shahules786/PoetryFoundationData · Datasets at Hugging Face

poem name stringlengths 7 245	content stringlengths 4 88.7k	author stringlengths 2 57	type stringlengths 4 411 ⌀	age null
Objects Used to Prop Open a Window	Dog bone, stapler, cribbage board, garlic press because this window is loose—lacks suction, lacks grip. Bungee cord, bootstrap, dog leash, leather belt because this window had sash cords. They frayed. They broke. Feather duster, thatch of straw, empty bottle of Elmer's glue because...	Michelle Menting	null	null
The New Church	The old cupola glinted above the clouds, shone among fir trees, but it took him an hour for the half mile all the way up the hill. As he trailed, the village passed him by, greeted him, asked about his health, but everybody hurried to catch the mass, left him leaning against fences, measuring the road wi...	Lucia Cherciu	null	null
Look for Me	Look for me under the hood of that old Chevrolet settled in weeds at the end of the pasture. I'm the radiator that spent its years bolted in front of an engine shoving me forward into the wind. Whatever was in me in those days has mostly leaked away, but my cap's still screwed on tight and I know t...	Ted Kooser	null	null
Wild Life	Behind the silo, the Mother Rabbit hunches like a giant spider with strange calm: six tiny babies beneath, each clamoring for a sweet syringe of milk. This may sound cute to you, reading from your pulpit of plenty, but one small one was left out of reach, a knife of fur barging between the others. ...	Grace Cavalieri	null	null
Umbrella	When I push your button you fly off the handle, old skin and bones, black bat wing. We're alike, you and I. Both of us resemble my mother, so fierce in her advocacy on behalf of the most vulnerable child who'll catch his death in this tempest. Such a headwind! Sometimes it requires all my...	Connie Wanek	null	null
Sunday	You are the start of the week or the end of it, and according to The Beatles you creep in like a nun. You're the second full day the kids have been away with their father, the second full day of an empty house. Sunday, I've missed you. I've been sitting in the backyard with a glass of Pinot waiting...	January Gill O'Neil	null	null
Invisible Fish	Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock. Soon the fish will learn to walk. Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the dying stone. Then later, much later, the ocean floor will be punctuated by Chevy trucks, carrying the dreamers’ decendants, who are going to ...	Joy Harjo	Living,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Social Commentaries,History & Politics	null
Don’t Bother the Earth Spirit	Don’t bother the earth spirit who lives here. She is working on a story. It is the oldest story in the world and it is delicate, changing. If she sees you watching she will invite you in for coffee, give you warm bread, and you will be obligated to stay and listen. But this is no ordinary story. You will have to end...	Joy Harjo	Religion,The Spiritual,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends	null
The One Thing That Can Save America	Is anything central? Orchards flung out on the land, Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills? Are place names central? Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm? As they concur with a rush at eye level Beating themselves into eyes which have had enough Thank you, no more thank you. And the...	John Ashbery	null	null
["Hour in which I consider hydrangea"]	Hour in which I consider hydrangea, a salt or sand plant, varietal, the question of varietals, the diet of every mother I know, 5 pounds feels like 20, I have lost … I have lost, yes, a sense of my own possible beauty, grown external, I externalize beauty. Beauty occurs on the surface of plants; the sun darkens the ...	Simone White	Living,Parenthood,The Body,The Mind,Nature,Trees & Flowers	null
Stung	She couldn't help but sting my finger, clinging a moment before I flung her to the ground. Her gold is true, not the trick evening light plays on my roses. She curls into herself, stinger twitching, gilt wings folded. Her whole life just a few weeks, and my pain subsided in a moment. In the cold, she h...	Heid E. Erdrich	null	null
Nothing But Good...	I will not speak ill of Jack Flick. I will rarely look at the scar he made on my cheek one summer at the lake. I won't speak ill of Jack whose freckles and gangly legs are gone. So is the drained face I saw when he saw what he'd done with a sharp rock nonchalantly skipped. I will speak well, for it...	Sarah White	null	null
How Quiet	How quiet is the spruce, the wind twills through the uppermost tier of splayed leaves. Now the song of a bird like the squeaky lock over a canoe's oar, followed by startling chirps, the sky pushing its clouds like sailboats, and I think, what kind of God keeps himself secret so that to find h...	Judith Harris	null	null
Porcupine	You think we are the pointed argument, the man drunk at the party showing off his gun collection, the bed of nettles. What we really are is hidden from you: girl weeping in the closet among her stepfather's boots; tuft of rabbit fur caught in barbed wire; body of the baby in the landfill; boy with th...	Kelly Madigan	null	null
Summer Apples	I planted an apple tree in memory of my mother, who is not gone, but whose memory has become so transparent that she remembers slicing apples with her grandmother (yellow apples; blue bowl) better than the fruit that I hand her today. Still, she polishes the surface with her thumb, ho...	Cathryn Essinger	null	null
Visiting the Neighborhood	The entrance at the back of the complex led onto a road, where an upended couch tilted into a ditch and a washing machine gleamed avocado beneath pine needles. From the end, you turned left and left again, then cut a trail to find the cul-de-sac of bright brick houses. We'd walk as far as we dared ...	P. Ivan Young	null	null
scars	my father’s body is a map a record of his journey he carries a bullet lodged in his left thigh there is a hollow where it entered a protruding bump where it sleeps the doctors say it will never awaken it is the one souvenir he insists on keeping mother has her own opinionsbố cùa con điên—your...	Truong Tran	The Body,Family & Ancestors	null
what remains two	it has long been forgotten this practice of the mother weaning a child she crushes the seeds of a green chili rubs it to her nipple what the child feels she too will share in this act of love my own mother says it was not meant to be cruel when cruelty she tells me is a child’s lips torn from breas...	Truong Tran	Infancy,Parenthood,The Body	null
West of Myself	Why are you still seventeen and drifting like a dog after dark, dragging a shadow you’ve found? Put it back where it belongs, and that bend of river, too. That’s not the road you want, though you have it to yourself. Gone are the cars that crawl to town from the reactors, a parade of insects, m...	Debora Greger	Coming of Age	null
Yes	Yes, your childhood now a legend of fountains —jorge gullén Yes, your childhood, now a legend gone to weeds, still remembers the gray road that set out to cross the desert of the future. And how, always just ahead, gray water ...	Debora Greger	Coming of Age,Youth	null
Bounden Duty	I got a call from the White House, from the President himself, asking me if I’d do him a personal favor. I like the President, so I said, “Sure, Mr. President, anything you like.” He said, “Just act like nothing’s going on. Act normal. That would mean the world to me. Can you do that, Leon?”...	James Tate	Humor & Satire,History & Politics	null
History	Of course wars, of course lice, of course limbs on opposing sides to remind a body about ambivalence, of course orphans and empty beds and eyes exiled for blinking in the harsh light. Of course Khrushchev gave Crimea to the Ukraine in a blind drunk, and yes, land mines and burning skin and of course organs, ...	Barbara Ras	History & Politics,War & Conflict	null
What It Was Like	If they ask what it was like, say it was like the sea rolling barrels of itself at you in the shadowless light of the shore, say it was like a spider, black as night, large as a campesino’s hand, a deepness that could balance a small world of dirt as easily as a gift of gleaming red tomatoes held out to you ...	Barbara Ras	Money & Economics	null
All	The prisoner can’t go any longer, but he does. The beggar can’t go on begging, but watch— Tomorrow he’ll be in the alley, holding out a bowl To everyone, to even a young, possibly poorer, child. The mother can’t go on believing, But she will kneel for hours in the cathedral, Holding silence in her arms. ...	Barbara Ras	Life Choices,Faith & Doubt	null
Sleeping with Butler’s Lives of the Saints	After Octavio Paz What’s most human must drive an arrow to the heart. Ghosts, too, must abide by this directive & remain transparent, going about their business in old houses. Before I was an I, I longed to be ethereal. Sprouting wings at will & gliding through cul-de-sa...	Eugene Gloria	Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets	null
Hoodlum Birds	The fearless blackbirds see me again at the footpath beside the tall grasses sprouting like unruly morning hair. They caw and caw like vulgar boys on street corners making love to girls with their “hey mama this” and their “hey mama that.” But this gang of birds is much too slick. They are my homeys ...	Eugene Gloria	Animals	null
Wilde's Tomb	But these, thy lovers are not dead.…They will rise up and hear your voice. . .. and run to kiss your mouth. –The Sphinx In the garden of Père Lachaise, city of the dead, we passed angels covering their faces in shame, & nineteenth-century trees, with tops bowed as if their onl...	Michael Gessner	Poetry & Poets	null
The Poem of Death	This is the poem of death. There is only one and no other. Every one is an occasion, one way or another, and the last poem is this poem of death. It is an occasion like no other. I will no longer lope after elegance, beauty’s body, or love’s wonder. I will be sorry for everything I wa...	Michael Gessner	Death	null
The Innocents at Sandy Hook	Nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel, or what life itself eventually reveals. No more studies of kindness or courtesy, nor grace or charity, all is needless now. All is needless now, sky, world, family grieving for their bundles of purity, now beyond disgrace, failure, winter streets,...	Michael Gessner	Sorrow & Grieving	null
Fiddlers at the Desert Valley County Care Center	Among physicians rich in their death watch In hallways crowded with locked wheelchairs, Cradles of a century’s platitudes, The stale air smelling of disinfectant And weeping wounds enough to stupefy nurses, Among the staring insomniacs of the day room, The stroke victims on their rented gurneys, Compla...	Michael Gessner	Death,Sorrow & Grieving	null
Face	Imagine half your face rubbed out yet you are suited up and walking to the office. How will your mates greet you? with heavy hearts, flowers, rosary beads? How shall we greet the orphan boy, the husband whose hand slipped, children and wife swept away? How to greet our new yea...	Indran Amirthanayagam	Sorrow & Grieving	null
Order	Jesus did not ride that monstrous wave, not Yahweh, Jah, Allah, none of the major Gods or the minor ones, not even the godless strode that bugger which sliced our lives in two: the past where we danced ballroom while the children played carom, and mangos stained our lapels, and today, hobblin...	Indran Amirthanayagam	Faith & Doubt	null
The City, with Elephants	The elephants of reckoning are bunches of scruff men and women picking up thrown out antennae from the rubbish bins of the city to fix on their tubular bells and horn about by oil can fires in the freezing midnight of the old new year We ride by their music every hour in cabs on train...	Indran Amirthanayagam	Travels & Journeys,Class	null
Words for the Sri Lanka Tourist Office	The King Cobra slides through our jungles, and tucked in bushes by the riverbanks the grand Kabaragoya holds court among lizards— but if you want to swim at Mount Lavinia, or fly kites on Galle Face Green, or ride horse carts in the Jaffna peninsula of your ancestors, or bear a child in Col...	Indran Amirthanayagam	Weather	null
Kiss	Kissing your lips I try to forget roses or the fruit of palmyra trees sweet and strong Tongue lolling upon tongue heart beating against heart beating, these are my words signifying our human bodies which poetry does not capture, the absolute desire I have to kiss your lips on this hot and...	Indran Amirthanayagam	Realistic & Complicated	null
hamsters are heads with little characteristics on the head, part one	in florida a giant hamster lays in bed worrying about its future the hamster has bad eyesight and many other problems later that night the hamster drives its car around listening to sad music; the master lightly drums its paws on the steering wheel the hamster is alone but not for long: at home three waf...	Tao Lin	Pets	null
hamsters are heads with little characteristics on the head, part three	in the evening the hamster sits at the computer watermelon juice and coffee sit by the computer the hamster drinks all of the coffee after a few minutes the hamster drinks all of the watermelon juice the hamster lays its paw atop a neatly folded to-do list; this is a resourceful hamster with a strong will,...	Tao Lin	Pets	null
thirteen of twenty-four	notice how my forehead approaches you at a high speed notice the contortions on my face; hear and feel the impact of my forehead against your eyebrow never get angry if someone doesn’t do things for you react to disappointment by being quiet and nice and alone, not by being confrontational or frustrated ...	Tao Lin	The Body	null
Turtle Came to See Me	The first story I ever write is a bright crayon picture of a dancing tree, the branches tossed by island wind. I draw myself standing beside the tree, with a colorful parrot soaring above me, and a magical turtle clasped in my hand, and two yellow wings fluttering on the proud shoulders of my ruffled...	Margarita Engle	null	null
Kinship	Two sets of family stories, one long and detailed, about many centuries of island ancestors, all living on the same tropical farm... The other side of the family tells stories that are brief and vague, about violence in the Ukraine, which Dad's parents had to flee forever, leaving all their loved...	Margarita Engle	null	null
Ritmo/Rhythm	Mad has decided to catch a vulture, the biggest bird she can find. She is so determined, and so inventive, that by stringing together a rickety trap of ropes and sticks, she creates a puzzling structure that just might be clever enough to trick a buzzard, once the trap’s baited with leftover pork ...	Margarita Engle	null	null
More Dangerous Air	Newsmen call it the Cuban Missile Crisis. Teachers say it's the end of the world. At school, they instruct us to look up and watch the Cuban-cursed sky. Search for a streak of light. Listen for a piercing shriek, the whistle that will warn us as poisonous A-bombs zoom close. Hide under a desk. Pr...	Margarita Engle	Coming of Age,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity,War & Conflict	null
Napalm	I have come to realize the body is its own pyre, that degree rises from within, the fatty acids a kind of kindling. Like a scientist in a lab, this much I have established, blood jelled like gasoline, the years spread before me like a map pinned with targets, where I’m raging even now. It works both ways. ...	Quan Barry	The Body	null
vigil	And both the girls cried bitterly (though they hardly knew why) and clung to the Lion and kissed his mane and his nose and his paws and his great, sad eyes. Then he turned from them and walked out onto the top of the hill. And Lucy and Susan, crouching in the bushes, looked after him and this is what they s...	Quan Barry	Animals,War & Conflict	null
loose strife [Somebody says draw a map]	Somebody says draw a map. Populate it with the incidents of your childhood. Mark the spot where the lake receded after a winter of light snow. The stairs on which someone slapped you. The place where the family dog hung itself by jumping over the back fence while still on the dog run, hours later its body ...	Quan Barry	Poetry & Poets,War & Conflict	null
loose strife [Listen closely as I sing this]	Listen closely as I sing this. The man standing at the gate tottering on his remaining limb is a kind of metronome, his one leg planted firmly on the earth. Yes, I have made him beautiful because I aim to lay all my cards on the table. In the book review the critic writes, “Barry seeks not to judge but t...	Quan Barry	Poetry & Poets,War & Conflict	null
loose strife [Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings]	Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings they were still there. The upper portion of their faces long ruined but you could still see the meaning in their hands, palms once covered in gold. We knew better than to call them by their names, Light that Shines Throug...	Quan Barry	War & Conflict	null
Craft [The first great poet]	The first great poet of the crisis the one whose generation was left as if firebombed though if you look back at the seminal work you will see that only a handful of of the poems explicitly  touch on that dark time  the blood f...	Quan Barry	Sorrow & Grieving,War & Conflict	null
Someone once said we were put on this earth to witness and testify	Nowhere in the Halakha’s five thousand years of rules  does it specifically state Thou shall not [ ] but sometimes tradition carries more weight than law and so for much of the past year we have ...	Quan Barry	Birth & Birthdays	null
crossing the South China Sea as analgesia	One day we will all be like this—the boat’s sickening pitch, & the delicateness needless, consumable. How everything here naturally passes into night, a room w/o walls. Could mindlessness keep us alive? Could bright colors? Tonight I am thinking of the young woman who dreams of her fa...	Quan Barry	Travels & Journeys	null
lion	Shagged-gold, at rest the great haunches as if axled, fur sleeked like a butter rug. In the Serengeti sun, the male’s harem like a solar system, each lady kept exclusive, her seasonal heat for him alone, estrous belly pressed to the ground, then the male’s riding her musculature— throughout evo...	Quan Barry	Animals,War & Conflict	null
Thanksgiving	Literally the thing has been gutted, a ragged gash carved under its tail to midway up its chest, eyes like stagnant water, horns intricate as a woodwind. Where did the viscera go? Where do the viscera ever go? I am in a car driving to the northernmost point on this spit. Porte de Mort. Death’s Northern Doo...	Quan Barry	Family & Ancestors,War & Conflict	null
Allowance	I am ten. My mother sits in a black rocking chair in the parlor and tells stories of a country school surrounded by ricefields and no roads. I stand in the kerosene light behind her, earning my allowance. A penny for each white hair I pull.	James Masao Mitsui	Jobs & Working,Home Life	null
Block 18, Tule Lake Relocation Camp	—for James I. Ina 1. The emotion of trucks, buses & troop trains brings them here, to the wrong side of another state. A woman at the Klamath Falls depot calls it the wrong side of the ocean. 2 Crumbs hide around the table legs in the mess hall, dishes & silverware clink a...	James Masao Mitsui	Realistic & Complicated,History & Politics,War & Conflict	null
Painting by a Mental Patient, Weaverville City Jail, California, 1922	—displayed in the Weaverville Museum It is the picture of a man who dreams at night, his dreams a cartoon color he can’t forget in his blue cell: a fork chases a hard-boiled egg across the smooth paper, cheered on by an angry alarm clock. The clock rings and the artist knows it is m...	James Masao Mitsui	Health & Illness,The Mind,Painting & Sculpture	null
New Lines for Fortune Cookies	—after Frank O’Hara You have been smiling across the table at your date with a sesame seed stuck in your teeth. You will gain sophistication, become accepted by Reader’s Digest, and retire in Puyallup. In your next life you will be a teacher and no one will ever call you by your f...	James Masao Mitsui	Eating & Drinking,Humor & Satire	null
Spring Poem For the Sake of Breathing, Written After a Walk to Foster Island	The sky wants the water to turn grey, but if I notice how waves play with the clumps of yellow flags, or the way turtles share logs, or even try to understand a friend’s decision to walk onto a glacier and end her life—I will be ready for any poems that have been waiting. The horizon ...	James Masao Mitsui	Time & Brevity,Spring	null
The Sweetest Oranges in Town	No, I am not deformed. I wear these socks Because I haven't any gloves, And my fingers are bitten with frost. They feel like stumps. Luckily, I finished covering The citrus tree with sheets of burlap. Before darkness, I will light a smudge pot Near the mummified trunk, Then anoint my hands in a b...	Rick Noguchi	Health & Illness,Winter	null
The Breath-Holding Contest	That boy, the champion breath holder, Kenji Takezo, lost his title This year to Mack Stanton A retired truck driver New to the area. Held in the town swimming pool Thirty-five participants inhaled Deeply all at once Submerged the depth. The contest went on into twilight. One by one each person ...	Rick Noguchi	Sports & Outdoor Activities	null
The Ocean Inside Him	After Kenji Takezo fell from a wave, The turbulence of whitewash confused His sense of direction. He breathed in When he should have Held tight. By accident, he swallowed The Pacific. The water poured down his throat, A blue cascade he could not see. He felt in his stomach The heavy life of the...	Rick Noguchi	Seas, Rivers, & Streams	null
October, Remembering the Ride No One Saw	Steel horses nodding In the petroleum field are beasts That suck The crude of earth. They have lived here for as long as I Remember. This moment, I smell wild incense: Heather, abducted by a desert wind. Its growth hides The rain-carved ribs of the foothills. Evening swallows The city fasti...	Rick Noguchi	Landscapes & Pastorals,Money & Economics	null
Human Knowledge	About the only thing I thought I knew was that nothing I’d ever know would do any good. Sunrise, say, or that the part of the horse’s hoof that most resembles a human palm is called the frog; certain chords on the guitar of no mercantile use; the abstruse circuitry of an envelope quatrain; even the mea...	Robert Wrigley	Coming of Age,Stars, Planets, Heavens	null
Unfunky UFO	The first space shuttle launch got delayed until Sunday, so we had to watch the shuttle’s return to Earth in class instead—PS113’s paunchy black & white rolled in, the antennae on top adjusted sideways & down for better reception. That same day, Garrett stole my new pencil box. That same day, Cynthia pee...	Adrian Matejka	School & Learning,Stars, Planets, Heavens	null
Illinois Abe Lincoln’s Hat	blacks painted onto bricks & split vinyl on the East Side, jaws as tight as window locks with the curtains drawn & behind that diligent fabric: blacks already tucked into homemade forts—folding chairs, wobbly backbones & the whole, snowy world waiting outside like ghost stories whispered around the last sp...	Adrian Matejka	Cities & Urban Life,Race & Ethnicity	null
Collectable Blacks	This is the g-dropping vernacular I am stuck in. This is the polyphone where my head is an agrarian gang sign pointing like a percussion mallet to a corn maze in one of the smaller Indiana suburbs where there aren’t supposed to be black folks. Be cool & try to grin it off. Be cool &...	Adrian Matejka	Cities & Urban Life,Crime & Punishment	null
from Stone: 24	Leaves scarcely breathing in the black breeze; the flickering swallow draws circles in the dusk. In my loving dying heart a twilight is coming, a last ray, gently reproaching. And over the evening forest the bronze moon climbs to its place. Why has the music stopped? Why is there such s...	Osip Mandelstam	Stars, Planets, Heavens	null
from Stone: 98	The clock-cricket singing, that’s the fever rustling. The dry stove hissing, that’s the fire in red silk. The teeth of mice milling the thin supports of life, that’s the swallow my daughter who unmoored my boat. Rain-mumble on the roof— that’s the fire in black silk. But even at the botto...	Osip Mandelstam	Time & Brevity,Animals	null
from Stone: 103 The Twilight of Freedom	Let us praise the twilight of freedom, brothers, the great year of twilight! A thick forest of nets has been let down into the seething waters of night. O sun, judge, people, desolate are the years into which you are rising! Let us praise the momentous burden that the people’s l...	Osip Mandelstam	History & Politics	null
from Stone: 122	Let me be in your service like the others mumbling predictions, mouth dry with jealousy. Parched tongue thirsting, not even for the word— for me the dry air is empty again without you. I’m not jealous any more but I want you. I carry myself like a victim to the hangman. I will not call yo...	Osip Mandelstam	Realistic & Complicated	null
from Poems: 140 1 January 1924	Whoever kisses time’s ancient nodding head will remember later, like a loving son, how the old man lay down to sleep in the drift of wheat outside the window. He who has opened the eyes of the age, two large sleepy apples with inflamed lids, hears forever after the roar of rivers swollen with the waste...	Osip Mandelstam	History & Politics	null
from Poems of the Thirties: 286 [The Stalin Epigram]	Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces you can’t hear our words. But whenever there’s a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, the ten thick worms his fingers, his words like measures of weight, the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his ...	Osip Mandelstam	History & Politics	null
Love Letters	Many months have passed since the diagnosis, and you’re still grieving for her. She’s not dead yet. But she’s lost, like a child is lost— her mind the ocean floor, where she kicks up sand and churns in the water. Al, we call it, or AD— never by its real name as if mentioning the word would br...	Juliet Kono	Growing Old,Health & Illness	null
Shower	In her illness Elizabeth believes we do this deliberately, the washing of her body. She blames me, her Japanese daughter-in-law for having made keeping her clean a fetish. Angry, she says we do this to torment her soul, the shower a hot spray of needles we subject on her moon-colored skin. She ha...	Juliet Kono	Growing Old,Health & Illness,The Body	null
Womanhood	When I was three, a tsunami hit town. “Daddy, Daddy, save me, don’t let me drown.” He saved me and my common-type dolls. When I was sixteen, another tsunami hit town. I cried to my daddy, “Daddy, Daddy, please save me, don’t let me drown!” But he let go of my hand! I still dance to ...	Juliet Kono	Sorrow & Grieving,Family & Ancestors	null
Homeless	My son lives on the streets. We don’t see each other much. Like a mother who puts white lilies on the headstone of a dead child, I put money into his bank account, clothes into E-Z Access storage and pretend he’s far away— at a boarding school, or in a foreign country. Nights, I dream fairy tales abo...	Juliet Kono	Parenthood,Home Life	null
Bees Were Better	In college, people were always breaking up. We broke up in parking lots, beside fountains. Two people broke up across a table from me at the library. I could not sit at that table again though I did not know them. I studied bees, who were able to convey messages through dancing and could find the...	Naomi Shihab Nye	null	null
Burning Monk	From the remains of his cremation, the monks recovered the seat of Thich Quang Duc’s consciousness — a bloodless protest to awaken the heart of the oppressor offered at the crossing of Phanh Dinh Phung & Le Van Duyet doused in gasoline & immo...	Shin Yu Pai	Life Choices,Social Commentaries,History & Politics	null
Model Minorities	in the shooter’s face, she recognizes her sibling’s coarse unforgiving hair, his yellow skin, & vacant stare, the year her brother broke down, she was still in high school, seventeen — w/ a taste for cutting not class but hands & arms any outlet to escape this ...	Shin Yu Pai	Family & Ancestors,Crime & Punishment	null
A Day Without an Immigrant, Dallas, Texas	At Pearl Street station, two brown-skinned men in painter’s pants stand out in a sea of white I am just one more face sticking out in a crowd & it is my privilege that prevents me from understanding why the workers want to know how to buy one-way trips the automated mach...	Shin Yu Pai	Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity	null
Search & Recovery	For James Kim (1971 — 2006) it could have happened to any of us a wrong turn down a logging road tires tunneled into snow a man’s undying love for his children moves satellites maps aerial images eighteen care packages dropped over 16 miles of the Siskiyo...	Shin Yu Pai	Parenthood,Travels & Journeys	null
from What the Heart Longs For When It Only Knows Heat ["We spend the afternoon together watching a docudrama..."]	We spend the afternoon together watching a docudrama about wild horses that roamed the ancient Arctic Circle. Surprisingly sleek, built for speed and not the weather, they were remarkable for their recklessness. They careen headlong down ice bluffs to fall into a broken heap. We can hear the small, tinny sounds of t...	Sueyeun Juliette Lee	Animals,Photography & Film	null
from Solar Maximum ["My skin crawls at odd hours of the day..."]	My skin crawls at odd hours of the day, a residual effect of my recent radiation therapies, how they inadvertently synced me to coronal flares. During my morning tea, at the gym, during the drive back home. A simple turn transforms into an avalanching pinprick of tremors one millimeter thick. I’d have preferred a su...	Sueyeun Juliette Lee	Health & Illness,The Body	null
from Solar Maximum ["How much chemical disorder..."]	How much chemical disorder can be survived depends on medical technology. A hundred years ago, cardiac arrest was irreversible. People were called dead when their heart ...	Sueyeun Juliette Lee	Health & Illness,The Body	null
Three Blue Butterflies	I. MORPHO MENELAUS Foiled acqua- moiré wings the butterfly’s beauty- mark hydraulic in its purposes his hair’s flame lifts you snarls you II. MORPHO ACHILLES Sea-bed in semaphore / an eyepiece wing-span delft dye vat-dipped shingle scintilla : truant and accl...	Christina Pugh	Animals	null
["Something I learned about agape when I was young..."]	Something I learned about agape when I was young: the Iliad tells us fellow-feeling is finite in communities. Brotherly love becomes a number that has to be divided among persons—so if you’re too kind to others, that might explain your neighbor’s graft. I sometimes wonder if perception is the same; if the qu...	Christina Pugh	Poetry & Poets	null
The German word for dream is traume.	The coal-dust hushed parameters of the room. Outside, my mother stitched whole dresses for $3.00 a piece. I slept in a bedroom which faced the street. A cheerleader was killed in a drive-by that year. She died in her sleep. I watched the headlights sweep overhead. ...	Cathy Linh Che	Coming of Age,The Body	null
Split	I see my mother, at thirteen, in a village so small it’s never given a name. Monsoon season drying up— steam lifting in full-bodied waves. She chops bắp chuối for the hogs. Her hair dips to the small of her back as if smeared in black and polished to a shine. She wears a deep side-part ...	Cathy Linh Che	Men & Women,War & Conflict	null
["My father does his own dental work"]	My father does his own dental work. A power drill and epoxy and steady hands— On Christmas Day, he mistook the Macy’s star for the Viet Cong flag. While watchingForrest Gump, he told me how he too carried a friend. He squeezedaround my throat so tight,I thought I’d die with him.	Cathy Linh Che	Home Life,War & Conflict	null
My Mother upon Hearing News of Her Mother’s Death	She opened her mouth and a moose came out, a donkey, and an ox—out of her mouth, years of animal grief. I lead her to the bed. She held my hand and followed. She said, Chết rồi, and like that, the cord was cut, the thread snapped, and the cable that tied my mother to her mother broke. And now her eyes red as a marke...	Cathy Linh Che	Sorrow & Grieving	null
The Properties of Light	Mid-October in Central Park, one of the elms has changed early, burning with a light grown accustomed to its own magnificence, imperceptible until this moment when it becomes more than itself, more than a ritual of self-immolation. I think of sacrifice as nourishment, the light feeding bark and v...	Eric Gamalinda	The Body,The Spiritual	null
Zero Gravity	The dry basin of the moon must have held the bones of a race, radiant minerals, or something devoid of genesis, angel-heavy, idea-pure. All summer we had waited for it, our faces off-blue in front of the TV screen. Nothing could be more ordinary—two figures digging dirt in outer space—while mother re...	Eric Gamalinda	Stars, Planets, Heavens,Sciences	null
Factory of Souls	It takes just two people to bring the world to ruin. So goes the history of love. At the end of the day we tally the casualties of war, victory for the one who gets wounded the least. You say it’s time for a change but I don’t know to what end, change being just the skin of some incandescent creature...	Eric Gamalinda	Realistic & Complicated,Sciences	null
The Opposite of Nostalgia	You are running away from everyone who loves you, from your family, from old lovers, from friends. They run after you with accumulations of a former life, copper earrings, plates of noodles, banners of many lost revolutions. You love to say the trees are naked now because it never happens ...	Eric Gamalinda	Heartache & Loss,Fall	null
the luams speak of god	If there is a god, let it be the hyena who plunges her mouth into the river after eating our grandfather’s poisoned bait, who, dark with thirst, poisons the river unbeknownst to both of them. Her ghosts stand in the street where we are called already through “time” out of our houses. She tells her ...	Aracelis Girmay	Family & Ancestors,Animals	null
Second Estrangement	Please raise your hand, whomever else of you has been a child, lost, in a market or a mall, without knowing it at first, following a stranger, accidentally thinking he is yours, your family or parent, even grabbing for his hands, even calling the word you said then for “Father,” only to see t...	Aracelis Girmay	Youth	null
from The Black Maria	after Neil deGrasse Tyson, black astrophysicist & director of the Hayden Planetarium, born in 1958, New York City. In his youth, deGrasse Tyson was confronted by police on more than one occasion when he was on his way to study stars. “I’ve known that I’ve w...	Aracelis Girmay	Stars, Planets, Heavens,Race & Ethnicity	null
Something Something Something Grand	I adore you: you’re a harrowing event. I like you very ugly, condensed to one deep green pang. You cannot ask the simplest question, your hold is all clutch and sinker. Cannibal old me, with my heart up my throat, blasting on all sides with my hundred red...	Sandra Lim	The Body	null
Pantoum	Taking on an aspect of the Orient, Skies full of hatchets and oranges Love, uninvited, hangs in the blood: But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor? Skies full of hatchets and oranges Keep the birds singing, sorrows fresh— But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor, As the nights grow steadily into m...	Sandra Lim	Realistic & Complicated,Stars, Planets, Heavens	null
Just Disaster	We stopped to watch the accident. Fire! It had finally come to pass. Just as surely as I was a coward carrying a wolf. It stepped out from me, it was paradise leaving me, running towards the giant idea of that melting house. So often you don’t think, “Little nicks of monstrosity, I shall be splendid in...	Sandra Lim	null	null
Lucky Duck	Be large with those small fears. The whole sky has fallen on you and all you can do about it is shout, dragging your fear-ettes by their pinked ears. They dance a number now: consequence without sequence. Lovingly broadminded in their realization and ruin, expert at the parting shot. Not so small...	Sandra Lim	Life Choices	null

Objects Used to Prop Open a Window

Dog bone, stapler, cribbage board, garlic press because this window is loose—lacks suction, lacks grip. Bungee cord, bootstrap, dog leash, leather belt because this window had sash cords. They frayed. They broke. Feather duster, thatch of straw, empty bottle of Elmer's glue because...

Michelle Menting

null

The New Church

The old cupola glinted above the clouds, shone among fir trees, but it took him an hour for the half mile all the way up the hill. As he trailed, the village passed him by, greeted him, asked about his health, but everybody hurried to catch the mass, left him leaning against fences, measuring the road wi...

Lucia Cherciu

null

Look for Me

Look for me under the hood of that old Chevrolet settled in weeds at the end of the pasture. I'm the radiator that spent its years bolted in front of an engine shoving me forward into the wind. Whatever was in me in those days has mostly leaked away, but my cap's still screwed on tight and I know t...

Ted Kooser

null

Wild Life

Behind the silo, the Mother Rabbit hunches like a giant spider with strange calm: six tiny babies beneath, each clamoring for a sweet syringe of milk. This may sound cute to you, reading from your pulpit of plenty, but one small one was left out of reach, a knife of fur barging between the others. ...

Grace Cavalieri

null

Umbrella

When I push your button you fly off the handle, old skin and bones, black bat wing. We're alike, you and I. Both of us resemble my mother, so fierce in her advocacy on behalf of the most vulnerable child who'll catch his death in this tempest. Such a headwind! Sometimes it requires all my...

Connie Wanek

null

Sunday

You are the start of the week or the end of it, and according to The Beatles you creep in like a nun. You're the second full day the kids have been away with their father, the second full day of an empty house. Sunday, I've missed you. I've been sitting in the backyard with a glass of Pinot waiting...

January Gill O'Neil

null

Invisible Fish

Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock. Soon the fish will learn to walk. Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the dying stone. Then later, much later, the ocean floor will be punctuated by Chevy trucks, carrying the dreamers’ decendants, who are going to ...

Joy Harjo

Living,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

null

Don’t Bother the Earth Spirit

Don’t bother the earth spirit who lives here. She is working on a story. It is the oldest story in the world and it is delicate, changing. If she sees you watching she will invite you in for coffee, give you warm bread, and you will be obligated to stay and listen. But this is no ordinary story. You will have to end...

Joy Harjo

Religion,The Spiritual,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

null

The One Thing That Can Save America

Is anything central? Orchards flung out on the land, Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills? Are place names central? Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm? As they concur with a rush at eye level Beating themselves into eyes which have had enough Thank you, no more thank you. And the...

John Ashbery

null

["Hour in which I consider hydrangea"]

Hour in which I consider hydrangea, a salt or sand plant, varietal, the question of varietals, the diet of every mother I know, 5 pounds feels like 20, I have lost … I have lost, yes, a sense of my own possible beauty, grown external, I externalize beauty. Beauty occurs on the surface of plants; the sun darkens the ...

Simone White

Living,Parenthood,The Body,The Mind,Nature,Trees & Flowers

null

Stung

She couldn't help but sting my finger, clinging a moment before I flung her to the ground. Her gold is true, not the trick evening light plays on my roses. She curls into herself, stinger twitching, gilt wings folded. Her whole life just a few weeks, and my pain subsided in a moment. In the cold, she h...

Heid E. Erdrich

null

Nothing But Good...

I will not speak ill of Jack Flick. I will rarely look at the scar he made on my cheek one summer at the lake. I won't speak ill of Jack whose freckles and gangly legs are gone. So is the drained face I saw when he saw what he'd done with a sharp rock nonchalantly skipped. I will speak well, for it...

Sarah White

null

How Quiet

How quiet is the spruce, the wind twills through the uppermost tier of splayed leaves. Now the song of a bird like the squeaky lock over a canoe's oar, followed by startling chirps, the sky pushing its clouds like sailboats, and I think, what kind of God keeps himself secret so that to find h...

Judith Harris

null

Porcupine

You think we are the pointed argument, the man drunk at the party showing off his gun collection, the bed of nettles. What we really are is hidden from you: girl weeping in the closet among her stepfather's boots; tuft of rabbit fur caught in barbed wire; body of the baby in the landfill; boy with th...

Kelly Madigan

null

Summer Apples

I planted an apple tree in memory of my mother, who is not gone, but whose memory has become so transparent that she remembers slicing apples with her grandmother (yellow apples; blue bowl) better than the fruit that I hand her today. Still, she polishes the surface with her thumb, ho...

Cathryn Essinger

null

Visiting the Neighborhood

The entrance at the back of the complex led onto a road, where an upended couch tilted into a ditch and a washing machine gleamed avocado beneath pine needles. From the end, you turned left and left again, then cut a trail to find the cul-de-sac of bright brick houses. We'd walk as far as we dared ...

P. Ivan Young

null

scars

my father’s body is a map a record of his journey he carries a bullet lodged in his left thigh there is a hollow where it entered a protruding bump where it sleeps the doctors say it will never awaken it is the one souvenir he insists on keeping mother has her own opinionsbố cùa con điên—your...

Truong Tran

The Body,Family & Ancestors

null

what remains two

it has long been forgotten this practice of the mother weaning a child she crushes the seeds of a green chili rubs it to her nipple what the child feels she too will share in this act of love my own mother says it was not meant to be cruel when cruelty she tells me is a child’s lips torn from breas...

Truong Tran

Infancy,Parenthood,The Body

null

West of Myself

Why are you still seventeen and drifting like a dog after dark, dragging a shadow you’ve found? Put it back where it belongs, and that bend of river, too. That’s not the road you want, though you have it to yourself. Gone are the cars that crawl to town from the reactors, a parade of insects, m...

Debora Greger

Coming of Age

null

Yes

Yes, your childhood now a legend of fountains —jorge gullén Yes, your childhood, now a legend gone to weeds, still remembers the gray road that set out to cross the desert of the future. And how, always just ahead, gray water ...

Debora Greger

Coming of Age,Youth

null

Bounden Duty

I got a call from the White House, from the President himself, asking me if I’d do him a personal favor. I like the President, so I said, “Sure, Mr. President, anything you like.” He said, “Just act like nothing’s going on. Act normal. That would mean the world to me. Can you do that, Leon?”...

James Tate

Humor & Satire,History & Politics

null

History

Of course wars, of course lice, of course limbs on opposing sides to remind a body about ambivalence, of course orphans and empty beds and eyes exiled for blinking in the harsh light. Of course Khrushchev gave Crimea to the Ukraine in a blind drunk, and yes, land mines and burning skin and of course organs, ...

Barbara Ras

History & Politics,War & Conflict

null

What It Was Like

If they ask what it was like, say it was like the sea rolling barrels of itself at you in the shadowless light of the shore, say it was like a spider, black as night, large as a campesino’s hand, a deepness that could balance a small world of dirt as easily as a gift of gleaming red tomatoes held out to you ...

Barbara Ras

Money & Economics

null

All

The prisoner can’t go any longer, but he does. The beggar can’t go on begging, but watch— Tomorrow he’ll be in the alley, holding out a bowl To everyone, to even a young, possibly poorer, child. The mother can’t go on believing, But she will kneel for hours in the cathedral, Holding silence in her arms. ...

Barbara Ras

Life Choices,Faith & Doubt

null

Sleeping with Butler’s Lives of the Saints

After Octavio Paz What’s most human must drive an arrow to the heart. Ghosts, too, must abide by this directive & remain transparent, going about their business in old houses. Before I was an I, I longed to be ethereal. Sprouting wings at will & gliding through cul-de-sa...

Eugene Gloria

Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets

null

Hoodlum Birds

The fearless blackbirds see me again at the footpath beside the tall grasses sprouting like unruly morning hair. They caw and caw like vulgar boys on street corners making love to girls with their “hey mama this” and their “hey mama that.” But this gang of birds is much too slick. They are my homeys ...

Eugene Gloria

Animals

null

Wilde's Tomb

But these, thy lovers are not dead.…They will rise up and hear your voice. . .. and run to kiss your mouth. –The Sphinx In the garden of Père Lachaise, city of the dead, we passed angels covering their faces in shame, & nineteenth-century trees, with tops bowed as if their onl...

Michael Gessner

Poetry & Poets

null

The Poem of Death

This is the poem of death. There is only one and no other. Every one is an occasion, one way or another, and the last poem is this poem of death. It is an occasion like no other. I will no longer lope after elegance, beauty’s body, or love’s wonder. I will be sorry for everything I wa...

Michael Gessner

Death

null

The Innocents at Sandy Hook

Nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel, or what life itself eventually reveals. No more studies of kindness or courtesy, nor grace or charity, all is needless now. All is needless now, sky, world, family grieving for their bundles of purity, now beyond disgrace, failure, winter streets,...

Michael Gessner

Sorrow & Grieving

null

Fiddlers at the Desert Valley County Care Center

Among physicians rich in their death watch In hallways crowded with locked wheelchairs, Cradles of a century’s platitudes, The stale air smelling of disinfectant And weeping wounds enough to stupefy nurses, Among the staring insomniacs of the day room, The stroke victims on their rented gurneys, Compla...

Michael Gessner

Death,Sorrow & Grieving

null

Face

Imagine half your face rubbed out yet you are suited up and walking to the office. How will your mates greet you? with heavy hearts, flowers, rosary beads? How shall we greet the orphan boy, the husband whose hand slipped, children and wife swept away? How to greet our new yea...

Indran Amirthanayagam

Sorrow & Grieving

null

Order

Jesus did not ride that monstrous wave, not Yahweh, Jah, Allah, none of the major Gods or the minor ones, not even the godless strode that bugger which sliced our lives in two: the past where we danced ballroom while the children played carom, and mangos stained our lapels, and today, hobblin...

Indran Amirthanayagam

Faith & Doubt

null

The City, with Elephants

The elephants of reckoning are bunches of scruff men and women picking up thrown out antennae from the rubbish bins of the city to fix on their tubular bells and horn about by oil can fires in the freezing midnight of the old new year We ride by their music every hour in cabs on train...

Indran Amirthanayagam

Travels & Journeys,Class

null

Words for the Sri Lanka Tourist Office

The King Cobra slides through our jungles, and tucked in bushes by the riverbanks the grand Kabaragoya holds court among lizards— but if you want to swim at Mount Lavinia, or fly kites on Galle Face Green, or ride horse carts in the Jaffna peninsula of your ancestors, or bear a child in Col...

Indran Amirthanayagam

Weather

null

Kiss

Kissing your lips I try to forget roses or the fruit of palmyra trees sweet and strong Tongue lolling upon tongue heart beating against heart beating, these are my words signifying our human bodies which poetry does not capture, the absolute desire I have to kiss your lips on this hot and...

Indran Amirthanayagam

Realistic & Complicated

null

hamsters are heads with little characteristics on the head, part one

in florida a giant hamster lays in bed worrying about its future the hamster has bad eyesight and many other problems later that night the hamster drives its car around listening to sad music; the master lightly drums its paws on the steering wheel the hamster is alone but not for long: at home three waf...

Tao Lin

Pets

null

hamsters are heads with little characteristics on the head, part three

in the evening the hamster sits at the computer watermelon juice and coffee sit by the computer the hamster drinks all of the coffee after a few minutes the hamster drinks all of the watermelon juice the hamster lays its paw atop a neatly folded to-do list; this is a resourceful hamster with a strong will,...

Tao Lin

Pets

null

thirteen of twenty-four

notice how my forehead approaches you at a high speed notice the contortions on my face; hear and feel the impact of my forehead against your eyebrow never get angry if someone doesn’t do things for you react to disappointment by being quiet and nice and alone, not by being confrontational or frustrated ...

Tao Lin

The Body

null

Turtle Came to See Me

The first story I ever write is a bright crayon picture of a dancing tree, the branches tossed by island wind. I draw myself standing beside the tree, with a colorful parrot soaring above me, and a magical turtle clasped in my hand, and two yellow wings fluttering on the proud shoulders of my ruffled...

Margarita Engle

null

Kinship

Two sets of family stories, one long and detailed, about many centuries of island ancestors, all living on the same tropical farm... The other side of the family tells stories that are brief and vague, about violence in the Ukraine, which Dad's parents had to flee forever, leaving all their loved...

Margarita Engle

null

Ritmo/Rhythm

Mad has decided to catch a vulture, the biggest bird she can find. She is so determined, and so inventive, that by stringing together a rickety trap of ropes and sticks, she creates a puzzling structure that just might be clever enough to trick a buzzard, once the trap’s baited with leftover pork ...

Margarita Engle

null

More Dangerous Air

Newsmen call it the Cuban Missile Crisis. Teachers say it's the end of the world. At school, they instruct us to look up and watch the Cuban-cursed sky. Search for a streak of light. Listen for a piercing shriek, the whistle that will warn us as poisonous A-bombs zoom close. Hide under a desk. Pr...

Margarita Engle

Coming of Age,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity,War & Conflict

null

Napalm

I have come to realize the body is its own pyre, that degree rises from within, the fatty acids a kind of kindling. Like a scientist in a lab, this much I have established, blood jelled like gasoline, the years spread before me like a map pinned with targets, where I’m raging even now. It works both ways. ...

Quan Barry

The Body

null

vigil

And both the girls cried bitterly (though they hardly knew why) and clung to the Lion and kissed his mane and his nose and his paws and his great, sad eyes. Then he turned from them and walked out onto the top of the hill. And Lucy and Susan, crouching in the bushes, looked after him and this is what they s...

Quan Barry

Animals,War & Conflict

null

loose strife [Somebody says draw a map]

Somebody says draw a map. Populate it with the incidents of your childhood. Mark the spot where the lake receded after a winter of light snow. The stairs on which someone slapped you. The place where the family dog hung itself by jumping over the back fence while still on the dog run, hours later its body ...

Quan Barry

Poetry & Poets,War & Conflict

null

loose strife [Listen closely as I sing this]

Listen closely as I sing this. The man standing at the gate tottering on his remaining limb is a kind of metronome, his one leg planted firmly on the earth. Yes, I have made him beautiful because I aim to lay all my cards on the table. In the book review the critic writes, “Barry seeks not to judge but t...

Quan Barry

Poetry & Poets,War & Conflict

null

loose strife [Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings]

Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings they were still there. The upper portion of their faces long ruined but you could still see the meaning in their hands, palms once covered in gold. We knew better than to call them by their names, Light that Shines Throug...

Quan Barry

War & Conflict

null

Craft [The first great poet]

The first great poet of the crisis the one whose generation was left as if firebombed though if you look back at the seminal work you will see that only a handful of of the poems explicitly  touch on that dark time  the blood f...

Quan Barry

Sorrow & Grieving,War & Conflict

null

Someone once said we were put on this earth to witness and testify

Nowhere in the Halakha’s five thousand years of rules  does it specifically state Thou shall not [ ] but sometimes tradition carries more weight than law and so for much of the past year we have ...

Quan Barry

Birth & Birthdays

null

crossing the South China Sea as analgesia

One day we will all be like this—the boat’s sickening pitch, & the delicateness needless, consumable. How everything here naturally passes into night, a room w/o walls. Could mindlessness keep us alive? Could bright colors? Tonight I am thinking of the young woman who dreams of her fa...

Quan Barry

Travels & Journeys

null

lion

Shagged-gold, at rest the great haunches as if axled, fur sleeked like a butter rug. In the Serengeti sun, the male’s harem like a solar system, each lady kept exclusive, her seasonal heat for him alone, estrous belly pressed to the ground, then the male’s riding her musculature— throughout evo...

Quan Barry

Animals,War & Conflict

null

Thanksgiving

Literally the thing has been gutted, a ragged gash carved under its tail to midway up its chest, eyes like stagnant water, horns intricate as a woodwind. Where did the viscera go? Where do the viscera ever go? I am in a car driving to the northernmost point on this spit. Porte de Mort. Death’s Northern Doo...

Quan Barry

Family & Ancestors,War & Conflict

null

Allowance

I am ten. My mother sits in a black rocking chair in the parlor and tells stories of a country school surrounded by ricefields and no roads. I stand in the kerosene light behind her, earning my allowance. A penny for each white hair I pull.

James Masao Mitsui

Jobs & Working,Home Life

null

Block 18, Tule Lake Relocation Camp

—for James I. Ina 1. The emotion of trucks, buses & troop trains brings them here, to the wrong side of another state. A woman at the Klamath Falls depot calls it the wrong side of the ocean. 2 Crumbs hide around the table legs in the mess hall, dishes & silverware clink a...

James Masao Mitsui

Realistic & Complicated,History & Politics,War & Conflict

null

Painting by a Mental Patient, Weaverville City Jail, California, 1922

—displayed in the Weaverville Museum It is the picture of a man who dreams at night, his dreams a cartoon color he can’t forget in his blue cell: a fork chases a hard-boiled egg across the smooth paper, cheered on by an angry alarm clock. The clock rings and the artist knows it is m...

James Masao Mitsui

Health & Illness,The Mind,Painting & Sculpture

null

New Lines for Fortune Cookies

—after Frank O’Hara You have been smiling across the table at your date with a sesame seed stuck in your teeth. You will gain sophistication, become accepted by Reader’s Digest, and retire in Puyallup. In your next life you will be a teacher and no one will ever call you by your f...

James Masao Mitsui

Eating & Drinking,Humor & Satire

null

Spring Poem For the Sake of Breathing, Written After a Walk to Foster Island

The sky wants the water to turn grey, but if I notice how waves play with the clumps of yellow flags, or the way turtles share logs, or even try to understand a friend’s decision to walk onto a glacier and end her life—I will be ready for any poems that have been waiting. The horizon ...

James Masao Mitsui

Time & Brevity,Spring

null

The Sweetest Oranges in Town

No, I am not deformed. I wear these socks Because I haven't any gloves, And my fingers are bitten with frost. They feel like stumps. Luckily, I finished covering The citrus tree with sheets of burlap. Before darkness, I will light a smudge pot Near the mummified trunk, Then anoint my hands in a b...

Rick Noguchi

Health & Illness,Winter

null

The Breath-Holding Contest

That boy, the champion breath holder, Kenji Takezo, lost his title This year to Mack Stanton A retired truck driver New to the area. Held in the town swimming pool Thirty-five participants inhaled Deeply all at once Submerged the depth. The contest went on into twilight. One by one each person ...

Rick Noguchi

Sports & Outdoor Activities

null

The Ocean Inside Him

After Kenji Takezo fell from a wave, The turbulence of whitewash confused His sense of direction. He breathed in When he should have Held tight. By accident, he swallowed The Pacific. The water poured down his throat, A blue cascade he could not see. He felt in his stomach The heavy life of the...

Rick Noguchi

Seas, Rivers, & Streams

null

October, Remembering the Ride No One Saw

Steel horses nodding In the petroleum field are beasts That suck The crude of earth. They have lived here for as long as I Remember. This moment, I smell wild incense: Heather, abducted by a desert wind. Its growth hides The rain-carved ribs of the foothills. Evening swallows The city fasti...

Rick Noguchi

Landscapes & Pastorals,Money & Economics

null

Human Knowledge

About the only thing I thought I knew was that nothing I’d ever know would do any good. Sunrise, say, or that the part of the horse’s hoof that most resembles a human palm is called the frog; certain chords on the guitar of no mercantile use; the abstruse circuitry of an envelope quatrain; even the mea...

Robert Wrigley

Coming of Age,Stars, Planets, Heavens

null

Unfunky UFO

The first space shuttle launch got delayed until Sunday, so we had to watch the shuttle’s return to Earth in class instead—PS113’s paunchy black & white rolled in, the antennae on top adjusted sideways & down for better reception. That same day, Garrett stole my new pencil box. That same day, Cynthia pee...

Adrian Matejka

School & Learning,Stars, Planets, Heavens

null

Illinois Abe Lincoln’s Hat

blacks painted onto bricks & split vinyl on the East Side, jaws as tight as window locks with the curtains drawn & behind that diligent fabric: blacks already tucked into homemade forts—folding chairs, wobbly backbones & the whole, snowy world waiting outside like ghost stories whispered around the last sp...

Adrian Matejka

Cities & Urban Life,Race & Ethnicity

null

Collectable Blacks

This is the g-dropping vernacular I am stuck in. This is the polyphone where my head is an agrarian gang sign pointing like a percussion mallet to a corn maze in one of the smaller Indiana suburbs where there aren’t supposed to be black folks. Be cool & try to grin it off. Be cool &...

Adrian Matejka

Cities & Urban Life,Crime & Punishment

null

from Stone: 24

Leaves scarcely breathing in the black breeze; the flickering swallow draws circles in the dusk. In my loving dying heart a twilight is coming, a last ray, gently reproaching. And over the evening forest the bronze moon climbs to its place. Why has the music stopped? Why is there such s...

Osip Mandelstam

Stars, Planets, Heavens

null

from Stone: 98

The clock-cricket singing, that’s the fever rustling. The dry stove hissing, that’s the fire in red silk. The teeth of mice milling the thin supports of life, that’s the swallow my daughter who unmoored my boat. Rain-mumble on the roof— that’s the fire in black silk. But even at the botto...

Osip Mandelstam

Time & Brevity,Animals

null

from Stone: 103 The Twilight of Freedom

Let us praise the twilight of freedom, brothers, the great year of twilight! A thick forest of nets has been let down into the seething waters of night. O sun, judge, people, desolate are the years into which you are rising! Let us praise the momentous burden that the people’s l...

Osip Mandelstam

History & Politics

null

from Stone: 122

Let me be in your service like the others mumbling predictions, mouth dry with jealousy. Parched tongue thirsting, not even for the word— for me the dry air is empty again without you. I’m not jealous any more but I want you. I carry myself like a victim to the hangman. I will not call yo...

Osip Mandelstam

Realistic & Complicated

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from Poems: 140 1 January 1924

Whoever kisses time’s ancient nodding head will remember later, like a loving son, how the old man lay down to sleep in the drift of wheat outside the window. He who has opened the eyes of the age, two large sleepy apples with inflamed lids, hears forever after the roar of rivers swollen with the waste...

Osip Mandelstam

History & Politics

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from Poems of the Thirties: 286 [The Stalin Epigram]

Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces you can’t hear our words. But whenever there’s a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, the ten thick worms his fingers, his words like measures of weight, the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his ...

Osip Mandelstam

History & Politics

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Love Letters

Many months have passed since the diagnosis, and you’re still grieving for her. She’s not dead yet. But she’s lost, like a child is lost— her mind the ocean floor, where she kicks up sand and churns in the water. Al, we call it, or AD— never by its real name as if mentioning the word would br...

Juliet Kono

Growing Old,Health & Illness

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Shower

In her illness Elizabeth believes we do this deliberately, the washing of her body. She blames me, her Japanese daughter-in-law for having made keeping her clean a fetish. Angry, she says we do this to torment her soul, the shower a hot spray of needles we subject on her moon-colored skin. She ha...

Juliet Kono

Growing Old,Health & Illness,The Body

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Womanhood

When I was three, a tsunami hit town. “Daddy, Daddy, save me, don’t let me drown.” He saved me and my common-type dolls. When I was sixteen, another tsunami hit town. I cried to my daddy, “Daddy, Daddy, please save me, don’t let me drown!” But he let go of my hand! I still dance to ...

Juliet Kono

Sorrow & Grieving,Family & Ancestors

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Homeless

My son lives on the streets. We don’t see each other much. Like a mother who puts white lilies on the headstone of a dead child, I put money into his bank account, clothes into E-Z Access storage and pretend he’s far away— at a boarding school, or in a foreign country. Nights, I dream fairy tales abo...

Juliet Kono

Parenthood,Home Life

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Bees Were Better

In college, people were always breaking up. We broke up in parking lots, beside fountains. Two people broke up across a table from me at the library. I could not sit at that table again though I did not know them. I studied bees, who were able to convey messages through dancing and could find the...

Naomi Shihab Nye

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Burning Monk

From the remains of his cremation, the monks recovered the seat of Thich Quang Duc’s consciousness — a bloodless protest to awaken the heart of the oppressor offered at the crossing of Phanh Dinh Phung & Le Van Duyet doused in gasoline & immo...

Shin Yu Pai

Life Choices,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

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Model Minorities

in the shooter’s face, she recognizes her sibling’s coarse unforgiving hair, his yellow skin, & vacant stare, the year her brother broke down, she was still in high school, seventeen — w/ a taste for cutting not class but hands & arms any outlet to escape this ...

Shin Yu Pai

Family & Ancestors,Crime & Punishment

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A Day Without an Immigrant, Dallas, Texas

At Pearl Street station, two brown-skinned men in painter’s pants stand out in a sea of white I am just one more face sticking out in a crowd & it is my privilege that prevents me from understanding why the workers want to know how to buy one-way trips the automated mach...

Shin Yu Pai

Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity

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Search & Recovery

For James Kim (1971 — 2006) it could have happened to any of us a wrong turn down a logging road tires tunneled into snow a man’s undying love for his children moves satellites maps aerial images eighteen care packages dropped over 16 miles of the Siskiyo...

Shin Yu Pai

Parenthood,Travels & Journeys

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from What the Heart Longs For When It Only Knows Heat ["We spend the afternoon together watching a docudrama..."]

We spend the afternoon together watching a docudrama about wild horses that roamed the ancient Arctic Circle. Surprisingly sleek, built for speed and not the weather, they were remarkable for their recklessness. They careen headlong down ice bluffs to fall into a broken heap. We can hear the small, tinny sounds of t...

Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Animals,Photography & Film

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from Solar Maximum ["My skin crawls at odd hours of the day..."]

My skin crawls at odd hours of the day, a residual effect of my recent radiation therapies, how they inadvertently synced me to coronal flares. During my morning tea, at the gym, during the drive back home. A simple turn transforms into an avalanching pinprick of tremors one millimeter thick. I’d have preferred a su...

Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Health & Illness,The Body

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from Solar Maximum ["How much chemical disorder..."]

How much chemical disorder can be survived depends on medical technology. A hundred years ago, cardiac arrest was irreversible. People were called dead when their heart ...

Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Health & Illness,The Body

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Three Blue Butterflies

I. MORPHO MENELAUS Foiled acqua- moiré wings the butterfly’s beauty- mark hydraulic in its purposes his hair’s flame lifts you snarls you II. MORPHO ACHILLES Sea-bed in semaphore / an eyepiece wing-span delft dye vat-dipped shingle scintilla : truant and accl...

Christina Pugh

Animals

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["Something I learned about agape when I was young..."]

Something I learned about agape when I was young: the Iliad tells us fellow-feeling is finite in communities. Brotherly love becomes a number that has to be divided among persons—so if you’re too kind to others, that might explain your neighbor’s graft. I sometimes wonder if perception is the same; if the qu...

Christina Pugh

Poetry & Poets

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The German word for dream is traume.

The coal-dust hushed parameters of the room. Outside, my mother stitched whole dresses for $3.00 a piece. I slept in a bedroom which faced the street. A cheerleader was killed in a drive-by that year. She died in her sleep. I watched the headlights sweep overhead. ...

Cathy Linh Che

Coming of Age,The Body

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Split

I see my mother, at thirteen, in a village so small it’s never given a name. Monsoon season drying up— steam lifting in full-bodied waves. She chops bắp chuối for the hogs. Her hair dips to the small of her back as if smeared in black and polished to a shine. She wears a deep side-part ...

Cathy Linh Che

Men & Women,War & Conflict

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["My father does his own dental work"]

My father does his own dental work. A power drill and epoxy and steady hands— On Christmas Day, he mistook the Macy’s star for the Viet Cong flag. While watchingForrest Gump, he told me how he too carried a friend. He squeezedaround my throat so tight,I thought I’d die with him.

Cathy Linh Che

Home Life,War & Conflict

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My Mother upon Hearing News of Her Mother’s Death

She opened her mouth and a moose came out, a donkey, and an ox—out of her mouth, years of animal grief. I lead her to the bed. She held my hand and followed. She said, Chết rồi, and like that, the cord was cut, the thread snapped, and the cable that tied my mother to her mother broke. And now her eyes red as a marke...

Cathy Linh Che

Sorrow & Grieving

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The Properties of Light

Mid-October in Central Park, one of the elms has changed early, burning with a light grown accustomed to its own magnificence, imperceptible until this moment when it becomes more than itself, more than a ritual of self-immolation. I think of sacrifice as nourishment, the light feeding bark and v...

Eric Gamalinda

The Body,The Spiritual

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Zero Gravity

The dry basin of the moon must have held the bones of a race, radiant minerals, or something devoid of genesis, angel-heavy, idea-pure. All summer we had waited for it, our faces off-blue in front of the TV screen. Nothing could be more ordinary—two figures digging dirt in outer space—while mother re...

Eric Gamalinda

Stars, Planets, Heavens,Sciences

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Factory of Souls

It takes just two people to bring the world to ruin. So goes the history of love. At the end of the day we tally the casualties of war, victory for the one who gets wounded the least. You say it’s time for a change but I don’t know to what end, change being just the skin of some incandescent creature...

Eric Gamalinda

Realistic & Complicated,Sciences

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The Opposite of Nostalgia

You are running away from everyone who loves you, from your family, from old lovers, from friends. They run after you with accumulations of a former life, copper earrings, plates of noodles, banners of many lost revolutions. You love to say the trees are naked now because it never happens ...

Eric Gamalinda

Heartache & Loss,Fall

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the luams speak of god

If there is a god, let it be the hyena who plunges her mouth into the river after eating our grandfather’s poisoned bait, who, dark with thirst, poisons the river unbeknownst to both of them. Her ghosts stand in the street where we are called already through “time” out of our houses. She tells her ...

Aracelis Girmay

Family & Ancestors,Animals

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Second Estrangement

Please raise your hand, whomever else of you has been a child, lost, in a market or a mall, without knowing it at first, following a stranger, accidentally thinking he is yours, your family or parent, even grabbing for his hands, even calling the word you said then for “Father,” only to see t...

Aracelis Girmay

Youth

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from The Black Maria

after Neil deGrasse Tyson, black astrophysicist & director of the Hayden Planetarium, born in 1958, New York City. In his youth, deGrasse Tyson was confronted by police on more than one occasion when he was on his way to study stars. “I’ve known that I’ve w...

Aracelis Girmay

Stars, Planets, Heavens,Race & Ethnicity

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Something Something Something Grand

I adore you: you’re a harrowing event. I like you very ugly, condensed to one deep green pang. You cannot ask the simplest question, your hold is all clutch and sinker. Cannibal old me, with my heart up my throat, blasting on all sides with my hundred red...

Sandra Lim

The Body

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Pantoum

Taking on an aspect of the Orient, Skies full of hatchets and oranges Love, uninvited, hangs in the blood: But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor? Skies full of hatchets and oranges Keep the birds singing, sorrows fresh— But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor, As the nights grow steadily into m...

Sandra Lim

Realistic & Complicated,Stars, Planets, Heavens

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Just Disaster

We stopped to watch the accident. Fire! It had finally come to pass. Just as surely as I was a coward carrying a wolf. It stepped out from me, it was paradise leaving me, running towards the giant idea of that melting house. So often you don’t think, “Little nicks of monstrosity, I shall be splendid in...

Sandra Lim

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Lucky Duck

Be large with those small fears. The whole sky has fallen on you and all you can do about it is shout, dragging your fear-ettes by their pinked ears. They dance a number now: consequence without sequence. Lovingly broadminded in their realization and ruin, expert at the parting shot. Not so small...

Sandra Lim

Life Choices

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