as we forgive those
who ass against us.
And speed us not
into wimp nation
nor bequiver us
with needles, for thine
is the flimflam and the sour,
and the same fucking
story in leather
for never and ever.
Ah: gin.
The Obsenity Prayer, Mary Karr
New best poem ever.
Source: poetryfoundation.org
You give me the loose tooth of California, the broken jaw of New York City.
Rebecca Lindenberg, “Catalogue of Ephemera”
Source: poetryfoundation.org
I was pirouette and flourish,
I was filigree and flame.
Rita Dove, “Testimonial”
Source: poetrysince1912
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