Art and shiny things…
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill — more of each
than you have — inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.
1.
I’ve hesitated beside the jewelweed, deep in the sevenbark,
told them I will not, not again—
What sovereign lies? What queen in her epistolary cage?
An ochre shotglass empties,
a lantern, unlit, heedlessly shines.
In vain I have opened mirrors & edges of mirrors.
-Jennifer Givhan
It cuts through suddenly, expertly, this want to talk to you — like the way you used to open pomegranates. Nothing was wasted, not time, not an extra ruby-seed on the inside. You always said that one does not cut a fruit — you ask them to open, gently, and they would let you in. They knew you would be fair while splitting them. I try to talk to you, cutting through time. It does not open. It says, learn from your mother.
-Sujit Prasad
The bakery’s graffiti either spells HOPE
or NOPE. But hope and results
are different, said Fanny Brawne to her Keats
voiding his unreasonable lung.
Getting off the medicine
completely means light again
blinking to light. Device returned
to its factory settings. The complete black
of before the meteor shower
above the bakery. If you lose the smell
of leather, lemon, or rose,
studies show you will fail at being
Poets.org, Christopher Salerno
rt Gemi on Pixiv
Don’t take it personal’, they said;
but I did, I took it all quite personal—
the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;
the price of grapefruit and stamps,
the wet hair of women in the rain—
And I cursed what hurt me
and I praised what gave me joy,
the most simple-minded of possible responses.
The government reminded me of my father,
with its deafness and its laws,
and the weather reminded me of my mom,
with her tropical squalls.
Tony Hoagland, Poetry Magazine
rt Bluesaga331
He’s always coming back, our neighbor, never quite here.
His wife, who teaches English, will never leave Seoul,
so he’s present part-year
past-participle— a joke he tells without a face.
We watch
his cat Monkra who looks exactly like our cat, who also wakes him
before sunrise, whining for food. Call him Momo for short,
and we do, no questions. He deals in import-export,
never carries a briefcase, only a pamphlet
of English grammar his wife authored.
He says she doesn’t understand
what I do for a living,
that poetry is for children and nine-tailed foxes
favored in Korean dramas that he and I discuss in secret,
away from our disapproving spouses.
Rosebud Ben-Oni
Coffee and Irony 