Tear It Down by Jack Gilbert We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows. By redefining the morning, we find a morning that comes just after darkness. We can break through marriage into marriage. By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond affection and wade mouth-deep into love. We must [...]
My Shoes by Charles Simic Shoes, secret face of my inner life: Two gaping toothless mouths, Two partly decomposed animal skins Smelling of mice-nests. My brother and sister who died at birth Continuing their existence in you, Guiding my life Toward their incomprehensible innocence. What use are books to me When in you it is [...]
Practice by Ellen Bryant Voigt To weep unbidden, to wake at night in order to weep, to wait for the whisker on the face of the clock to twitch again, moving the dumb day forward— is this merely practice? Some believe in heaven, some in rest. We’ll float, you said. Afterward we’ll float between two [...]
only the crossing counts by C.D.Wright It’s not how we leave one’s life. How go off the air. You never know do you. You think you’re ready for anything; then it happens, and you’re not. You’re really not. The genesis of an ending, nothing but a feeling, a slow movement, the dusting of furniture with [...]
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens 1 Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe, As a calm [...]
This exhibition presents 22 artists’ books, collage-poems, book-objects and object-poems by Italian artist Elisabetta Gut (b. 1934).
Motel 1 By Allison Titus Once. I conjugated every animal to sorrow. Every sorrow into a small small factory, manufacturer of salt, camping gear, fur coats and poorly upholstered furniture. Even now it seems like every version of melancholy rescues a nocturne for the pallid sky. A type of permanent dusk. Fold down the bedsheet. [...]
Shedding Skin by Harryette Mullen Pulling out of the old scarred skin (old rough thing I don’t need now I strip off slip out of leave behind) I slough off deadscales flick skinflakes to the ground Shedding toughness peeling layers down to vulnerable stuff And I’m blinking off old eyelids for a new way of [...]
Enough By Suzanne Buffam I am wearing dark glasses inside the house To match my dark mood. I have left all the sugar out of the pie. My rage is a kind of domestic rage. I learned it from my mother Who learned it from her mother before her And so on. Surely the Greeks [...]
Robert Pinsky’s mind is a constant generator of metaphors. When he looks at one small thing, he sees a city, a country, a cosmos. Like William Blake, he seems to aspire “to see a world in a grain of sand.” A jar of pens is a “quiver /Of detached stingers. (Or, a bouquet /Of lies [...]
