June: and considering again my recent, um, ruminations of the centrality of cigarettes in my almost-teenager life in the latter sixties, I thought, tonight as I write, I might extend that reverie. Easy enough – after all, it was not
Featured Selection
Introductions by Tara Skurtu and Margento: Tara Skurtu: Romanian poetry is more than alive and kicking. I discovered this in the fall of 2013, when I first traveled to Romania and serendipitously landed in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu
Reviews
In this month’s installment, reviews editor Adam Tavel examines a poet’s elegiac eleventh book. After by Robert Gibb Marsh Hawk Press $15, 98 pages published March 2017 In “The Deer Lay Down Their Bones,” one of
Essays and Comment
“Blogspot was our Montparnasse” – Robert Archambeau The era of poetry blogging was a brief one, more like a moment than an era. It was preceded, in the 1990s, by the SUNY Buffalo Poetics List, founded according to its archival
This Month's Selections
Your toys, my child, hold them dear, your toys smaller even than you. And at night, when the fire drifts off to sleep, — wrap them up in the stars from atop a tree. Let the golden pony graze the
I lent my Daily Missal, which had been published before they dropped the Latin, to Robin. Though she had been raised a Catholic in an Irish-Italian suburb of Boston in the sixties, had even been a “choir boy” until she
Love Talk What the boy heard his older sister say— Perfect, Fallen, Falling again— drew him to the blizzard snow. It was purely physical. He had his first red snow shovel. It was a tool. It needed use. He wasn’t
After Jim Moore If like a Buddhist I accepted the world as it was given, without judgement, does it mean I would remain unmoved by any atrocities, any tragedies? Karma gives birth to snakes, swine, songbirds. Step out of one
These white stripes of day achieve more than we could possibly hope for, with curtains –thin movements– shielding the curious birds. Pure pleasure is illuminated by each sequence of bright and shadow on the wall. Think of this– Light stands
Wayne had already flung off his t-shirt, pulled off his black Khakis to set up our tent—I can work faster if I’m naked—a new weed in the wet and wild. Faster, maybe, but not better: he slammed things together, tangled ropes.
Hidden from all mothers’ eyes by blinded windows glowing, I chase two neighbor sisters up slides and platforms, my boy heart surely rising as we round a silver maple, past the open gate, the scooter I’d cast off—my sister’s purple
Start Me Up! was what started it--Monica Litzkus from up the street got tight that afternoon so she put on Tattoo You cranked to the Max & anybody coming over to complain got handed a beer & invited to dance
Quetzal: you write the word on a sheet of paper then erase it; each word, a talisman, leaves a track: a magpie struts across a portal and vanishes from sight; when you bite into sea urchin, ocean currents burst in
ONLY BEES BUZZ IN THE MEADOW —for Harryette Mullen Speech a tremble, “Why not stop?” “Why not tremble?” Blessings from the other birds. Bread again. “What is as sweet?” Every grain of word is wheat. “Why not stop?”
Music Class Kids learned to play recorder in fourth grade, but I arrived late that year, and Mr. Bradley, fatigued and harried, taught me to fake it: how to inflate my cheeks and make fingers navigate in the Baroque way
I figured it out after you ate the palm sized sugary plump plums, after you left the twelve line letter on the granite kitchen counter, unsigned, that did not explain why you ate the plums but not the leftovers I