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01/31
Michael Canavan
,
Just Bodies
"How a fire spooks a field out of its hallows, / prone raccoons trapped within"
01/25
Jono Tosch
,
You Know How It Is when You Go into a Room?
"more than barf had changed–my attitude had changed."
01/18
Seth Abramson
,
Speed Will Win
"no one will be excused from this scene / until the question has been recovered"
01/10
Sarah Greenleaf
,
“You Know You’re There”
"You can’t tell the difference between numb and empty until (finally!) you find yourself face-down on the ground"
01/03
Sally Delehant
,
In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree . . .
"These structures were not built to bend through Black Friday."
12/20
Evan White
,
filum terminale
"In the man a garden was waiting. / Ever since, a genius for accidental finds."
12/13
Evan Nagle
,
sex
"Sex is looking stupidly / Into the traffic of another"
12/06
Ted Powers
,
from PLEASE LIGHT UP
"Because we are in love / I can know five or six things."
11/30
Cecilia Llompart
,
Considerations
"Consider, O Lord, how You sit atop the sky; like a man / in a glass bottom boat"
11/22
John Bowman
,
Inscription
"by lovers’ pen-knives – / by sun-beam on Birch"
11/16
Robert Moura
,
No Tombstone
"Ephemeral and unkept / As the breath that cripples her"
11/08
Rebecca Hazelton
,
You Make Me Touch Your Hands for Stupid Reasons
"might be people, might be ruptured protein in the eyes’ reversed image"
10/27
Sheera Talpaz
,
COMMENT ON MIRACLES
"The overcast sky is inept, / rainless. That’s fine—we don’t ask for much."
10/20
Sarah Louise Green
,
Lake Merritt
"To be one of the geese. / Unhindered and not-suffering by the Lake."
10/13
Andy Stallings
,
Harvest Fair
"the dust of formulas a skywriter copied out (for the weather is fine) disintegrate"
09/29
Sara Guest
,
Song for Valedictorians
"I want to name myself. I am a winged-ornament."
09/22
Adam Day
,
Badger’s Speech to the Audience
"the glimpse of a particularly / sordid wallpaper unaccountably chokes one"
09/15
Emily Kendal Frey
,
from SORROW ARROW
"Even though I have this giant problem in my pants / I am not going to do anything"
09/08
Nick Sturm
,
A BASIC GUIDE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY
"47. A good thing to do would be to have fun. / 48. New new new new new new sincerity."
09/01
Debrah Morkun
,
from THE IDA PINGALA
"the moist sweat of the turn-coat landscape as it spoils "
08/25
Jaimie Gusman
,
Sonnet for the Search Party
"In a thousand mirrored pores / Sits a handful of feral stars"
08/16
Broc Rossell
,
MODERN LIVING
"Everyone knows me / Say my name and stop my motion"
08/09
John Bowman
,
Hour Duet
"Letters could like larvae grow / in lath beneath a plaster page."
07/28
Robert Moura
,
1937
"The old days. / Grandma has the skirt on."
07/21
Ming Holden
,
under the larches
"sop within the skull, every last branchlet of ash rendered diamond"
07/13
Sarah Heady
,
Catenary
"When the skeleton came, it was not what we’d imagined."
07/06
Susan Denning
,
For The Newly Cinematic
"five notes and a little soul, a theme / on all your blurred entanglements"
06/29
T. Vance Roley
,
Medicine
"he would quietly corner an old wooden piano, / waiting for a single dusty thought"
06/22
Sarah Bartlett
,
(X sits through hours of PowerPoint slides then leaves)
"It performs frog in a blender, trees on fire in the dark seen from an airplane"
06/14
Sarah Louise Green
,
Severe
"In my face there is a sandwich but I liked it better when it was you"
06/07
Meg Hurtado
,
Game 1
"St. Brigid, without a moon, draped only in residual street-light, is losing her edges"
05/31
Adam Fell
,
TO MY BROTHER SAVING THE COMPUTERS OF SACRAMENTO HOSPITALS AT 4:17AM
"You can do nothing for them / but make their agonies paperless."
05/24
Bryan Coffelt
,
the operation
"you’re back in bed / gripping for a brick to / throw at whoever"
05/17
Sally Delehant
,
Oubliette
"Words / for a while wandered, / came back to dance at us / winded–"
05/10
Jaimie Gusman
,
Explode, expunge, but hold on tight
"All I remember is our rocking was in sync, like a hagfish’s five hearts."
04/26
Sara Guest
,
Critic as Spinning Jenny
"Gingerly I’ve been altered by what’s been said to me."
04/19
Jay Steingold
,
All Irises In Their Own Ivory Oceans
"When the sky is flooded incandescent / and the pinhole pricks / for breath give way"
04/07
Catherine Cafferty
,
Coupling constellations
"By night mice in a dish, when the torch / is on. And squirrels want fireside."
03/31
Sarah Heady
,
Yes, Virginia,
"When the parish releases a song, spheres of slightest blue collide with not-there Indians."
03/15
Matt McBride
,
Before the Common Era
"“ssssszzzzzhhhhhaaaaa” / and that’d be your name"
02/22
Noah Falck
,
from Wine In A Coke Can
"Out of the shapeless, eroding roadkill elevated thousands / of dandelion seeds"
02/03
Matthew Kaler
,
False Paintbrush
"face adopted by stitches, / pockets leaden with disorders"
01/25
Bryan Coffelt
,
.
"Today there is nothing / but what can you do."
01/12
Lucas M. Rivera
,
Shrunk Plot (or The Shade of Rodin)
"Not today. No, not today. No sad inclinations. "
01/04
Emily Kendal Frey
,
from SORROW ARROW
"You’re in love in your chair / Tethered so hard you make a groove in the landscape"
12/29
Jordan Stempleman
,
“You do not walk around Las Vegas with a picture in your pocket of a...
"unaware of what nerve gas does, unstricken by what disappears"
12/15
Alex Phillips
,
Staying With the Theme of Clicks
"my body is surrounded by science / and I live to take it apart"
11/30
Brandon Shimoda
,
The Grave on the Wall
"help me / down from my impalement on the star"
11/23
Jaimie Gusman
,
Self-infliction
"The crops grow toward her, 165 degrees."
11/16
Sally Delehant
,
On Proclivity
"Do the days watch my figure? / Certainly they’ve changed my face."
11/09
Maurice Burford
,
this face
"this face / of falling white / / neutralizes your face"
10/26
Rebecca Bridge
,
I Would Like to See You More Often
"You would like to see me more often but now you are a hermit"
10/19
Luke Bloomfield
,
NUDES BATHING
"This is my accomplishment. Pajamas."
10/12
Susan Denning
,
From the start
"If I can’t be blameless, let me be superior / in my mistakes."
10/05
Dora Malech
,
Lying Down With Dogs
"This is
what army
sanitized for your protection. "
09/28
Emily Kendal Frey
,
from SORROW ARROW
"You sit in your body, quietly making blood"
09/21
Andy Stallings
,
Better Apple
"The day gets / million-pointed / / and intermittently / loud."
09/14
Jaimie Gusman
,
A closer look and a long shot
"jetpacks with fuel and silly string / strapped to their child spines"
08/31
Eileen G'Sell
,
Simple Plans
"the memory of bonnets, thought bubbles floating / past unsold meats"
08/24
Matthew Kaler
,
Common Nights in the Incidence of Sympathy
"Habit fixes our mind’s entirely / slippery button."
08/17
Jay Steingold
,
A Man of Such Exquisite Emptiness is Ground for Fine Flowers
"hand over hand, to his core / where he found an antique engine"
08/10
Emily Pettit
,
BECAUSE YOU CAN HAVE THIS IDEA ABOUT BEING AFRAID OF SOMETHING
"We have no direction. We are damn serious about not changing direction. "
08/03
Andy Stallings
,
Autobiography
"sound as a protein swimming through salt water, dumb in my proper solvent."
07/27
Jordan Stempleman
,
from Back Room Poems
"not to call this place a living room, / haunt our children for the right word "
07/20
Stephen Danos
,
Place No Likelier Home
"a living exhibit poking the polished chests of visitors"
07/13
Bryan Coffelt
,
POSITIONING/CHARTING
"I want to fling hams off tall buildings to waiting beasts."
07/06
Emily Kendal Frey
,
from SORROW ARROW
"Sometimes I want fewer choices / Asparagus or a baby with wings"
06/22
Matthew Kaler
,
In Awe of Scavengers
"as you hold your first grandchild / in the soporific daylight of your arms"
06/15
Meg Hurtado
,
last night in the apartment.
"Now you are young; but give it a minute. / Accumulation is the easiest art."
06/08
Dot Devota
,
P. S . T h e B u r n i n g o f P a s t S p a c i o u s n e s s
"Grime and music, our new desires / trapped in their own extinct animals."
06/01
Brandon Shimoda
,
The Grave on the Wall
"His shoulders were the first steps, the tail that grew out of his neck"
05/25
Sara Guest
,
Love Story
"fitting like thin metal boots / against a thicker wind"
05/19
Andy Stallings
,
Raise the Flag
"What’s / half-conceived along / the fading hum I covet"
05/11
Ming Holden
,
carving
"Art is the axe. / The Emersonian eyeball."
05/04
Sally Delehant
,
A Confirmation of Hands
"Somewhere a child sings / his training in a cathedral"
04/27
S.M. Fattig
,
Retention
"I had this wedding / dress, in werewolf. / All day it slid / down / my ribs, a bath."
04/20
Jennifer Borges Foster
,
Cataclyst
"Light broke the window / by pretending to be Spanish"
04/13
Emily Pettit
,
HOW TO RECOGNIZE WHEN YOU HAVE BEHAVED BADLY AND BEHAVE BETTER
"It was the shaking sky and what I wanted to see below."
04/06
Caroline Manring
,
Proxima
"Whatever comes in that chariot / we must work to slow its progress"
03/30
Susan Denning
,
untitled
"Dear lost fragment of youthful / exuberance, you left your shoes by the river. "
03/23
Michael Comstock
,
2004
"A red don’t / walk hand cut // / the night in half / each time it clapped."
03/16
Emily Kendal Frey
,
TRESTLE
"A picture exists of almost everything In bed is where I realize people are dead"
03/12
Leora Fox
,
brandishing something
"the furthest of them, heart in throat behind a gun, imagines a child in her belly."
03/09
Rebecca Bridge
,
I Cannot Find My Tiny
"To keep their ponies safe, the people carried them deep inside of their chest cavities. "
03/05
William Camponovo
,
New York, New Amsterdam, Paris, Texas
"Leaning all over one another after / Another unreasonable night of being alive"
03/02
Jack Christian
,
Roseland
"We’ve four soups tonight, one with deer and shot in it. "
02/26
Andy Stallings
,
Horse
"My hiding-place vibrates like dinner’s in it."
02/23
Eileen G'Sell
,
I Love You Like a Good Game of Skee-Ball
"Second, if I drove a stick / I sure didn’t do it for Jesus."
02/19
Michael Comstock
,
I am an aging inventor. You are my trophy wife.
"I saw your face, but not before / I saw the face of every vacationer"
02/16
William Camponovo
,
The Great Physicist Tucks In His Children, 1944
"Feeling thinking measure and be measured. / Two chimes lowly ring of infinite chimes. "
02/12
Dora Malech
,
Relatively Long Arms
"steered clear of
neon
but stoked the fire / with a store-bought log."
02/09
Jordan Stempleman
,
Hammer Stuck
"It’s just a terrible bull, someone shouts / through the warehouse, it has no authority"
02/05
Lily Ladewig
,
Congratulations,
"Partial nudity means never / having to say you’re sorry."
02/02
Adam Fell
,
HUMAN RESOURCES 1
"Not quite sure what the dawn / keeps shoveling over us"
01/29
Jack Christian
,
Another from the Live Creature Series
"There’s an account wherein a piano falls in on itself and a man inhabits a stoop"
01/26
Hannah Gamble
,
Everything That’s Alive Stays That Way
"One night I heard the war in the wall / behind my head–"
01/22
Jaimie Gusman
,
Furlough Friday, October 23, 2009
"babies flowering babies vanished babies / on ships made of monkey shrubs"
01/19
Kate Lebo
,
Asleep on Repeat
"I lit a fire and the hearth exploded. / Birds opened my windows to hunt for eggs. "
01/15
Sarah Greenleaf
,
Courier; Unclassified
"Unchained, uncouth, drank too much, grabbed at youth."
01/12
Bryan Coffelt
,
to fearful brothers
"where, uh, baste the landscape / with this stage of cancer."
01/08
Eileen G'Sell
,
Love Poem from Detroit
"to know that the grass sweats more than we do / that people wear perfume that smells like grass"
01/05
Jessica Fjeld
,
You can’t call it Tuesday
"You have this way of putting things so they’re true. / You have these gray skies. Open that mouth. "
01/01
Luke Bloomfield
,
The New Funambule
"The child with the unused expressions / Does not want to dance alone"
12/22
Emily Kendal Frey
,
[THE HISTORY OF KNIVES]
"I met you and you put me on ice and I froze in the corner of your first bed."
12/18
Jono Tosch
,
The Man I Am Today
"Computers are pencils you don’t need to sharpen."
12/15
Brittany Cavallaro
,
Aperture
"There is a flurried debate about you in fur, as you will be under the train."
12/11
Seth Abramson
,
Thursday With Borderline
"Yes. The fourteenth time already. I will sleep with you when you have ironed your shirt for work."
12/08
Ben Estes
,
Have Cold Hump and Bough
"
“fffooorrr eeevvveeerrr mmmooorrreee”
/ Here’s to that risk of poignancy and gamble."
12/04
Maurice Burford
,
Industrial Poem
"tremolo of argyle metal in socks / rectangles plus eyes plus pretty speech"
12/01
Cynthia Arrieu-King
,
Poem Fighting Sleep
"A big black horse is very rude to me. / I know. It wasn’t. And then choke."
11/27
Seth Landman
,
All Year
"what’s in the violet / the shepherd from my neck ignited me"
11/24
J. Townsend
,
Ecliptic
"wait in the breath of / zeros / ludicrous waiting, unspent / hours at cold storage"
11/20
Lucy Ives
,
Poem
"She does not like that very nice man on wheels with the face of salt"
11/17
Lucas Farrell
,
We Are All of Us Nearly Home
"The earth is spinning the way children might / when a storm overhead / performs its invitational curtsy."
11/13
Lawrence Giffin
,
Presque vu
"Still, lacking / the word will not /star her consequence."
11/10
Jordan Stempleman
,
Agreed
"god used to just blurt out, I love it, / love it"
11/06
Bryan Coffelt
,
Oh.
"Oh, to jog with suicide eyes, / uh, with a light dangling in front."
11/03
Valerie Wetlaufer
,
Helpmate
"In the city library, we clutched knees, gazed at men whose moustaches came loose."
10/30
Macgregor Card
,
Contempt
"Now comes the mystery / I have no power / To move my arms"
10/27
Nicole Trigg
,
If You are the Danube, I am the Right Bank
"From the ruin I can see another ruin"
10/23
Austin Ellis
,
Ode to America, My Dead Cat, Etc.
"A tired man walks a bounding dog and thinks
to hope, must I learn to think less?
"
10/20
Lucy Ives
,
View (Red Flowers)
""
10/16
Patrick Lucy
,
JUST BORN, A TWILIGHT OF DOORKNOBS, THREE BULBS
"the dragon held a quartz crystal in its jaws / moonlight saddled my caboose till morning"
10/13
Dan Boehl
,
Self-Improvement
"13-year-old girls with sex growing in them, babies in light up shoes"
10/09
Sean Bishop
,
Sonnet for Sweetypies
"Sometimes a sweetypie has nothing to lose / when the black crags crack and muscle"
10/06
Eileen G'Sell
,
Nobody’s Winter
"There were grape leaves we couldn’t / get to, an attic without a home"
10/02
Dept. of Posthumous Letters
,
SELVES DIMINISH A SOUNDLESS HALL IN FURIOUS FURY ONCE MADE
"you fear the floorboards / raising up to be your new master. "
09/29
Adam J. Maynard
,
Stoned (ii)
"In the evening you become tired and sad / Watching a robot making an omelette"
09/25
Daniel Bailey
,
Some Short Poems I’d Write if I Were in Love Right Now
"push me out the second story window / I’ll look up and laugh"
09/22
Lacey Hunter
,
from The Stranger
"the sea flashing not a quiet darkness but a set of teeth lost inside the mouth"
09/18
Lawrence Giffin
,
Protocol
"The example will pass unharmed / in the equipment of equipment."
09/15
Macgregor Card
,
The Libertine’s Punishment
"another red photographed birthday / lost at low lighting"
09/11
Eugene Ostashevsky
,
Carl the Craven Raven
"He never would pronounce / that fatal “Nevermore”"
09/08
Lucy Ives
,
from Blue Flowers
"It is spring again in January and leaves dangle We are ourselves and I imagine"
09/04
Lawrence Giffin
,
In Loco Parentis
"Often, without any consent and from / out of its arcane architecture"
09/01
Macgregor Card
,
Le Soleil et le Police Dog
"through the curtain of burning geese / I hope they will not catch fire"
08/28
Sarah Louise Green
,
Familiar Deserts
"this is where God comes in (apparently) / scooping out the fun from infinity"
08/25
Meg Hurtado
,
the vampire speaks to the receptionist
"just as the evensong gave out, just as the traffic dropped her clothes"
08/21
Dora Malech
,
Copy That
"Don’t give us that
it’s sunrise somewhere
. Try a prayer: Almighty please bother to jiggle"
08/18
Sarah V. Schweig
,
Meanwhile in Our City of Abandon
"The bay has begun its slow evaporation. The only citizen is awaiting a glass of wine."
08/14
Sandra Simonds
,
Also Included in this Poem is a Real Life Astronaut
"She Lost So Much Blood She Needed an Emergency Transfusion...lost so much blood she needed an emergency transfusion"
08/11
Jordan Stempleman
,
Something Nearby
"enough with training, / give me my carapace"
08/07
Stephen S. Mills
,
My Midwest Knight
"everything was true, as true as anyone’s life, anyone’s growing up"
08/04
Sarah Louise Green
,
My periodic darlings
"I love you when I mistake your moan for a loon, stitching up the gasp in dawn."
07/31
Patrick Lucy
,
PITCH BLACK
"This was the eighties, that was the eighties, or this is the eighties, depending."
07/28
Merton Lee
,
Birdsong
"Is it that bird means girl, or that a bird’s shrill voice will repeat its surprise in song?"
07/24
Eric Ekstrand
,
Plumblossom
"The comet is hitched to its petering. / There is no way to change my mind."
07/21
Sasha Steensen
,
The Insemination
"the tightly woven knit of his pajamas and the sperm-like tails of a thousand stars"
07/17
Heather Green
,
The Apology that Drooped Like a Tree
"The trees were basically pregnant / You in the mouth // God in the mind"
07/14
Dan Boehl
,
Self-Improvement
"I wish someone would bake me snickerdoodles. / I wish someone would feel me inside of them..."
07/10
Alisa Heinzman
,
The She, The Sea, The Leaving
"She walks to harbor where land grants dampness. The air thickens and is unordinary."
07/07
Sara Guest
,
Anecdote of Heat
"I set a jar of Peking Duck off the train in Nashville heat."
07/03
Dean Gorman
,
[I heard a flawless country song once, understanding that]
"a period of singing follows a period of singing."
06/30
Robert Mueller
,
Cannolies Over the Bridge
"You can steal a crisp of chervil / on blankety-blank orbs on gossamer-pinks"
06/26
Sasha Steensen
,
The Book of the Grotesque
"The writer, a man with a hole in his heart, was almost always drunk."
06/23
Gale Thompson
,
The Most Beautiful Bibles
"We are in the future perfect and we are wearing hats. "
06/19
Aaron Balkan
,
Inauguration Day
"the man in $7000 shirt woven from threads they call bullet-resistant "
06/16
Carley Moore
,
Little Worry
"In my movie called
The Mother
, I am always awake. I use the window shades as eyelids."
06/12
Gabrielle Balkan
,
The Dumb Conversation
"I made my way through med school forging copies of The Cliffs at Etretat"
06/09
Luke Woods
,
Outside the Walt Whitman Residences.
"a meek pilgrim cowering under the height of stories stacked too high"
06/05
Liz Countryman
,
Yoda Uvula
"In the commercial for the anti-snore device, a man’s throat in scientific cartoon cross section (is)"
06/02
Matt Longabucco
,
The Today Show
"fill the toilet bowl with sunshine / and stand naked at the window"
05/29
Tana Jean Welch
,
The Locusts Are Swarming
"tell me why the pit of my stomach bleeds, why the front step stays loose"
05/26
Leora Fox
,
ways to eat a grapefruit
"screaming romantically: two fingers, frantic, scooping chunks of pink flesh"
05/22
Lucas M. Rivera
,
Pre- proviso
"The rabbi used the full weight of his shoulder and cracked the keyboards like crackers."
05/19
Pablo Lopez
,
A man is what he thinks about all day
"All things / for love–all things for dying / for a direction words / direct"
05/15
Evan Nagle
,
Climb Up My Genitals; Put On My Coat
"Isn’t is but an ice-clod, / Is but a jaw in the law of lost shuts."
05/12
Lucas Farrell
,
I Apologize For Nearly Everything Since My Heart Hurts
"I don’t know how long I’ve been missing. / I’ve become sad and dusty like a garden hose..."
05/08
Maurice Burford
,
Night Poem
"tonight I left Madrid in a moment of shine / exactly as the chord hit the night"
05/05
Emily Pettit
,
HOW TO RECOGNIZE A STRANGER
"Like glowing in the dark. / Like twice the inventions in half the time."
05/01
Brandon Downing
,
from Lake Antiquity (4)
"You glide easily from place to place within it / and you can have it the way you want it."
04/28
Caitie Moore
,
Trans Manifesto
"
Have you ever been attacked by a wild boar?
Define wild."
04/24
Jordan Stempleman
,
Fixed
"UPS driver who’s pounding / on his own front door with his forehead"
04/21
Brandon Shimoda
,
The Grave on the Wall
"shimoda is a fleshpot of inferior rank / a man says, Idiot"
04/17
Guy Pettit
,
Someone Must Live Here
"And it formed clots in the sky / Between our eyeballs and theirs."
04/14
Zach Savich
,
Fossil, Snorkle, and Cold Blood
"I wanted to write fauna impossibly / tender and necessary as a column of newsprint"
04/10
Jeff Downey
,
Withnail and I
"I hope it’s not a coincidence oste- prefixes both osteoporosis and ostentation?"
04/07
Aaron Balkan
,
Imaginary Stanzas
"The war was over because: no paper. "
04/03
Evan Nagle
,
Winter: A Transcription
"I’m talking, of course, of stars / Those things stuck on my God damn beard"
03/31
Heather McHugh
,
Study Under Fire
"shed the whole / shebang–next week, next month and half / of every life,"
03/27
Zachary Schomburg
,
This Is What You Need to Know About the World, Pretend Son
"When I cupped my hand a broken hummingbird fell into it."
03/24
Brandon Downing
,
from Lake Antiquity
"outset / haste // The music stopped. / He hurled his bike at them"
03/20
Nicole Burgund
,
Preludes
"Later in moonfield thoughts would die / becoming root systems"
03/17
Kara Candito
,
Sweet Reader (There Is Much I Want to Accomplish Since My Month-Long...
"Hold still while I taser you with a heraldic / dwarf in a ring of fire"
03/13
Neil Fauerso
,
Bungeeing In
"That sanguine furnace, bleeding in the basement, bungee in!"
03/10
Carrie A. Purcell
,
300.00: Anxiety State, Unspecified
"and starfish to frolic on skyscraper windows–"
03/05
Bernd Sauermann
,
Blue Report
"Report to the people that I am failing blindly in the blue air."
03/02
K. Silem Mohammad
,
I Only Have Eyes
"a “thing” in the sky, which was a “place” for it contained a “thing”"
02/26
Paul Otremba
,
Gorgias in Love
"For example,
If you walk out
—I wish to discuss / the nature of things."
02/23
Anna Journey
,
Snipers in the Arrangement
"Let thine tabby cat not vomit stigmata for the lord’s flowers."
02/15
Heather McHugh
,
On Purpose Laid
"Bitten hind and headquarters by Jove / I beat a blind retreat from love."
02/08
Lindsey Baggette
,
Penelope: whoops.
"For twenty years you suffered...wasting away the nights, weeping away the etc."
02/02
Aaron Balkan
,
Same Train
"Hey, no piñata in that tree. / No tree drenched in flame."