Tag Archives: poetry

Ode to Eating a Pomegranate in Brooklyn

books poetry lit February 19, 2015 Leave a comment

When I fall in love again I will have another heart

and a second set of eyes which is one way

to watch the woman you love          grow old

The story of my heartbreak started like this:

someone gave me a key that opens many doors

I traded it for a key that opens only one

I traded that one for another and that for another

until there were no more doors

          and I had a fist full of keys

At any given moment only part of the world is gruesome

There are three pomegranates in the fridge

waiting to be broken open

When I fall in love again

my beloved and I will spit seeds into the street

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-Patrick Rosal in Wax Wing Magazine

Poetry: Story in Which I Am Renamed Saint

books poetry lit February 15, 2015 Leave a comment

It’d been so long since we’d touched, you thought I must’ve found God. I caught you in the dark watching a video: a piano on the curb letting itself be touched and touched, singing for any finger that asked. It only survived one night before men with sledgehammers shattered it to tinder, took away each metal part that sang. Each time I caught you watching this–your face glowing in the darkness of our bedroom–you told me you were learning acceptance. After all, this is the world we live in: men can be broken and made whole again. Woman with all her faults remains dismembered: body and body parts forever being torn to pieces.

read more at Linebreak

Poetry: ‘Big Sky’

books poetry lit February 12, 2015 Leave a comment

prairie sky

The Kid rode west. That was where the light went. A small house there. The rest of it below the prairie. The Kid only a small moving piece that never reached the horizon. The distance reduced into a proverb.

-Bob Hemen, Right Hand Pointing

Quotidian: Atticus on Poetry

books poetry lit February 10, 2015 Leave a comment

atticus poetry

From “Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City” by Durs Grünbein

books poetry lit February 10, 2015 Leave a comment

“My little bird won’t come”
—Immanuel Kant, 1803

1

Why moan about it, Johnny-come-lately? My friend,
When you were born your city was long gone.
Misty eyes don’t turn hair grey and you,
Your name: too quick for it, too green.
Seventeen years, a childhood hardly, were plenty
To erase the past. They sealed the wounds all up
In strict and somber grey; enchantment ceded to bureaucracy.
The Saxon peacock wasn’t slaughtered out of need—
Lichens, inexorable, bloomed on sandstone flowers.
They come back like hiccups, elegies: why brood, why bother?

read more at Asymptote 

Poetry: On the Late Bus

books poetry lit February 6, 2015 Comments: 3

ahead of me

on the late bus to Bristol

the woman leaned her head

upon the rain-smeared window

and surrendered herself to sleep

I was reading,

no, fighting through

a novel an ex had given me,

when grace feathered my hands

wisps of a ponytail,

the ends of ten golden inches,

kissed my book-cradling fingers

I held pose

as if meditating

until her awakening

-Tony Press, Right Hand Pointing

Poetry: Groundspeed by Emilia Phillips

books poetry lit February 6, 2015 Leave a comment

A falling plane as vessel. As Valkyrie—

The espresso shots tremble, darkening; the ounces
chatter on the tray as the unceilinged twin-
engine roar scourges the ear of the drive-thru
worker who only made out double tall. Out the window,
the plane jerks kite-like, tether whipped serpentine, &
drops like an elevator into the abandoned strip’s
parking lot a block from the register, nose snapped like
pencil lead guided by the god-hand that wanted to write
something (elegy, condemnation) across the weedy
& scarred blacktop. The falling plane as thrall, apologia of who’s
to become shadow. After hours, she guided us outside
with chilled canisters of heavy cream sweetened with vanilla
pressurized to spray. It was her last
night on the job. I used to dream I could float two stories
high, like confetti above a fire barrel, but when I
addressed my grounded companions, they said, You’re not
flying. When I say tangible, I mean to
touch. I mean, Of the earth & not above it. & yet love

is an act of falling; & parting, falling out.

read the rest at Green Mountains Review 

Poetry: ‘All the Right Tools’ and ‘Late Aubade’ by James Richardson

books poetry lit January 31, 2015 Leave a comment

These poems by James Richardson left me weak with wonder and the intense love that only words weaved in the way that perfectly resonates with my particular soul can cause. LOVE.

All the Right Tools

It is aggravating to have to stop writing to fix things. We hope these tools
will get you back to the important work faster.
—Inscription in a toolbox, a gift from my parents, 1973

That good slow tool the sun,
with a trumpeter’s strict breath,
swells hemispheres of fruits
to scarlet or dusk or amber
imperceptibly,
not breaking one.

That good slow tool the moon
pulls the quiet
wide-eyed face of the ocean
to its face,
not a drop through its long fingers
slipping down.

That good slow tool that turns
trees and lives to wreckage
brilliant and strange,
that train so smooth and slow
we hardly know we’re on
is Time, but is there one

slower still
that would reverse
these words and call
your breaths and all
your strayed thoughts home
to be you, standing again?
Late Aubade

after Hardy

So what do you think, Life, it seemed pretty good to me,
though quiet, I guess, and unspectacular.
It’s been so long, I don’t know any more how these things go.
I don’t know what it means that we’ve had this time together.

I get that the coffee, the sunlight on glassware, the Sunday paper
and our studious lightness, not hearing the phone, are iconic
of living regretless in the Now. A Cool that’s beyond me:
I’m having some trouble acting suitably poised and ironic.

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Poetry: ‘The Call’ by C Dale Young

books poetry lit January 28, 2015 Leave a comment

Make sure you click through for the ending because especially in this poem..it’s the most important part.

in memoriam Cecil Young

I am addicted to words, constantly ferret them away
in anticipation. You cannot accuse me of not being prepared.
I am ready for anything. I can create an image faster than

just about anyone. And so, the crows blurring the tree line;
the sky’s light dimming and shifting; the Pacific cold and
impatient as ever: this is just the way I feel. Nothing more.

I could gussy up those crows, transform them
into something more formal, more Latinate, could use
the exact genus Corvus, but I won’t. Not today.

Like any addict, I, too, have limits. And I have written
too many elegies already. The Living have become
jealous of the amount I have written for the Dead.

So, leave the crows perched along the tree line
watching over us. Leave them be. The setting sun?
Leave it be. For God’s sake, what could be easier

in a poem about death than a setting sun? Leave it be.

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Poetry: Wardship

books poetry lit January 25, 2015 Leave a comment

This poem about being a foster kid by Vilaska Nguyen at Blue Fifth Review knocked my socks off.

Twelve hundred a month isn’t worth more than the top ramen on the pantry’s bottom shelf. The Progresso is off limits. So is the Diet Coke. She dares me to even lay eyes on the Cool Ranch because that’ll be the end of me. I can drink all the water I want out of the tap. The fridge is off limits, especially the juice inside. I can get ice from the freezer but only two to three cubes per cup with the tap water. That’s all I need to know about the kitchen. Television watching is okay so long as either she or Mr. Kenneth turned it on. They also have to be sitting in the living room. Other than that, it’s off limits. There’s only one bathroom in the house which means I have to wait my turn, whatever that means. I have to empty the trash when I get home from school. That’s the bag under the kitchen sink and the one in the bathroom. I’m not allowed in their bedroom where the other trash is. My bed is in the extra room with the computer which is also off limits. If Mr. Kenneth needs to relax sometimes with computer games, I have to leave the room and wait in the living room. But if no one’s there, the television is off limits. The phone is off limits too.

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