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  • Notes on Desire

    Archytas of Tarentum said the most fatal curse

  • Invitation to the Dance and Pieces of us Keep Breaking Off

    In the summer of 1949, Jacques d’Amboise found himself in a clash with a bully

  • A Convalescent Bed in a Field of Yellow Tulips

    Your wires trail into a gopher hole.

  • Kennedy

    Based on the private messages I receive

  • Burial Arrangements

    If I have to be buried at all,

  • Wild Yeast & Kiss and Tell

    What color is Shakespeare?

  • Here & Now

    I’m walking the beach where I ran as a child.

  • JIGSAW

    Where in the world does it fit

  • Disseminate

    Plums to the Garden of Eden. Their flesh

  • Pastan, Meinke, Dickow, et. al.

    Hank Lazer  on N33P14 and N33P29 The two poems/pages included in Plume 88 are from my ongoing Notebooks project –…

    Editors Note

  • Mystery and Surprise: Two Chinese Poets; reviewed by Alexander Dickow

    The contemporary Chinese poet Mang Ke and the Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin (9th century) could hardly be more different.…

    Book Review

  • Bhisham Bherwani: KNOTS

    No bowline, no double Carrick bend,
    Featured Selection

  • Can Poetry Save America by Chard DeNiord

    CAN POETRY SAVE AMERICA? Czelaw Milosz, the twentieth century Polish poet and Nobel laureate who became a U.S. citizen in…

    Essays and Comment

  • My Surly Heart

    You don’t know what lives

  • In Memorium: Peter Everwine — 1930 – 2018: written by Christopher Buckley

    In Memorium: Peter Everwine — 1930 – 2018 Peter Everwine died in his home in Fresno, CA during the night…

    Essays and Comment

  • N33P14 and N33P29

    Cloud cover

  • Cicada’s Courtship, Origin Story and Clean Houses

    The dissipation of freshly harvested leeks, wilted,

  • Clytemnestra, Unleashed

    Lovingly, she poured the scented water into his bath

  • The Sailor’s Love Song and Irish Whiskey

    When I was young I burned to be

  • Kabuki

    A widow in Mississippi kept them in glass cases,

  • Almost an Elegy: For Tony Hoagland

    Your poems make me want to write my poems

  • From Inches Away

    From inches away his finger can’t miss

  • From THIS BROKEN SYMMETRY

    Yes, Ravidat, to follow the rabbit down its winding hole

  • CYCLORAMA

    Only with such care could history take form.

  • Vesper

    The sky is blue for reasons other than atmospheric ones.

  • I Remember Nightfall: Marosa Di Giorgio, reviewed by Johannes Göransson

    Until recently, the great Uruguayan poet Marosa Di Giorgio (1932-2000) was largely untranslated.
    Book Review

  • That Which is Difficult: Poetry at West Point – Matt Salyer

    I was sitting on a corniche near the Tigris River watching kingfishers trip and scamper
    Essays and Comment

  • Gregerson, Jacob, Callihan, et. al.

    Linda Gregerson on “The Wayfarer” If one were to open the wooden panels on which this painting appears, one would…

    Editors Note

  • Frannie Lindsay

      Frannie Lindsay’s fifth volume, If Mercy, was released by The Word Works in 2016. Her work appears in Best…

    Featured Selection

  • Snow, an essay and The Day After the Day Without a Yesterday

    Or, the winter I kept being turned into a pillar of salt.

  • the primate hospital

    I have raptured the oars.

  • The Wayfarer

    When the wings of the triptych are open as

  • No Touch and Elder in a Garden

    I'm fed up with farewells.

  • Canine Elegy

    All over town, dogs are lying down

  • Pensé Que Estabas Muerto

    but your deaths existed the nights you didn’t come home.

  • A WOMAN I KNEW ATE FIRE FOR BREAKFAST

    And the light would tattoo itself across her mouth

  • Mouth & Nomadic Reverie

    Molar: a grinding tooth at the back of a mammal’s mouth.

  • JOURNAL, OR STORY WITHOUT WORDS

    And I follow the hand copying what it had written years ago

  • All the Shrimp I Can Eat

    They are swimming away from me at the speed of light

  • Cooking in Ashes

    The smile is missing; no joy around the eyes.

  • Others & Kents

    They stopped the car on the crest of Coleman Valley Road to show his sister and her husband the Pacific view.

  • Richardson, Withiam, Riedinger, et. al.

    Readers -- As you are here, just a word about the new website, so long in the works.
    Editors Note

  • Immanent Foundation: Norman Finkelstein, reviewed by Joshua Corey

    “Decision,” the first poem in Norman Finkelstein’s new book, announces an end to preliminaries and prolegomena: you must decide for…

    Book Review

  • Aldon Nielsen: White Mischief Redux

    I’ll confess at the outset that, despite my intense interest in contemporary poetries, the name of Anders Carlson-Wee was utterly…

    Essays and Comment

  • Mark Wunderlich

    Mark Wunderlich’s most recent volume of poems, The Earth Avails, was published in 2014 by Graywolf Press, was a finalist…

    Featured Selection

  • Boots and Bayonet

    My platoon a loose group cross-legged

  • Becoming Hat

    When in Rockport— with Rockport—

  • Bleeding Hearts

    They do not fit their given name. They glow

  • Eternal Sunshine

    Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

  • Lament Sunburns

    The worst I got on a tar roof, mid-July with a bottle

  • Scales

    I’m off in sixteen different directions

  • Fireworks or Gunfire?

    It’s just somebody sighting his gun—

  • The Excellent Trip

    You thought you’d need a month. You thought you’d need

  • South Hole

    So worship fire.

  • Ode to the Paper Clip

    O knot in two dimensions,

  • Trompe L’oeil –Not a Painting

    From 30,000 feet

  • Nice Dark One

    Yours is a noble bio, one note

  • A VARIATION | MY MOTHER BEFORE SHE DIED | HART CRANE

    Why ask to know, twin and neighbor,

  • A Habitation of Jackals, a Court for Ostriches

    Very dark now I put a seed in my mouth but its texture and taste

  • Scheffler, Lindsay, Nuernberger, et.al

    Adam Scheffler on “Charade” I think of this poem as a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster. I write poems in…

    Editors Note

  • AFTER A FUNERAL

    After the service and reception hour

  • Photographs, 1949 | Retiree

    In one, they pose, grinning straight at the Kodak,

  • Ars Poetica Über Prompt (Not the Taxi Service)

    Take the worst poem you’ve ever written but that you haven’t

  • No Heaven for the King

    Always in the faintest glow of pleasure, and always

  • THE INVENTION OF FIRE

    In “Burning of three witches in Baden, Switzerland,” dated to 1585, three women lie on a large pyre watched by a circle of men.

  • Invitation

    Go now to the silence. It has longed for you

  • Terese Svoboda

    NM: I’m intrigued with these innovative new poems. It’s remarkable how each use unique and singular stylistic inventions to track…

    Featured Selection

  • Piotr Florczyk: The Milosz Festival

                      The Miłosz Festival, which takes place in the city of Kraków…

    Essays and Comment

  • The Birthdays of the Dead

    It is an affront in their land

  • The Last of Fanfare

    By fire, then, but within view of a rough sea?

  • Crawlspace: Nikki Wallschlaeger, reviewed by Timothy Otte

    Poetic forms are constraints. A constraint gives form and body, and also creates space. A body is a constraint. A…

    Book Review

  • Classmate

    I was at the beach talking with someone else

  • Charade

    I was thinking of the sad

  • REVENANT

    Salt and sour bait

  • Marc Scroggins Why Swinburne? (An Open Letter)

    Why Swinburne? (An Open Letter) Dear B——, The other night at the bar, when I had just gotten in from…

    Essays and Comment

  • Cruel Futures: Carmen Giménez Smith, reviewed by Sarah Huener

    From its first pages, Cruel Futures is a book of intense assuredness. Carmen Giménez Smith’s latest book is richly lyrical,…

    Book Review

  • In a Pile of Pictures

    The man—young enough to be my son—

  • THE HARVARD CLASSICS

    My grandfather bought a set for his living room,

  • LITTLE PIECES OF STRING TOO SMALL TO BE USED | INCEST | HER LISTS | BIRD SONGS

    Granny's label on a box in her attic.

  • Stages on a Journey Westward

    All the mapmakers in history

  • Fagan, Solomon, Codrescu, et.al.

      Kathy Fagan on “Fountain” I think “Fountain” is a poem about plans and patterns, how they grow, change and…

    Editors Note

  • For Those Whose Lives Have Seen Themselves

    Welcome all who have traveled the long road

  • july

    The best thing about this month is not

  • Angela Ball

          Angela Ball directs the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her sixth book of…

    Featured Selection

  • from Border Crossings

    On dark nights when I have no words of my

  • Amsterdam

    Your shadow is born new

  • Olympia

    The ancient Greeks knew how to pick out a sacred spot,

  • return of the repressed in the age of avantgarde robots

    creating and smashing ideas of high and low was a good

  • FOUNTAIN

    Dogwood white knuckle it through January, February, March:

  • CAConrad: While Standing in Line for Death

    Best known for the “(soma)tic” rituals that serve as the source materials for his verse and prose poems, poet, critic,…

    Book Review

  • Heather Altfeld, Gregory Orr, Donald Revell, et.al.

      Heather Altfeld on “The Island to Remind You of Your Childhood” About ten years ago, I decided to teach…

    Editors Note

  • LOOKING AT DAD

    To see my father not seeing me with

  • Remedios Varo’s Locomotion Capilar (1959)

    Riding the bicycles of their beards,

  • A Poem and Two Fables

    The breeze this morning pulls on the surface of the bay,

  • The Only One

    In the stories of old there were always three.

  • Unfinished Business

    Cleaning up, in the kitchen, she goes to wipe away a small black seed from the counter.

  • POSTCARD WITH A CITY’S AERIAL VIEW AT NIGHT

    To think that each lit window there

  • Venice is Sinking | Window Shopping

    Venice is sinking, Signora. Look –

  • From the Republic of Sleep and Mercy | The Island to Remind You of Your Childhood

    All night I dreamt death

  • Getting Old, Thinking of Keats

    Even though I’m old now

  • Gerry LaFemina: A Video Interview and New Poems

      Photo credit Laura Byrnes My hometown of Salisbury, Maryland hosted Gerry Lafemina as poet-in-residence for Poetry Week, April 5-9,…

    Featured Selection

  • Alexander Dickow: Poetry, Sentimentality, and the Laugh Track Compulsion

    Poetry, Sentimentality, and the Laugh Track Compulsion   The Anglo-Saxon world – many would say mercifully – never brought forth…

    Essays and Comment

  • CATAFALQUE

    Angel of the gap thrills to floodwaters

  • Template

    Any skink

  • Concussion Test

    Do you feel heartsick for aboriginal (original) people wearing baseball caps?

  • Christopher Buckley, Nicole Callihan, Chris Forhan, et.al

    Christopher Buckley on ”I’m Nothing” “I’m nothing” has seen many incarnations . . . a longer poem, longer lines, more…

    Editors Note

  • The Doorway | Wants

    Two things she wanted among the left-behinds when her parents moved

  • What if Cat Stevens was a dog person? | Thus, always to tryrants | The Seamstress

    Someone offered me an olive branch

  • City That Cultivated Our Voice

    Back then, everything was only starting,

  • Song

    It wasn’t a goat’s head swaying in the tree. It was a ferret

  • The Departure | The Screamer

    Farewell my pond and all my many doves

  • At Once People at the End of Their Lives

    come from common spaces to move around

  • Words

    Words are loyal.

  • Robert Archambeau: The Poem in White Space

    The Poem in White Space   White space comes first, for the poet and the reader.  I don’t mean anything…

    Essays and Comment

  • Babel of Signs

    Skirting the coast desperate for fresh food

  • I’m Nothing

    close to a Zen scholar,

  • Blind | Opulent, Unfunereal World

    The way, as I wake, some shimmery dream

  • Martha Collins: “Night Unto Night” and “Day Unto Day”

    What are the heavens, and what is the firmament—what, a house, and for how long? How do we live, die,…

    Book Review

  • PHYSICS, ETC.

    Everything and everybody are always doing something.

  • Family

    None of my friends called their grandmother Nana.

  • Robin Behn “Fiddle Tune Poems”

      Fiddle Tune Poems   In writing these Fiddle Tune Poems, I was influenced by each tune’s sound—its rhythms, major…

    Featured Selection

  • Morning, Redux | Drift Road

    Another morning in the obscure,

  • from Devil Mutant Child

    Exactly the hair I wanted,

  • Between the Bed and the Window

    First, the light, which is always

  • What Light Tastes Like

    Depends on the hour of departure and if flowers

  • Untitled |Untitled

    Day as in backwards

  • April

    I think I will accept my life, the moment

  • The Myth of the Eternal Return

    The river sinks beneath our love

  • Woman, Man, Tepoztlán

    Mother, today I met a man.

  • naked dreaming

    an artist friend once told me

  • RIFF ON A LINE BY CHAR

    Somewhere inside the sacerdotal

  • Labyrinth (Lear)

    A poorly timed abdication. A madness

  • From The Little Book of Passage

    Ecco il fiume che mi allarga lo sguardo, che mi attraversa la fronte.

  • Ron Slate, Thylias Moss, Kristina Bicher, et.al

    Ron Slate on “Between the Bed and the Window”   “Between the Bed and the Window” was sparked by a…

    Editors Note

  • Norman Dubie: That fraught moment where the old Zen master talks while washing his ass in a bowl of morning tea…

        NM: Hi Norman. Thank you for talking with us at Plume and sharing your lovely, mysterious, and deeply…

    Featured Selection

  • Amish Trivedi: Taylor Swift is a Barbarian or: Stephanie Burt’s Defense of Poetry

    Taylor Swift is a Barbarian, or: Stephanie Burt’s Defense of Poetry   In November 2017, Cosmopolitan published an interview with…

    Essays and Comment

  • Karla Kelsey: Of Sphere and Hermaphropoetics & Rochelle Owens: Drifting Geometries

    In very different ways these two collections—Kelsey’s book-length “proem” (her Prelude) of prose ruminations interspersed with lyric poems, Owens’ book-length…

    Book Review

  • Inside the guts of fresh fish, just hauled up | Shall we praise the girls who will not come down | It’s about water that didn’t lose its shine

    Inside the guts of fresh fish, just hauled up

  • Jane Springer, Aleksey Porvin, Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler, et.al

    Jane Springer on “Paper” Inspiration: This poem is one of a trilogy: rock, paper, scissors. So began the inquiry, what…

    Editors Note

  • BORN ON

    The twelfth of July, like Neruda, wouldn’t

  • This Is the Day the Lord Has Made

    This is the day the Lord has made,

  • Nudes I & II

    Once she crosses the threshold

  • The Raccoon

    Like an old Italian man,

  • Letter to Jed from Niebla

    I’ll write you about being a stranger, as I am also

  • Paper

    Damned if I’ll be the woman who collects mass produced throw pillows counts her

  • Cry

    Bring back our dresses untorn

  • Lawrence Raab: The Life Beside This One

      NM: I’ve been enjoying your wonderful poems featured here from your new book The Life Beside This One. I’m…

    Featured Selection

  • T.R. Hummer: The Poet Retires

    intr. Of an army, troops, etc.: to fall back or give ground, esp. when confronted by a superior force; to retreat.…

    Essays and Comment

  • ON EMPATHY

    Wary of the verb  “empathize”—together with its noun “empathy” and adjective

  • AT THE SLEEP CLINIC

    I sat in the parking lot of the sleep clinic

  • John Matthias & Jean Dibble & Robert Archambeau: Revolutions: a Collaboration

    Revolutions, the title of this collaboration among a Notre Dame-affiliated poet (John Mathias), a printmaker (Jean Dibble), and a literary…

    Book Review

  • The Call |Palm

    You and I, we have been here before.

  • IT’S A CLASS THING

    She looked better

  • In the Late Style of Eros

    Loneliness is a female shark

  • NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

    This is No Country for Old Men. The young

  • Robin Behn, Will Schutt, Partidge Boswell, et.al

      Robin Behn on “In my Thorn Dream” and “In My Path Dream”   These two poems are from my…

    Editors Note

  • Almost Lost Moment

    coming back in an incidental way,

  • Pacemaker

    The heart in vital meter recites.

  • the ugly purple corpse I lug behind me | you haven’t changed a bit

    the ugly purple corpse I lug behind me

  • In My Thorn Dream | In my Path Dream

    The thing is the delicacy

  • Mario Murgia: Gerard Manley Hopkins in Spanish?

    What happens, then, when such a unique type of language is transplanted into a completely different linguistic code? In other…

    Essays and Comment

  • Ode to My Dap

    Soon as I get my dap down

  • Licks

    We each were given three licks

  • IT IS STILL BEAUTIFUL TO HEAR THE HEART BEAT*


    It's 3 AM. The crows on one leg or none are already starving for infant nests. A few leaves hang on

  • Dog in the Manger

    As if you’d keep your bones from other dogs

  • LIFE ON ENCELADUS

    It’s snowing all the time at the south pole of Enceladus

  • May Cause

    Tinnitus, uncharacteristic

  • Bruce Bond: Lesser Gods and the Suns They Bear

                    Lesser Gods and the Suns They Bear   These poems are, in…

    Featured Selection

  • Adeena Karasick: A New Salomè

    The most recent performance of Richard Strauss’s Salomè I saw was staged by Palm Beach Opera in a shiny new…

    Book Review

  • Sally Connoly: Transatlantic Poetics: An Autobiography

    Transatlanticism is a rather quaint notion. Outmoded even. the transatlantic traffic between the UK and American that defined twentieth century…

    Essays and Comment

  • Jeff Friedman, April Bernard, Alice Friman, et.al

    Jeff Friedman on   “Somebody’s Got My Hair” and “Cuffed”   I probably began this piece with the idea of retelling…

    Editors Note

  • To a New Chair | Bounty

    To a New Chair

  • Why I’m Here | Unbearable

    Why I'm Here

  • Father Enters the Water | Please Mr. Wasp | Ageing

    In life, he would walk into the water slowly until it reached his waist and stand there for a while, his arms out to the

  • IN JANUARY

    Low sky, slow air, and nothing much

  • PET SOUNDS

    The summer I bought Pet Sounds at G.C. Murphy’s, I hadn’t gone a block from the store when on impulse I smashed

  • A Pittsburgh Bakery in Winter

    Into Prantl’s, on Walnut Street,

  • OVER THE MOON

    Five a.m.—the soft percussion of the rain

  • Somebody’s Got My Hair | Cuffed

    Somebody’s got my hair, I said to my lover, who stood in front of the mirror in a long white t-shirt brushing out her

  • Jeffrey Skinner: A Prescription Tinfoil Hat

                  NM: Hey Jeff! You mentioned in a recent phone convo that your most…

    Featured Selection

  • On Time | Parallel Universes | After a Winter Storm: Grand Unified Field Theory

    The light years

  • Monk’s Eye, #20

    Of all rhythms he found day and night

  • Krystal Languell: Gray Market:

    “Look at / what passes for the new.” What are poetry reviews for? Today’s readers find poems more often than…

    Book Review

  • Swishing Tails of Horses, October

    Mine, says the glorious yearling claiming

  • In Praise of Wandering

    You ask how we do it. Simple.

  • 21 Polish Poems

    Edited and Translated by Benjamin Paloff.   Polaroid: 21 Poems by Justyna Bargielska Miłosz Biedrzycki Magdalena Bielska Julia Fiedorczuk Krzysztof…

    Featured Selection

  • ARS POETICA

    It's not the smoking I miss

  • J. Allyn Rosser, Patricia Clark, Kim Addonizio, et.al

    J. Allyn Rosser on “The Central”   Maturation in America has at times seemed to me – certainly it did…

    Editors Note

  • END OF LIFE DISCUSSION

    She speaks for him, her husband’s deepening

  • Pompeii

    Because the worst catastrophes

  • As So Often Happens | Twenty-two Years Later

    As so often happens, in the middle

  • Velvetleaf

    Tick of sweet clover, swinecress parasite, did you have a music

  • The Central

    When we were hungry and my mother was

  • Winter | Untitled

    Let this winter pass into another winter.

  • David Wojahn: AT THAT URGE FOR MORE LIFE: ADVENTURES IN LO-REZ (Part 2)

    AT THAT URGE FOR MORE LIFE: ADVENTURES IN LO-REZ  (Part 2) Let me now talk about what happens in one…

    Essays and Comment

  • MORE THAN I CAN SAY

    Clewell doesn’t exactly do haiku.

  • CREATION MYTH

    We never expected this. Shapes

  • I Like to Tuck a Leaf

    of some bright hue, say burgundy mauve,

  • Wozzeck | Casualty

    Even the toneless whisper finds its cradle, its home,

  • Cameron Barnett & Maggie Smith: Two Reviews in Brief

    Serving as reviews editor for Plume for the past two years has been a singular honor in my writing life.…

    Book Review

  • Sullen Art

    Someone will write a poem called Charlottesville,

  • David Wojahn: AT THAT URGE FOR MORE LIFE: ADVENTURES IN LO-REZ (Part 1)

                    AT THAT URGE FOR MORE LIFE:   ADVENTURES IN LO-REZ (PART ONE)                                                             Let me…

    Essays and Comment

  • EVERY MAP IS AN ISLAND

    I turned away from the paper

  • Shore

    Not stone, among stones,

  • In Search of Grace

    With slush to ground the Erie trees

  • Calendars Do Not Hold Fortunes

    One day you're old and thankful. One day

  • AS IN A SACK | STILL HEARD | BREATH THEY COULDN’T

    AS IN A SACK held shut by cord,

  • As So Often Happens | Twenty-two Years Later

    As so often happens, in the middle

  • From Blue as White (The Book of Margins) by Helga Landauer-Olshvang |

    Get out alive – spine, spleen, whole

  • DELIBERATE AS THINKING IS THE RAIN

    Stepping off the door lintel, down onto the grass as the day closed around us, grass, rising up inside its own squared

  • Adam Tavel, Benno Barnard, Wayne Miller, et.al

    Readers, as you will note, once more I have this month vacated my space in this note so that we…

    Editors Note

  • Given Plums

    Early July my sister and I filled two sacks of plums from our orchard. We shook each tree until the ripest orbs fell

  • Maria’s Yellow Coat

    I haven’t had

  • Tim Seibles: One Turn Around the Sun

    Halfway through his epic eleven-page sequence “Mosaic,” Tim Seibles echoes the closing of Robert Hayden’s oft-anthologized “Those Winter Sundays,” writing,…

    Book Review

  • FISHERMAN, 50 B.C.

    What else would I do on the river

  • Thanksgiving Chorus

    Kindergarteners beautiful and dumb

  • 21 Contemporary Indian Poets

    AKHIL KATYAL ♦ ANAND THAKORE ♦ ANINDITA SENGUPTA ♦ ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM ♦ VINOD KUMAR SHUKLA TRANSLATED BY ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA ♦…

    Featured Selection

  • Contemporary Faroese and Danish Poetry

      I’ve been back in my home state of West Virginia for a couple of years now. One friend tells…

    Featured Selection

  • VANISHING POINT

    I learned it in art class, second grade,

  • Of Course

    If I wake at 3, ephemerality

  • Some Propositions with Children | Changing the Subject

    The child is completely immersed in childhood

  • BUD

    Five years of nothing. Then, one night she calls

  • LONG AFTER HE IS GONE | LAST OFFER

    All the summer’s night

  • Summer circa 1967-2xxx

    My mother & the other ladies

  • Michael Gregory Stephens: Angels on the Avenue: The Lower East Side When Poetry Was the World

    Angels on Second Avenue: The Lower East Side When Poetry Was the World   At the start of the 1960s,…

    Essays and Comment

  • BOOK OF HOURS

    A jostle of stars at the edge of the Crab Nebula pinpoints the heart of Taurus. Under the right conditions, with a

  • Editor’s Note

    Readers, as you will note, once more I have this month vacated my space in this note so that we…

    Editors Note

  • On the Grounds of the Zendo

    The face of the Buddha’s so smooth, she whispered,

  • FAMILY BATTLES | WITCH

    My uncle stares at the TV throughout

  • NOTES ON SILENCE

    The racket of birdsong wakes me at 4am, before first light.

  • Cave Milk

    How can it be Tomaz? How is it

  • from The Seven Deadly Sins

    You had always expected a sonnet from me

  • Nancy Chen Long: Light Into Bodies

    In “Lapidary,” arguably her most commanding poem, Nancy Chen Long constructs a lush and brooding narrative about a rock collector…

    Book Review

  • Human Technology

    Sunlit & dangerous, this country road.

  • walls | uncertain

    one morning

  • Abend in Skåne | Du, Nachbar Gott | Wie der Wächter

    The park is high. As from a house

  • Building the Boat, Trèboul (1930)

    Half-way, the basket nature of the ship

  • My Fjord | Someone Else’s Someone Else

    I will sail through my own fjord and I will name the fjord My Fjord.

  • Doing Sudoku on September 11, 2016 | Mini-Golf

    Confusion hadn’t yet released its poisons

  • Kathy Lou Schultz: Teaching African-American Poetry in the Age of Trump

    Teaching African American Poetry in the Age of Trump   Poetry can’t change the world. The world where we witness…

    Essays and Comment

  • Editor’s Note

    Readers, as you will note, I have once again this month vacated my space in this note so that we…

    Editors Note

  • Let the Dead Bury the Dead

    Surely she would want to hear one final song, something from the Carpathians, something folkloric about flying

  • ON HANDSHAKES

    There are firm ones.  Soft, almost boneless ones.  Hardy/hearty ones.  Two-handed ones, cocooning.  Congratulatory

  • Lava Lakes and Petrified Forests in the Afterlife

    I watched a roomful of faces exert effort to remain unrevealed

  • Good Stuff | A Love Letter from Larkin

    There’s some good stuff on Youtube, someone writes.

  • Moss City

    City down to the last nuance is moss,

  • William Brewer: I Know Your Mind

    According to a recent New York Times article, drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans under…

    Book Review

  • A Sampler

    As you hold your breath, like a watchman waiting for sunrise. Let’s replace immediacy with a swift cataclysm, replace

  • Three Contemporary Russian Poets

      Viacheslav Kupriyanov, Dmitry Kuzmin, and Aleksandr Kabanov, Trans. by Alex Cigale Translator’s Note After hearing with an acceptance from…

    Featured Selection

  • Redeye | The Window’s Water

    that never sets,

  • ORACLES | HOME FRONT

    Gone, even the singing fountain, here

  • End of the Century

    We’ve slept too long, and that hasn’t stopped the incidental warping—

  • Instruction on Driving with an Orgasm | Napoleon’s Hat

    Look both ways before going out for a spin. And ease onto the road. Take careful note of the speed limit and

  • Sky

    What you draw as a blue stripe high above

  • Sestina

    The time is naturally over. It is another morning. Lie

  • Shot | Total Eclipse

    Don’t be distracted by

  • Undelivered letter from the Rev. Charles Smale to The Times, 1874 | Xiuhmolpilli, or The Binding of the Years, November 1507*

    We have spent too long debating Darwin in these pages

  • Personal Life | I, Too, Arrived Here in the End | Godard

    The universe is vast and boundless

  • Pablo Neruda: New Translations

    Sarah Green, Tomás Q. Morín, and David Young   “Soul Arborist”: Two Translations of Pablo Neruda’s THE HEIGHTS OF MACCHU PICCHU…

    Featured Selection

  • Emily Grosholz: Do I write as a Woman Poet, or as a Poet who is a Woman?

    Do I Write as a Woman Poet, or a Poet who is a Woman? When I was a child, I…

    Essays and Comment

  • Little Night Owl

    For hours I’d lug her on my shoulder,

  • THE WHITE ROAD

    I am walking along the dazzling ruin of a road I knew

  • Plait

    When I first knotted my hair against the coming of winter, I had grown tired of playing jacks and didn’t yet find boys

  • Editor’s Note

    August: and you’ll be pleased to discover, Readers, that you’ll be spared another chapter in the ongoing Lawless saga. Instead,…

    Editors Note

  • Mark Cox: Sorrow Bread: Poems 1984-2915 & Bill Knott: I am Flying Into Myself

    n the final stanza of “Joyland,” a poem teeming with amusement park ephemera, Mark Cox’s playful account of a mini-golf…

    Book Review

  • No Small Wonder: Klaus Merz

    Translated and with an Introduction by Marc Vincenz           “And if you have an eye for…

    Featured Selection

  • Editor’s Note

    July: and, given the length and discursiveness of last month’s note, a reprieve, Reader: the briefest of remarks this time…

    Editors Note

  • Patricia Smith: Incendiary Art

    It seems fitting, if lamentable, that the poetry community must celebrate Gwendolyn Brooks’s centenary during the ever-mounting tensions of Trumpism,…

    Book Review

  • small town saxaphone

    men in rain, thin and fine halos of hair,

  • She Dog | Mermaid

    A ticky rain of blood from

  • SENTIMENTAL CONVERSATION

    In an ancient park, isolated and icy,

  • How to Get Divorced

    STEP 1: For 20 years, swallow everything. Eat until you are the heaviest pillow on the

  • A Lean-to at the End of the Galaxy

    You fire a fiction deep into my brain

  • It’s Not Your Fault

    The brass lamp in your window,

  • Paper

    Damned if I’ll be the woman who collects mass produced throw pillows counts her

  • Death of God

    Bituminous was so soft, so much like dust

  • CONGREGATION | AT LAST

    We are six strangers gathered

  • Mark Scroggins: Poetry as Wallpaper: In (Ambiguous) Praise of Low-Intensity Poetics

    Poetry as Wallpaper: In  (Ambiguous) Praise of Low-Intensity Poetics   There are many William Morrises. For Marxists, he is a…

    Essays and Comment

  • Flowers in a Vase

    The dahlias' unopened buds poke like periscopes above their clownish mass

  • The Headless Horseman | A Tune for Theremin Vox

    The messenger was so dead they sent him

  • Poem with Ginger in it

    This rough hooked lump, this botched

  • Romanian Poets: Adela Greceanu, Angela Marinescu, Svetlana Cârstean, Radu Vancu, Ioan Es. Pop

    Introductions by Tara Skurtu and Margento:   Tara Skurtu: Romanian poetry is more than alive and kicking. I discovered this…

    Featured Selection

  • Joshua Corey:The Golden Age of Poetry Blogging

    “Blogspot was our Montparnasse” – Robert Archambeau The era of poetry blogging was a brief one, more like a moment…

    Essays and Comment

  • Editor’s Note

    June: and considering again my recent, um, ruminations of the centrality of cigarettes in my almost-teenager life in the latter…

    Editors Note

  • Toys

    Your toys, my child, hold them dear,

  • After the Paris Bombings

    I lent my Daily Missal, which had been published before they dropped the Latin, to Robin. Though she had been

  • Love Talk | On the Way to the Casinos

    What the boy heard his older sister say—

  • A SHOUT FROM THE DARK

    If like a Buddhist I accepted the world

  • Weather Report

    These white stripes of day achieve

  • Why I Hate Nudist Camps

    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

  • Willing

    Hidden from all mothers’ eyes by blinded windows

  • Block Party

    Start Me Up! was what started it--Monica Litzkus from up

  • Robert Gibb: After

    In “The Deer Lay Down Their Bones,” one of his last great poems, the oft-neglected master Robinson Jeffers shows an…

    Book Review

  • Talisman

    Quetzal: you write

  • ONLY BEES BUZZ IN THE MEADOW | ALLEGIANCE

    Speech a tremble,

  • Music Class | Hymnals and Revivals

    Kids learned to play

  • Just So You Know

    I figured it out after you ate

  • Guest Editor’s Note: David Breskin on Campaign

    This month, for the second time in three months and in Plume’s relatively brief history, I happily step aside, offering…

    Editors Note

  • Amit Majmudar: The Valentine’s Day Sutra

          The Valentine’s Day Sutra     1.] Before I read this Sutra aloud to you, a word…

    Featured Selection

  • Tattoos | Tattoos

    They come with stories. Like the woman whose thorny twist

  • N32P28

    Do not treasure or belittle,

  • In Brief: Tommye Blount, Jennifer Ghivan, Saarah Pape, Shelly Wong

    With the sensuality of Carl Philips and the edginess of Wanda Coleman, Tommye Blount’s debut chapbook What Are We Not…

    Book Review

  • SHALL BEAR UPON HIS SHOULDER IN THE TWILIGHT

    Reaching from history, that alpenglow, towards the dead whose clothes I wear

  • Perfect Air

    Put book down

  • Melodrama

    A gunshot: the trigger so light

  • Ernest Hilbert: On Literary Relics

    Rare book collectors devote whole lives to finding and preserving books by authors they love, though the books alone may…

    Essays and Comment

  • Mowing     

    I never remember to ask what it is

  • GIVING HER 100%

    There is a world where

  • Jukkasjärvi, Sweden | Hämeenkyrö, Finland

    It flew like a little bird

  • This Dog | 4 AM

    Maybe I’ve chosen life—not just

  • Aperol-Spritz | Padua

    Across the river from the Grossmünster

  • The Russian Senior Building. Newark, NJ | Mercury

    Those who are younger-younger play their bingo,

  • A Story about the Bees

    I still have the bees

  • Editor’s Note

    April: and, alone in another city, lost (as usual) as I wander around the back of a strip mall, three…

    Editors Note

  • 05-08 | 07-03 | 07-24 Three from The Ringing of the Rain has a Forgiving Grace

    We all become the raindrops’ filling in the blanks

  • ON THE RMS QUEEN MARY | LATENT IMAGE

    I'm exploring the decks, the ship docked in Long Beach since '67. Same liner Mom sailed in '39 from England to

  • MR. DARCY TALKS

    Mr. Darcy talks to the same woman

  • THE FLOWER AT THE END OF THE WORLD

    It was a 1954 Ford pickup truck that stopped

  • SECRET AGENT | GUARDIAN OF THE EGG

    A long armed monkey lurks by the far

  • THE STREET

    Streaked and fretted with effort, the thick vine

  • Five Orgasms after reading Lydia Davis

    You are sleeping beside me, but I can’t sleep, not in this roadside hotel smelling of new carpet and cigarettes. It’s late.

  • Whose Sky, Between | Rape of America. So, it appears

    A name that meant sound of an owl’s hard fall, another day of blood gunned to al

  • Ebbtide

    He said one day when we are old, we—

  • Cry

    Bring back our dresses untorn

  • Sydney Lea: “To neighbor”

        NM: Hey Syd! It’s great having this opportunity to chat with you; thank you. As I like to…

    Featured Selection

  • Chard deNiord: SWIMMING IN THE DROWNED RIVER OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY

    As a poet, essayist, and interviewer for the past twenty five years, I have struggled with a compound question that…

    Essays and Comment

  • Janice N. Harrington: Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippen

    Two epigraphs from the esteemed Cornel West introduce the seventh section of Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H.…

    Book Review

  • Quiet Candy

    After you kicked me out,

  • Geese

    More dream now than memory, though memory is all it is: after an early dinner, I’m dropping them off at their

  • Guest Editor’s Note: Chard deNiord on Tom Lux

    This month, with much to mourn, I happily cede this space to Chard deNiord’s remembrance of Tom Lux. Tom was…

    Editors Note

  • AUDITION

    Once through an ancient stage door, past a sign

  • Robert Lowell: New Selected Poems

                          In his time, Robert Lowell achieved unquestionable stardom. The…

    Featured Selection

  • IT’S 4PM IN THE E.R. AND I AM REARRANGED WITH A SMALL SADNESS

    I don't know what made me think

  • Could Someone Please Check on My Mother?

    When the young man thought about the history of poetry

  • Things forgotten

    once in another city,

  • To a High Aircraft | Palazzo Maldura

    While now by slow degrees

  • The Good World

    but when I painted the deer

  • Anthony Madrid: A Gallery of Rhymes from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, Book 1

    A Gallery of Rhymes from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, Book I     1 Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year’s…

    Essays and Comment

  • Stone Cross

    Remember your village of always uphill,

  • The Podium

    He is bilious, potty-mouthed, at once puffy and rachitic. He sways, eyes red and rheumy as September strawberries.

  • Mother of Invention | The Butcher Coat

    Who first fashioned fishnet stocking

  • Pet of the Week

    Oh, Salsa, I too

  • After victory — the era of postwar executions

    After victory – the era of postwar executions.

  • Review: Frannie Lindsay

    In his exquisite, jazzy homage to Frederick Douglass, Robert Hayden resists the elegy’s gravitational pull toward mere grief or mere…

    Book Review

  • The Harrow Plow

    Each spring it sank a little further down

  • Anna Świrszczyńska: Building The Barricade

    The narratives of horror and depravity that emerged from World War II remain impossible to tally, defying hyperbole even seven…

    Book Review

  • Editor’s Note

    February: yes, readers, the shortest month, and in acknowledgment of or rather aligning with such I want to offer today…

    Editors Note

  • Closed Eye Vision of Independence Day

    Dazzled drunks are bent over with laughter,

  • Some Answers

    No, I will not change.

  • YAWP

    I long to move closer

  • Cento for the Turn of the Year

    Assume nothing. Take a position:

  • PHAROAH

    Whenever we were out on the dance floor, I always looked at your face, while you looked downward, inward, at

  • SEND A SEARCH PARTY | FIRST SNOWFALL | A FINAL WALK WITH MY NEPHEW

    My joints are full of dewy lights

  • My Love

    Place your hand, my love, against my heart

  • New Year’s Day Truce, 1999

    He looked old and tired

  • David Lehman: On Stevens, Windows, and Poems in the Manner Of

    Photo Credit: Stacey Harwood   NM:  David thanks so much for agreeing to chat with us on the eve of…

    Featured Selection

  • Michael Anania: When Buffalo Became Buffalo

    When Buffalo Became Buffalo   There are several issues embedded in my title, I suppose, not only when Buffalo, the…

    Essays and Comment

  • The gap between

    the platform &

  • A Love Letter from Larkin | Chemotherapy

    Dearest, while waiting for my cheese to melt

  • The Madness of Crowds

    Long thought wrongly to be Turkish for turban

  • Life Pig

    The hams the hocks the oddly delicate

  • Copper Beech

    Because it had been, quite literally,

  • Aeolus

    The camouflaging wind gets

  • New Math

    Out of the place I knew,

  • The Absurd Self Looking Both Ways at Once | Inventing Nightlife

    Plato said the world is divided into a world

  • Ophelia

    Where stars sleep on the calm black waters,

  • BIRD

    I lived between the hemisphere of songbirds and the hemisphere

  • Anthropocene

    Nesting, the turtle seems to be crying even though she is simply

  • Her Oceanography

    A strand of algae leaves its rubbery

  • The Left Hand

    clay votive offering

  • Ernest Hilbert: The Muse and the Auctioneer’s Gavel: Learning About Poetry from First Editions

    The Muse and the Auctioneer’s Gavel: Learning About Poetry from First Editions   For a decade and a half I…

    Essays and Comment

  • Editor’s Note

    January: and as I write tonight, mid- December, winter or what passes for such in Florida. Far ahead of schedule…

    Editors Note

  • Katharine Rauk: Buried Choirs

    The work of Marianne Moore, arguably our quirkiest American modernist, has recently enjoyed an overdue revival. Perhaps in our precipitous…

    Book Review

  • Near the Sea

    All manner of birds love this windbreak hedge

  • Bill Knott: I AM FLYING INTO MYSELF

    I AM FLYING INTO MYSELF: BILL KNOTT’S SELECTED POEMS   I met Bill Knott in late 1968, or in early…

    Featured Selection

  • Sprang

    Before tracking pods of killer whales in and out

  • Carl’s Barbershop

    The peppermint stripes spinning

  • OLD LOVE LETTERS

    I too have my stack

  • Nurse at a Bus Stop

    The slow traffic takes a good long look.

  • Editor’s Note

    December: and once again I find my subject in that recent trip home to Louisville, freshened this time by a…

    Editors Note

  • Night World | The Gentle Soul

    The barbed-wire vines

  • ATTRACTION

    a literary critic wrote some

  • SOMETHING LIKE A WING

    One day they took him in a car all over the country and he hid in his

  • A Photo Of My Father That Doesn’t Actually Exist and Take The Body From The Ground

    Her clothing says Old Europe

  • Linda Pastan: The Secret Giver

                            NM: Hi Linda. I’ve long admired how seamlessly…

    Featured Selection

  • Amish Trivedi: Confessions of a Contest Junkie

    If you have any vice or addiction in your life – and we all have something – you probably already…

    Essays and Comment

  • Micah

    For a moment I was on trial

  • Delete the Bird

    My will was just a constant cuckoo

  • All the time I pray to Buddha…

    Issa, I killed 8 gophers this fall, held

  • In Brief: Hera Lindsay Bird, Michelle Bitting, Bruce Bond, Aracelis Girmay, Connie Wanek

    “If you slit your wrists while winking,” New Zealander Hera Lindsay Bird asks in her debut collection’s opening poem, “does…

    Book Review

  • LEONTES

    Elusive, but only sweetened by

  • ALL THE BOYS

    my face is old now

  • SPENCER HILL

    is steep, so breathing hard we sink down into a front pew,

  • KINDNESS DETECTOR | TRUTH IN ADVERTISING

    It looks like a bamboo flute, but has a motor that draws air across a copper plate treated with chemicals which,

  • CROYLAND ABBEY

    irrigation or exit

  • BRAINS | ECLIPSE

    You didn’t have any

  • The Old Pythagorean | Wish You Were Here

    The Scottish sheep farmer John Williamson espoused the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis, which held that

  • Curriculum Vitae | Ode to Silo City

    I’ll keep the ululating

  • GDR CHINA | LAMB

    My housekeeper had the dishes brought

  • Listen Up  Medusa | Personal Narrative

    Seduced by your statuesque

  • Sometimes,

    I’ll crumple the paper before beginning to write

  • WOMAN CAVE | MODERN ORIGAMI

    Even at my most primitive

  • Anti-Gravity Time Machine

    From the front stoop it’s the 21st century;

  • Brian Swann: “I THINK I WOULD RATHER BE/ A PAINTER”

    “I THINK I WOULD RATHER BE/ A PAINTER” The short essay “Poem and Prose-Poem: Ancient and Wild” needs no introduction.…

    Featured Selection

  • Linda Ashok: Letter from India: Worshiping the Stone Manasa

    Letter from India: Worshipping the Stone Manasa   I remember my father at 21, being hounded by the police for…

    Essays and Comment

  • Editor’s Note

    November: and just back from a trip home to Louisville, where I met my cousin B—, come to visit my…

    Editors Note

  • What’s Real? | Is Nothing Sacred Anymore?

    This question didn’t much interest me

  • JANUARY

    This longing for him the choke in my throat again —

  • Mark Yakich: Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide

    Metaphor is a form of illness. Sometimes writers ought to clothe rather than bare their souls. If we don’t know…

    Book Review

  • Editor’s Note

    Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 63 –   October: and, naturally enough, given this month’s Featured Selection on the…

    Editors Note

  • THE RAIN SO COLD

    The air of the day abhors us

  • EPHEBE WITH CYPRIPEDIUM

    Sweet ephebe, dear good friend,

  • Berlin

    We see the public statues

  • THE CURVE

    Something, call it X, wanted a body

  • It may well be, behind your back – one need only look back | Out of the crimson dawn one third the size of an icon’s

    It may well be, behind your back – one need only look back –

  • HER MOUTH

    Near the end, her mouth was pinned down

  • LA CASA BELLINA

    You seemed happy,

  • ON RETREAT | POLAND SPRING MANDARIN ORANGE

    The way you reconstructed the dream was telling –

  • NOT ALL SKELETONS ARE MUSEUM QUALITY

    Under a sky as hazy-blue-polluted

  • Max Ritvo: Rococo Doodad Shop

          Before I became acquainted with the late Max Ritvo’s poetry, which poet Louise Glück writes, is “marked…

    Featured Selection

  • Lawrence Raab: POETRY AND STUPIDITY

    Lawrence Raab: “POETRY AND STUPIDITY” 1. OBSCURITY One of the shortest and most provocative pieces in Paul Valéry’s “A Poet’s…

    Essays and Comment

  • Will flames lap? Leap? | The Country Stairs

    Will flames lap? Leap?

  • DOG CITY

    We have seen you following the scent—

  • Contagions of the Visible

    In the optics of the dark ages, the eye

  • Lucia Perillo: Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones: Selected and New Poems

    Esteemed sports writer and NPR commentator Frank Deford is, at first blush, an odd choice to narrate the 2002 PBS…

    Book Review

  • Editor’s Note

    Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 62 –   September: and you’ll be very happy to discover – no anecdotes…

    Editors Note

  • Robert Archambeau: The Barbarian Invasion of Poetry (Hurrah!)

    The Barbarian Invasion of Poetry (Hurrah!)   And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those…

    Essays and Comment

  • The Sunflower

    The sunflower

  • N27P23 (2/2/14) | N27P26   (2/7/14) | N27P29   (2/9/14)

    suddenly here

  • Dore Kiesselbach: Albatross

    I recently re-encountered the 9/11 Commission report. It’s a good, if politically-simplified, document—a useful, painful, reflection of its times: just…

    Featured Selection

  • Grevel Lindop: Luna Park

    In “O Taste and See,” one of her most famous poems, Denise Levertov rejects the brooding grimness that defines Wordsworth’s…

    Book Review

  • the kitchen song

    so strong a wind

  • WHEN EVENING COMES

    Everyone here has so many faces,

  • The Drowned and the Saved

    If all of us were to try to kill ourselves at least once, then all of us would know nothing more than that: which is why

  • THE ABDUCTION | INSIGHT | THE FOUNTAIN

    The falcon, which he’s just bought, at his cheek,

  • Drive-in Double Dare

    In gravel dust and starlight, after the hummingbirds fe

  • Rose-Scented Lotion | Blue

    The level of rose-scented lotion daily

  • Lag sol time

    Please are the big good door, no one is so did it anymore will be to period. No: only if he’d sown wheat in a set fiche

  • The Arithmetic Teacher Living in Six Meticulous Fields of Sweet

    I thought I heard outdoors

  • The Child and I

    I wanted to go fishing one day,

  • What is Love in Tennis, and What is Love | Nude from Here to Eternity

    If there’s personality in how you jump, then I wonder about

  • Editor’s Note

    Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 61 –   August: and as threatened, another anecdote from my miscreant youth –…

    Editors Note

  • Jean Valentine: To Stay Open

    Interview with Jean Valentine, Saturday morning, June 4, 2016, Schumaker Pond, Salisbury, Maryland.   Our conversation began the last morning…

    Featured Selection

  • MOMMY HARANGUES POOR RANDAL | TO RANDAL, CROW-STEALER, LORD OF THE GREENHOUSE

    Money is self-comprehending,

  • PRESENTIMENTS

    Such as the sun might present—out of sight—

  • THE BEAR IN THE WHEELCHAIR

    The bedside window is cracked a little, for fresh air presumably, and a lopsided venetian blind bangs softly in a

  • Those little plastic number puzzles | Linnaean

    given out at grade school parties:

  • Yard Art in Georgia

    Their presence was sudden.

  • Suburban Landscape, Summer

    Me, young and girlish, flesh not yet mourning.

  • Mantra Post- Storm Desmond

    After thirty-six hours indoors while Desmond

  • VISITORS

    Having just arrived, we are walked down a moonless

  • from Canisy

    Whenever we lined up to march into class, the assistant at my grandfather’s school always had us sing the kind of

  • The Transit Hall on Pier 86

    They say there’s a place in the brain for faces

  • LIMESTONE GHAZAL

    My windowsill’s lined with fossils, whorled limestone

  • Grade School Cafeteria

    When it has been

  • Mahtem Shiferraw: Fuschia

    “In the Lion’s Den,” a rare persona poem in Mahtem Shiferraw’s debut poetry collection Fuchsia, gives voice to the biblical…

    Book Review

  • Our Back Pages

    This month marks a departure both from the usual format (interview with the chosen poet and its content of new work…

    Featured Selection

  • Editor’s Note

    Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 60 –     July: and I write tonight drenched in the news coverage…

    Editors Note

  • Adrian C. Louis: Random Exorcisms

    Grief and irreverence rarely align in poetry. We have our wistful poets and we have our witty poets, conventional wisdom…

    Book Review

  • LATE

    The last time my father returned from work

  • Three Poems

    In the rainy sub-

  • SPUN | FUNNEL

    As sadder than ever

  • Prequel

    Take a seat. All you need to know is, I am

  • Three Orgasm Poems

    She thinks success would be her best revenge. It’s not enough for her now, merely to be alive. Or to feel bliss in brief

  • The Quarry, Pontaise

    To enter into the greens

  • Florida

    Every beauty barbed, from the tiniest mites

  • THE OMEN IN WOMEN

    It is only playing Words With Friend

  • Clues from the Animal Kingdom

    It seems you’re here again, pitching the weight of the bruise you call a body

  • 80 Words for Rosmarie Waldrop at 80

    sojourner

  • Ruler of Everything

    The Ruler of Everything proclaims blood-colored

  • Three Dances | Early Warning System

    In North Carolina

  • Ira Sadoff: “…an attentive laboring.”

        Ira Sadoff with Michael Hafftka painting 2011.     Mitchell: Ira Sadoff, you’re one of American Poetry’s most…

    Featured Selection

  • Editor’s Note

    Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 59 –   June: a most welcome intercession for many of us teachers, when…

    Editors Note

  • From the grab bag of desire

    I keep meaning to walk up to you,

  • Mishap

    At the soiree, a hot ticket zooms off with a hot potato into the toy

  • WHO did the blue school

    who bruised the wound

  • Stanley Cavell Pauses on the Aventine | A Package Tour

    At the side of the slope where all those waves

  • Tranquility & Tremolo

    Where song is, fire begins, tightens,

  • THE HEAD TRANSPLANT

    They walk in and out of the room,

  • Yahrzeit

    This was the woman who remembered her childhood.

  • Potato | The Surface

    I do not want to finish my potato,

  • Possibility of Erasure | There Are Corpses Buried in Them

    It is snowing this morning.

  • Me & Whiskey

    Collided hard

  • Geology Lessons

    I look back through the window of a Greyhound Bus

  • FOLDED WING | Pig, a sequel | Ode to Solitude

    The wrist and the leg are the test: flexible,

  • Christopher DeWeese: The Father of the Arrow Is the Thought & Amelia Martens: The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat

    Paul Klee, one of the most gifted and prolific visual artists of the early twentieth century, defies easy categorization. A…

    Book Review

  • Compare the movement of swallows

    with Magritte’s matrix of businessmen

  • Thomas McCarthy: The Sacred Hours

                Thomas McCarthy is an Irish poet, novelist, and critic, born in Cappoquin, County Waterford,…

    Featured Selection

  • Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Editor: The Oppens Remembered

    When Of Being Numerous won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1969, George Oppen seemed like an emblematic poet for…

    Book Review

  • Editor’s Note

    Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 58 –   May: up early and feeling already…wistful for some reason as I…

    Editors Note

  • SUNDAY LUNCH AT MOM’S COUSIN DINNIE’S: JUNE 1969 | “ELEGANT,” SHE SAID

    I hadn't yet recovered from a concussive first year teaching ninth-grade English

  • Spelling / Complication

    Serious injuries only!   Strange

  • Lüneburg Station, April 30, 1976

    It’s 5:45 am, sleepy car-landscape

  • POSTCARD

    always the dark body hewn asunder; always

  • BY THE MEADOWS OF HAY BALES

    By the meadows of hay bales

  • To Manuel Bandeira | To Hilda Hilst | To Adélia Prado

    The girls are still   a d o r a b l e

  • Road Trip

    Over the singed and brittle roadside stalks,

  • WILSER LOPEZ WOULD LIKE YOU

    to be Wilser Lopez. So be Wilser Lopez

  • Ambition

    Four in the morning,

  • Eggs

    Eggs in the cakes invoked by Marie Antoinette.

  • Call & Response

    In this last

  • INVENTORY | CAKE TIN

    Open door, high cistern, wooden loo seat

  • Editor’s Note

    Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 57 –   April. Brief, this time, thanks to my having been rather long-winded…

    Editors Note

  • GETTING READY THE HOUSE

    My friend goes to visit his grave

  • MARATHON | SHORELINE

    Jesus hears a swarm of bees beneath his porch. His television

  • Shoulder

    She flies south to visit me

  • De Profundis | Sea Song for Couples in Love

    Sometimes you are going past on a motorbike and you look up in time to see a woman who loved you hand in hand

  • Tails | On the Other Side

    When our tails fell off, we had nothing to wag or wave behind us, nothing to curl up or

  • A MORAL VICTORY IS STILL A DEFEAT

    It was late in the year and late in the day,

  • FIREFLIES

    Evenings when the children

  • PULSE

    Showers of snow geese.

  • Sieverts and Joules | Plate 136     Butter Lamp With Moths

    Maybe there’s a new way to be nuclear, not using rods with their troublesome impermanent cladding, their

  • Bridge Thrill

    After two days of TV airlifts and wheels-to-the-sky

  • Lawrence Matsuda and Tess Gallagher: “Blue Cocoon”

    “Blue Cocoon” is a collaboration between Tess Gallagher and Lawrence Matsuda. The entire book (three sections), entitled Boogie-Woogie Crisscross, is the…

    Featured Selection

  • In Brief: Bond, de la O, Denham, & Moeggenberg

    “This is how it feels, he thought, to be/the orphan of what you sacrifice to see,” Bruce Bond writes in…

    Book Review

  • A Face, A Cup

    The thousand hairline cracks in an aged face

  • Editor’s Note

    Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 56 –       March: And I think of my brother, whose birthday…

    Editors Note

  • Somewhere in Eastern Europe

    It was the year the townsfolk

  • To a Man in Rags Holding Out a Cup | A 100-year-old Man Asks Me to Write about Something

    I don’t have much

  • EPHEBE WITH CYPRIPEDIUM

    Sweet ephebe, dear good friend,

  • The Way Forward | Fountainebleau

    Swordplay is all

  • Bird of Paradise

    The songs of the mariachi in the park

  • The Fourth Walk

    Among the ruined are the ruins. Rules even skies can wreck in shreds,

  • Ars Poetica

    Sometimes I feel

  • Just Before Sunset in December

    It must have something to do with the angle of the earth

  • Before | Ode to Late Autumn, Auvillar

    The American poet died of head trauma

  • The Fruit Bat of Taxidermy

    Whoever the taxidermist was,

  • With My Senses in Ruins | Scavenge and Transform

    Here’s a recipe for seeing: sleep

  • SQUANDERED MOONS

    Probes on TV tell the tale of their

  • Robert Atler, Editor: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

    When Yehuda Amichai died in 2000, the international literary community mourned the passing of Israel’s greatest post-war poet. For those…

    Book Review

  • Cynthia Cruz: “Duras, the Mystic”

      NM:    Hi Cindy. I don’t want to spoil our readers’ pleasure in your graceful and convincing argument that Marguerite…

    Featured Selection

  • Greta Stoddart: Alive Alive O

    Greta Stoddart’s third poetry collection, Alive Alive O, takes its epigraph from the final verse of the famous Irish folk…

    Book Review

  • Song a Year After My Mother’s Death

    I allowed a small song

  • Editor’s Note

    Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 55 – February: A cold snap here in Florida as I write – 42…

    Editors Note

  • GET ON YOUR PONY AND RIDE | BIG WHEEL

    You are under the impression that my poems

  • The Day

    Day I didn’t blink and the day was gone.

  • Winkles & Dillisk

    Does he suspect the boys

  • Two Poems | Kelli Russell Agodon

    When you say no worries what you mean is,

  • Poem to Circe IV

    Ancient bronzes, we reached the sea.

  • Elephant Memory

    A cold sunny morning in Cambridge. Pragmatical

  • Emmanuel Moses A Mutual Rêverie

      NM:  Good Morning Emmanuel.  Your beautiful poems have emboldened me to suggest that we transcend this sensually impoverished cyberspace…

    Featured Selection

  • Hunger Abstract

    A black cat

  • The Movie My Murderer Makes

    My murderer sits in row F, seat 3, just behind my wife and me, in row E, seats 3 and 4.

  • City Harbor

    How often we come to a headland and a city opens,

  • Ode to Roadside Shrines

    I first see you in Crete, little boxes on four skinny legs,

  • Houses

    Under the cold light of the chintzy white crown chandelier, I’d lean one upright card again

  • Daneen Wardrop: Cyclorama & Reginald Dwayne Betts: Bastards of the Reagan Era

    It is a strange irony that despite all of our war documentaries, battle reenactments, and tourist traps, the American Civil…

    Book Review

  • Dick Allen: Of Mountains, and Bird’s Nest Soup, and Charles Lindberg

        Of Mountains, and Bird’s Nest Soup, and Charles Lindberg   Someplace in my life, in the back of…

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  • Editor’s Note

    Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 54 –   January: And why not bid farewell to the holidays, happy as…

    Editors Note

  • On the Banks of the Allegheny

    We had started over again—

  • YOUR PROBABILITY AMPLITUDE | A fragment from The Llatease of Homey, from a recently discovered Mycenaean text.

    I glance and

  • Two Views of Bercy

    It seems that the sun has stopped and will move no more

  • The Barn

    No one just Mary

  • I’LL CALL YOU THIS AFTERNOON,

    I’ll call you nowhere, now

  • Ferns  | Cycle

    Wind thrums

  • Lily of the Forest

    On the slopes of Mt. Ślęża, the cult

  • For a Theophoric Figure

    Strange how first things dawn on us

  • Revolver

    His face was a festival.  Inside it,

  • DHIMITRI

    He was a tall man on the edge of the couch

  • Mass Production

    The wheel was always reinvented,

  • I Became Friends | When I Was Fifteen | I Can Recall

    I became friends with a girl who was in the institution with me, also fifteen, also getting shock treatment, a girl who

  • Posthumous Cabin

    And got away to it, and left the work to others

  • LOVE HAS BIG TEETH | Route 140, Sixty Miles North of Winnemucca

    You, in New Hampshire,

  • Editor’s Note

    Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 53 –   December: Yes, and of course: Paris. Where when I first stepped…

    Editors Note

  • Transport | Gdańsk

    Today, a simple bowl of onion soup

  • What, Me?

    When we’re in a car together I worry we’ll die and the world will lose its role models.

  • Once We Were

    once we were immigrants

  • SUNDAYS | ALONE

    Mournful Sunday afternoons in winter,

  • Christopher Buckley: The Half-life of Revolution—Particle Physics, History, Baseball and Baby-Boomers.

        NM:    Chris, I can’t tell you what a kick of pleasure, as well as a kick in the…

    Featured Selection

  • The Fortieth Day | Pussy Riot/Want/Don’t/Want

    Now she called forth nights of a different kind of brilliance when the moon wrapped every thing with light—

  • The Names

    My student Natasha, who is Greek but is now living in Turkey,

  • Letter From The Capital

    She writes: now we have wars between historical eras. We fight in time as well as space. 1914 vs. 1939 is a devastating

  • Burning Leaves

    Leaf-fires smell like

  • Innocence

    The birds she could identify—nuthatch, oriole—

  • My Name in Sticks

    From the shallow sledding hill I gathered up

  • Urban Renewal

    Outside my window, a brutal winter burn has curled

  • EDITOR’S NOTE

    Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 52 –   October/November: Yes, you have read that correctly, but may have inferred…

    Editors Note

  • Caravaggio’s Supper

    They were tired and hungry when they found themselves just outside the village now known as

  • Cora Goes Birding

    This was a bad idea.

  • Club X

    Between the gaping double-doors of Club-X and two leather thugs,

  • Dream Sender

    Tonight you’re soaring fearlessly over Prague

  • Naked City

    Apprehended in Herald Square carrying the head of his sister-in-law

  • Paean for the Players

    The pale actor’s mouth

  • Oak | Installation

    I sat at it, a good table—one of a number

  • MASEFIELD IN PURGATORY | YOUR BROTHER’S FACE

    Falls and stays flemished,

  • A Few Estrogen Stories to Help Balance the Scales | Beasts of Burden

    Imagine half a million Vietnamese up to their heinies slogging rice paddies for a year, and you have the salary of the

  • Undersong

    lintel/cromlech, arch & splay

  • Untitled

    it's harder to be patient when you're helpless

  • Marc Vincenz: SIBYLLINE

        NM: Marc, I’m amazed by the prodigious imagination, intelligence and skill that permeates so much of SIBYLLINE. The narrative…

    Featured Selection

  • EDITOR’S NOTE

    Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 51 – September: Our fifty-first first issue! As you see, at last, now, our…

    Editors Note

  • A Few Years After a Death

    Toward sunfall, when I begin to count

  • As It Happens

    As it happens, there was nothing left, so much to do, a plethora

  • The Good Hand

    Often, without warning, my left hand

  • Gusto

    Skin the asparagus for their lives,

  • The Last Orgasm

    Sometimes I think of the innocent live

  • Let Me Hear You

    I am the disappearing point of an inverted pyramid

  • The Mystery

    The mystery of our time

  • Self-Portrait to Be Used in Meditation | 22 | Chesty Morgan and Her Crazy-Ass Titties

    I have a live owl in my mouth instead of words;

  • BOTTOM FEEDER | DOUBLE TIME

    Said he had some hard sledding to do.

  • The Elms | For the Collection

    Workers were cut; had to be done for . . . corporations

  • Uncle

    Here is the man who tells you

  • The Wayfarer

    One must turn thoughts

  • Adam Tavel: Catafalque

     NM: Your poems in this selection are in traditional or variations of traditional form, as are many of your poems…

    Featured Selection

  • THE BRIDGE

    The most beautiful Russian girl in the world lives in Germany

  • EDITOR’S POST #49

    Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 49 — July: And at last – it seems so long – we put our…

    Editors Note

  • A BAT IN THE HOUSE

    swoops high, webbed little arms for

  • EDITOR’S NOTE #50

    Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 50 –   August: Our fiftieth issue! Astonishing in every way, this little whim…

    Editors Note

  • AFTER THUNDERSTORMS IN OKLAHOMA

    The sky becomes sickly,

  • ALCHEMICAL MEDITATION

    It abides in secret on my pencil tip—

  • THE COMPLETE LIST OF EVERYTHING

    Plow blade excavated from a tomb

  • CONCRETE

    Entry was easy

  • THE LIGHTS ON THE BOATS

    I didn’t start this to break anyone’s heart.

  • ON PAINTING THE SISTINE CHAPEL: MICHELANGELO TO GIOVANNI DA PISTOIA

    This damn job’s given me a goiter –

  • PASTORAL

    The circle lies unbroken, and the lord is by and by.

  • POSTSCRIPT

    You’re wasting time. Your lilac needs pruning. By the shed,

  • SHE-POETS CENTO

    Femininity is a sickness.  I open my eyes.

  • SPITE FENCE | THE HUMAN CANARY

    My neighbor forced his abutter

  • YA KNOW? | LITTLE-KNOWN ROYAL COGNOMENS

    It’s been one of those days

  • Allison Adelle Hedge Coke: A Folio of Indigenous Poets

    What luck the incoming U.S. Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera, recently reminded us that “the audience is half of the…

    Featured Selection

  • SOLILOQUY OF A TORNADO IN THE DISTANCE

    I knew a girl once

  • My Father Taught Me To Fish | Hmmmmm

    Why did we have to kill you.

  • IN PROFILE

    Words hung into silence

  • Enchanted Egg #2

    When you look inside through the tiny porthole the lake looks back without blinking.

  • Two Fat Braids Crossed at the Crown

    Mishearing you holding out the gadget plug,

  • THE LOST MUSEUM | GOODBYE TO A

    All my life stars falling on cars, the laundry

  • The Tiger | Friendship  

    In a tourist magazine about the amusements of Rome,

  • TENEBRAE

    As grief begins taking up resi

  • Flour, Eggs, Milk, Baking Powder, Salt and God

    O Best Beloved, tell me, if you know, why—

  • NIGHT COMMUNION

    We met at the revolving hotel door. You’d shaved

  • I hitchhiked through Harrisburg once: night and some light dislocating, | A self beyond herself singed by the stars, fundamentally | Not the violent deaths that follow you around [if you were black] but the slow

    I hitchhiked through Harrisburg once: night and some light dislocating,

  • REMEMBERING RAY – AUG. 2,1998 – FOR TESS

    The invitation reads:

  • David Clewell BETWEEN THE SIXTIES AND THE SAUCERS

    As both our schedules had been whipped into a froth by a wicked spring semester’s tail end, and as poet…

    Featured Selection

  • EDITORS NOTE #48

    Readers:   June: And once again we find ourselves saying good-bye to a poet passed from this world: Franz Wright.…

    Editors Note

  • IS LIGHT ENOUGH ?

    Who’s there? I can’t seem to make out anything or anyone. Is

  • A Provisional Topography | One of the Many Stories of Sounds | Sooner or Later

    On the Weichsel River, before the war. You see

  • ELEGY WITH FULL DRESS BLUES

    Early in our marriage I would stand

  • Carol Moldaw: Dew Point

        Dew Point     Because of the nipple crust riming a girl’s breakthrough poem, I google Quetiapine.  …

    Featured Selection

  • Against Surrealism | Anima

    The human heart weighs ten ounces, but I don’t know if it can float. I don’t suppose it makes sense to say I feel like

  • KINDNESS DETECTOR | TRUTH IN ADVERTISING |

    It looks like a bamboo flute, but has a motor that draws air across a copper plate treated with chemicals which,

  • THE DAY

    History sings “misery, misery.”

  • SIXTH GRADE REDUX

    Good morning, Ladles and Jellyfish!

  • POPULATION ZERO

    Cockroaches ignored the winter dawn

  • TO HÉCTOR VIEL TEMPERLEY

    Cockroaches ignored the winter dawn

  • Busy bees | Torture

    I like being around people who believe

  • TAROT: THE EMPRESS

    Earth pours wet, quick scimitars

  • love sonnet to aliens | Putin statue project

    the known universe is self-referential: it has no choice.

  • EDITOR’S NOTE

    Readers:   May: As promised I am happy to report our own wave good-bye to Phillip Levine in Plume: the…

    Editors Note

  • OÚ EST LE CHAT

    I can ask this, which is good

  • SELF PORTRAIT IN THE BACKYARD AS MOTHER

    Tulip-bellied, fists full of weeds, the baby shuffles over the wet grass,

  • GETTING READY THE HOUSE | THEY ARE MOVING ALONG

    My friend goes to visit his grave

  • THE SECRET OF TIME MEETS A STRANGER

    You look familiar.

  • THINNING THE SPRUCES

    I’ve become ruthless with the spruces

  • ON EVERY HAND A GREAT PLAIN By Henry Israeli

    Two bears tearing at a tent

  • FREE VERSE

    Small woods upon an incline

  • WORDS IN THE WOODS

    All the words that have been spoken here

  • GHAZAL 4

    How sullen we’ve become in the belly of the empire;

  • ARCHIMEDES

    Bent over the plate, she studies

  • NIGHT SPIDER

    All day he waited, then

  • LOOKING FOR ZAGAJEWSKI UNDER THE COUCH

    If his book of poems isn’t there

  • THE LEAVES HAVE NO PITY

    gathering under the porch like abandoned promises,

  • On Philip Levine

    A few weeks ago, a thought occurred to me, regarding how, one last time, to wave good-bye to the great…

    Featured Selection

  • EDITOR’S NOTE #46

    Readers:   April: my birthday month: the 19th. I tell you this not to elicit congratulations or condolences (61!), nor…

    Editors Note

  • PAPERS

    On the great estate her Great

  • THE COURTING

    In every dark jazz club, in each smoky corner

  • cedar top goddesses from phil’s sawmill | ozark sonnet  

    The cedar goddesses lie down on saw-horses

  • WHY WE NEED UNIONS

    If the lion wants more

  • LA LONGUE DURÉE

    It’s a far cry from the blaze we light

  • CHINATOWN

    I almost bought a lucky dragon

  • OLD HUSBAND’S TALES

    I’m one who tells old husbands’ tales, not wives’,

  • SMOKE GHOST SMOKE

    Its smell didn't wake my husband

  • Loud Walk in Fall | Regret

    There is something else

  • SOME FAITH

    God we need rain. And white flowers.

  • DEATH MARCH

    Carry her the way it has to hurt:

  • It was never he, | One might say I’ve fulfilled the miserable obligation of constructing myself.

    It was never he,

  • Nin Andrews: The Continuing Adventures of “O”

          Mitchell: Hey Nin! I’m getting a serious kick out of this feature. How did you come (no,…

    Featured Selection

  • Editor’s Note

    Readers:   March: month when “…even your good friends will turn into monsters.” A trenchant observation from one of my…

    Editors Note

  • SAY

    Says her Tarot reader says

  • Of Shine

    What makes it

  • Ghazal, After Ferguson

    Somebody go & ask Biggie to orate

  • From Toying

    Like Tiny Tears

  • PASSING

    They lay the old woman in the back seat of a car,

  • Turn Back

    Intergenerational sex is a trend, Jeannine said.

  • The Real River

    Gauze gaze, the present’s freeze never sticks.

  • LETTERS FROM EDINBURGH

    some deluge loafing letter

  • Who Are You?

    who are you? the effect of well fed herds?

  • Alien Valley

    I’m sick of prodding the infinite,

  • The Etymology of “Alaasa” [علاسة]

    In 2006, the word

  • IX. Ophelia’s Garden | III. Tears

    After the turtle shook the world from its shell,

  • Babel’s Artifacts

    The construction proved without

  • My Raincoat Opens Doors for Me

    It holds a door open above my head.

  • To Isabella Franconati

    After your husband died and the cypress trees,

  • Remembering Lethe

    Yesterday, a friend reached out:

  • The Willows in Winter in the Boston Public Garden

    In the sun’s white

  • I Had a Cheerful and Gentle Dog

    I had a cheerful and gentle dog.

  • from THE CITY OF PARIS HAS YOU IN MIND TONIGHT

    When G died began the midnight panic attacks.

  • All Night, Give or Take a Sloppy Hour

    My neighbor’s patio light burns like an ember, burns cleanly, never mind circadian rhythms and light pollution,

  • Annie Fitch’s Duck Sauce

    I must be prepared to sit

  • ELK | RUE MOUFFETARD |

    The man who said he could smell the girls ovulating

  • Cosmology

    Someone has spilled the moon

  • Woo | Red Rover

    O life little life little sawdust fleck I thought we’d go on riding hip-to-hip

  • Luljeta LLeshanaku: Homelands

        Nancy Mitchell: Hi Ani and Luljeta!  What a great treat to chat with you both about these amazing
…

    Featured Selection

  • Editor’s Note

    Readers: January: in Latin, as you know, Januraius, after Janus, god of beginnings (and by necessity endings) and transitions; the…

    Editors Note

  • A ROMANCE | DOUBLED MIDDAY

    A creature without definite feelings. Better so.

  • Stopping At Whole Foods on a Snowy Evening

    If commerce, too, has its music, then it’s in kumquat, pine nut, Arctic char,

  • On a Version of “Lady with Lapdog” | Synch

    How clever, to leave out all the articles, thereby suggesting their story, their plight, were less a story than a portrait

  • Centerfold of the Year | Centerfold of the Month: Rabbit Season | Centerfold of the Month: Judgment

    Full frontal I stand, knee-high socks and white heels,

  • Before the rebirth | The harvest field | Song of love present

    No flowers here

  • The Uncanny

    Suppose a rational man

  • View From a Shrinking Floe

    Beyond the boats freed from the dripping ice

  • Listening to Stone

    The man who carved you vied and gossiped

  • Q&A

    When you take off your mask, what is your true address

  • The Albino Squirrel

    Bury it, I said.  In the field.  No,

  • The Lost Explorers

    Give me the lost explorers, the last-seens,

  • from Fourteen Fourteenliners

    Why can say passion fruit for instance always begin again

  • Daniel Bourne and Tadeusz Dziewanowski: Reading Between the Lands

      Reading Between the Lands: An Introduction to a Poetry Road Trip Through Northern Poland   As an “author’s photo,”…

    Featured Selection

  • Gifts | The List

    Books, your books, and blocks

  • Shaft of Light

    Smile behind the lips

  • What They Told Me At The Boy’s Club In Gainesville

    Right over there, in the public library, that's where Rahul got shot--

  • Gun Notes

    This man and I softly discussed hunting

  • Ayotzinapa

    We bite the shadow

  • Mr. Blake’s Skin Don’t Dirt

    Because the vanishing point hovers

  • July Saturday Night 

    Now I’m going to walk downtown to Cape Tip Sportswear

  • Double Sonnet Ending in New Testament

    This poem is meant to have the make and model

  • Bad Harvest

    Does my name take your tongue’s

  • This Could Happen

    If you kept walking you would eventually step out of yourself.

  • Free Descent

    It seemed I had always been kicking

  • After the Invention of Polystyrene a Ligurian Goat Crosses the Equator

    Abut in a tailspin, mad spark

  • Five South African Poets

          Introduction This is a vast country with such a mixed and turbulent political and social history –…

    Featured Selection

  • Bah!

    It is well-past old hat and hurt

  • For the Child Molester

    Let him sleep right through it—

  • Old Tunes, Politics, Karma & Career

    Took the afternoon off from the dozen things I’m supposed to repair, respond to, or maintain around the yard, and

  • An Occupation

    The world will end in pink.  Those clouds just above the horizon

  • The Dolls’ House Mysteries

    A woman lies so tidily

  • Sack

    Ancient river bed hacked and carved whittled deep

  • Embroidered Eyebrows of Eve

    Eve as reflection, Eve

  • Memorial Bench

    Suzanne and Half Zantop loved sitting here—

  • At the Cemetery

    Cloud cover from horizon to horizon

  • The List

    Branches shiver as if a wand

  • Indian River at Dusk

    The first and only time I caught a sheephead

  • THE SACRIFICE | BROWNACRE

    nothing but blue

  • Luis Cernuda: Versions by Michael Smith

    Luis Cernuda (1902-1963), versions by Michael Smith   Luis Cernuda was born in Seville in 1902. His father, Bernardo Cernuda Bousa,…

    Featured Selection

  • In the Supermarket of Orgasms

    Some nights I feel so alone in my longing for you, love, alone in my supermarket of orgasms as I cruise the aisles of

  • It Happened All the Time

    Daylight shatters through the thatches where a bird might fall,

  • God-Box

    They give us a white cube, a paper box,

  • The Lord Is a Man of War | Far Desert Region | The Day-Shift Sleeps, | [Does the war want

    The Lord is a man of war

  • Wartime Pantoum

    Were the mountain women sold as slaves

  • FISHERMEN’S VILLAGE | VIA POLITICA

    Squinty, salt-dusted windows gaze into the distance.

  • Ode to Scars

    The scars on others’ faces draw me to them.

  • She Painted Artichokes

    You had nothing to say so you painted some splendid artichokes

  • Sounds Like Love

    A spacial infirmity

  • Night Watch

    It’s instant art:  transmuted to the net

  • The Rosy Tones

    the rosy tones

  • Value and Reverie

    The dog dreams on the rug

  • Glenn Mott: Imaginaries of China

          In his first book of poetry, Analects on a Chinese Screen, Glenn Mott claims that the most…

    Featured Selection

  • Uncle Yehuda Sharvit Between Marrakesh and Draa

    When my uncle Yehuda got drunk

  • Back to Brooklyn Bridge | Second Skin

    tears are intuition

  • Charcoal | Medicine and Magazines

    In my brown leather bag:

  • Riddle

    The chair is not far from the bed

  • Half of Life

    The land with yellow pears

  • On the Beach at Divi Bay, St. Martin

    Was melancholy yesterday, watching slate-grey clouds

  • On Friendship, Haiku, Lust, and Blame

    Eye of hurricane,

  • Untitled | Matinee 

    To dream a world on a hunk of shade,

  • Who Pays

    Lord I have eaten and I don’t

  • The Last Widow | The Last Mirror

    The last widow misses men. The last widow misses her husband

  • Pick Me Up

    the words love you, friend

  • Thomas Hardy in the Dorset County Museum

    Turned sideways in a desk chair,

  • Jim Daniels: On Collaboration

            NM  Outside of productions dependent upon it, collaborations are rarely as seamlessly successful as the Special…

    Featured Selection

  • Nature

    Looking through trees strangely into nature.

  • Lobsters | Turkey Vultures

    In the depths of the sea they will eat the sea and outgrow the world’s largest pot.

  • A Heresy Sublime

    An artist whom I’ve met is Dürer,

  • The Muse Writes Luis Jorge Borges A Letter On His 86th Birthday

    The night has entered your eyes

  • A Terribly Sentimental Fork

    As unmined silver,

  • Shin Issues | Flash Flood

    Probably you have shins.

  • The Conversations I Remember Most | As A Hammer Speaks to a Nail

    The way a sweet cake wants

  • Plastic Bag Caught in a Tree

    Some dark animal’s

  • Hellebore | The Way of Books

    Lord, I am all

  • Inner City Canal

    This water tumbling over the canal locks

  • Coda alla Vaccinara | A Dusting

    From Keats’s grave, past the Paladiana and Coyote

  • Pedestrian Interval

    The trick in all of this is to build well--

  • André du Bouchet: Openwork

    “Excerpted from Openwork: Poetry and Prose by André du Bouchet, selected, translated, and presented by Paul Auster and Hoyt Rogers. Reprinted with…

    Featured Selection

  • Poem of the Quotidian

    Night falls so swiftly in this part of town

  • Birds in the Night

    The French government, or was it the English government,

  • RODIN, “Hand with Small Torso, Bronze” | Rodin’s “The Cathedral”

    In Paris you can see his drawer of hands.

  • CALLING BACK | CHARITY

    My daughter sings in snow falling through the scent of red oak or ash, some of the flakes large enough to contain passages from Emily Dickinson’s letters. 

  • Over

    Suddenly, it’s over, and I hear!

  • Things I’ve Discovered in Hong Kong

    Semantics: clue that Trappist Dairy Milk Drink is not milk—had I read the label—

  • Fret Not

    Opening the door for the first time since

  • End in Itself

    All veins point to a heart in depleted rivers, in branches,

  • Better Than Heaven

    So many set asides, you say, intemperate

  • True West

    We return by foot from pre-plantation oaks,

  • SOUL-DARK second version | SLEEP second version

    At the forest’s edge: a dark deer. A hush.

  • Essay: Domestic

    Brassiere

  • James Richardson: Vectors

        Over the past weeks I’ve returned to James Richardson’s VECTORS 4.1: A FEW THOUGHTS IN THE DARK and…

    Featured Selection

  • Albatross

    Driving toward

  • December, First Frost

    A small green house sits beside the highway, fading into maple shade.

  • This Surface

    Of the earth,

  • The Lord Is a Man of War | Far Desert Region | The Day-Shift Sleeps, | [Does the war want

    The Lord is a man of war

  • On Clitocybe Nuda | On Oysters

    Peak of autumn’s deepening yellow

  • Lapse

    I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer. I

  • Lyre

    Because it hangs from the center of the sky,

  • Feasts for the Blind | My Dear Menshevik

    That year it rained crows. Birds fell out of the sky in midflight.

  • Tsunami Letter—March 2011

    Shunning the safety of high ground

  • Lichen Prospectus

    Specimen leaves sung down for pages

  • Doppler Effect

    Stopped in cars, we are waiting to accelerate

  • BETRAYAL—ORANGES AND APPLES | EEE EQUALS EMCEE SQUARED

    I am a plastic tree, naturally

  • Brian Swann MODEL- DEPENDENT REALISM

        BIO NOTE: No. 1 After much wandering, I am back here, though I never really left. It is…

    Featured Selection

  • The Labors of Psyche

    Because I could not not-know any longer I held the lamp over him

  • Fresco

    We stayed in a monastery cut up into condos, ours with a terrace of dried-up papery roses overlooking Fiesole.

  • Dirt

    Just after Wierex etched a toddler Christ

  • Pacific

    Balconies and streams

  • Between Poems | It Was | Było

    Here in this moment before the perfect poem

  • America

    America, I have a friend for whom everything went south

  • Almost Nightfall

    City lovely in its concocted dream, there

  • Preludes and Fugues, Cycle C

    Watch your cat leap up in fright and flee

  • So Much More Mournful than Before

    This morning, remembering the end

  • Proof of Poetry

    I wanted first to end up as a drunk in the gutter

  • Miss Favour, or Dear rsmith@gmail.org

    Hello Dearest, My name is Miss Favour,

  • Wool Cap

    Flip is coming for dinner, I hear his car driving past the house. 

  • Amit Majmudar: ABECEDARIAN

      Mitchell: I loved your playfulness in the title ABECEDARIAN; for example, you obviously intend for the title to designate…

    Featured Selection

  • Reality Check

    The orgasm likes the dusk best, the time of day

  • Notes Toward a Treatise on the Atlantic Periwinkle

    None knows the song devoted to winkles.

  • The Beginner

    Doesn’t have a clue, sips whiskey in a train

  • What We Work At | Look to the Side

    What we work at

  • I’m a Witch!

    It is standard for women

  • Toshno

    Marina is trying to describe Raskolnikov’s interior state

  • Genital Epistemology

    don’t it make you snicker how desire goes

  • Survival Rate | 1st Love

    When at customs I don’t declare

  • Apologetics

    A host of angels or a compass of cherubim

  • Sweetness

    Sweetness of fish sauce and tonal voice

  • No use

    On October 21, 1962, Sylvia Plath wrote one poem that became two.

  • Two Dogs Passing Through the Yard | Practice

    One’s a male Aussie mix,

  • Hank Lazer: “TALK SHOW: A Conversation between Glenn Mott and Hank Lazer”

      The poet with Andrew Raffo Dewar on soprano saxophone, rehearsing at Maxwell Hall, University of Alabama, November 2013 “TALK…

    Featured Selection

  • Cigar Box Banjo

    Blind Willie Johnson could coax

  • Old Sweater | Alongside

    On November 21, in late afternoon, I open the bottom drawer of my bureau

  • Ancestors

    Farther back than my grandmother

  • The Plumber is Here

    The plumber is here

  • Song of The Hoarse Bullhorn Holder

    I eviscerated Vince, my prized pig, to calm the churning sea

  • Sleep

    There is a room, and inside the room

  • First Wedding

    It was one of those days when not even the bland sun

  • Speculation on the Absent God

    As if abandoned

  • (…) | In Your Land

    Let your heart beat like a gnat in an autumn lamp,

  • I Offer This Container

    Monkeys of fresh rage born again—

  • Butchering the Ram | James Cameron Descends into Lake Baikal

    And while traveling the transcendental path of non-violence,

  • Raccoon in a Trap

    The kidskin of his clever paws

  • David Baker and Page Hill Starzinger: Concentric Circles

          Concentric Circles:  Page Hill Starzinger David Baker:  You are a poet and you are a business woman. …

    Featured Selection

  • Holy Day

    A holy day

  • Titanic

    Some of the shoes

  • The Gaping Trellis

    Cigarette burns on drab naugahyde

  • The gift of putting something down…

    The gift of putting something down, he had yet to discover it--letting it slide from his grip.

  • Riddle

    The chair is not far from the bed

  • I’m Going to Bed When You Go to Bed

    Let someone else learn the borders of every country’s will,

  • Objects in Mirror Are Larger than They Appear

    That beautiful girl on a bicycle smoking a cigarette:

  • Portrait | The Traveler

    Recollections of my infancy: a patio in Seville,

  • Joint Effort

    Let the hunchback lie hump down

  • Olney Hymn

    not my li-

  • Another case of sitting still in a room as for chamber music minus | I’m sure some animals negotiate and plea.  I’m sure there’s a hard winter’s compromise | Lou Reed sings “Berlin,” a voice that has in it paradise if paradise was broken

    Another case of sitting still in a room as for chamber music minus

  • Sidewinder

    You say I rudely cut her off, that you had to apologize,

  • Martha Collins: Up North

        Introduction for Up North Martha Collins   In the fall of 2004, I finished a book-length poem I’d…

    Featured Selection

  • Leaving the Big City

    So afterward I sat by the bosphorus blue water and many dazzling

  • Husband-Watching Height

    That’s my fear, turning to stone.

  • Note to Thomas Stearns Eliot

    I just dared to eat

  • The Conscious Fruit Fly

    This means fruit fly the scholar.

  • August

    Water and wind do it too

  • Square of Beveled Glass

    Hag––first thought.

  • Picasso & Dora Maar (1942)

    Four decades I have lived among the French

  • Another Morning, Same Mountain

    Enshrouded mountain,

  • Until Recently I Had Believed In Something Like Lack | Until Only Last Week I Hadn’t Thought

    Until recently I had believed in something like lack

  • Muxica

    The border fence,

  • The Shell

    When I picked it up from the sand

  • Childhood

    A bead of moisture swelling from black metal,

  • Lisa Rose Bradford: Approaching Juan Gelman’s Today

    A Note From Lisa Rose Bradford: Sadly, Juan Gelman has left us, dying yesterday, January 14th, just one day after…

    Featured Selection

  • Isle of the Narrator

    It's true these boots were taken from a dead man,

  • Seeking Alpha

    Praise for the one who can take us above

  • Slow Thinker

    Audiences love the slow

  • A Meeting

    Of all the disappointments

  • Cache

    Here lies a hectic site, la Cité

  • Three Poems from “Where Are the Trees Going”

    Inhabited uninhabited house subject to the air’s structure

  • Ant Story

    Each ant was given a different part of the message to carry.

  • The Water Returns

    The water returns. The pools teem with newborn fish.

  • Insomnia

    It is a stain that feeds on moons

  • The Poets

    They are farmers, really--

  • Mangos | Talking Animals | Bringing Things Back From the Woods

    We did not have mango trees back home on the prairies.  The climate and soil conditions were not conducive to that

  • Kneeling in a Pile of Leaves

    Kneeling in a pile of leaves

  • Rachel Zucker: The Pedestrians

      Introduction, by Rachel Zucker I am frequently asked, “What does your husband think about these poems?” When students ask…

    Featured Selection

  • A Bookstore in Hay-on-Wye

    In a Tudor castle now a vast used bookstore in Hay-on-Wye

  • Ancestors

    Farther back than my grandmother

  • Two Stories and a Poem

    Do you have a canned ham?

  • Your Brother’s Face

    You believe your brother will come down

  • Bailed Out

    And once we climbed over the wire fence

  • Crucifixion

    One minute he’s looking at you, full-size, in anguish,

  • On the Way to the Acupuncturist

    In the wrong lane, the slow one—

  • Mnemonic

    Leaves in the eaves

  • Killer

    When he saw me coming

  • Vega

    On my bed in late afternoon I am listening

  • You, Reader, As I Imagine You

    Why is it awkward to acknowledge

  • A Woman in Damascus That Year | While She’s Asleep In Baghdad

    Her soul’s in my hand and she knows I’m there

  • D. Nurkse: Early Anthropocene

    Plume: The closing line of the poem “Anthropocene”– published by the Virginia Quarterly Review in 2007- asks the question: Is…

    Featured Selection

  • Bunch of Asparagus and Asparagus

    Bundle on a wet bed

  • Idea for a Screenplay *

    A man sits on his porch and reads aloud to the yard, to some plants and to some birds, his feelings of paranoia, anger

  • Hail to Thee,

    I write, my wrist nodding

  • I Dreamed of Obama on the Night of His First Election

    He stirred the coals of my dwindling campfire. We were alone. Blue tendrils of smoke punctuated the Mesozoic haze

  • The Killing

    While Abraham binds his son’s hands,

  • Anti-Fundamentalist

    I remember that

  • Pathetic Fallacy

    Jog through this suburb at a blue hour

  • Myth

    The blind hobo who returned

  • Wooden Boards

    My father carefully rolls his pant leg up, places his leg between two wide boards. He tells my mother to jump hard on

  • Stairway

    In those days, so many stairways were said to lead to happiness, mainly of a sexual kind—and as I climbed those

  • Ode to the Google Maps Man

    Gold-suited spaceman, terranaut,

  • Why I Haven’t “Outgrown Surrealism,” No Matter What That Moron Reviewer Wrote

    I still love the sound of breaking,

  • Molly Lou Freeman: New Poems and Reflections from Shelter

    By way of introduction to this month’s collaborative “Featured Selection,” per usual first a brief introductory essay by the poet,…

    Featured Selection

  • Aspect

    The spirit’s simulacra have obtained

  • George Orwell Sucks

    How can a word evocative of so much pleasure,. both adult and infantile, find itself used – by almost everybody – in

  • Fat

    I saw that I was fat and walked and walked toward a desert only to find a case of (not light) beer.

  • I’ve Lived Long with the Dead | The Word Stays Here

    I’ve lived long with the dead. I know their

  • Leopard Goes Through Hell Villanelle

    When I am sober my brain calls me names. 


  • January in West Texas

    Once, I preferred nights. How they arrived one tied to the next like silk scarves, knots of daylight between them. I

  • Dear Reader Are You Having a Good Day?

    Dear reader are you having a good day?

  • True Bug | I Will Be Good

    I’ve been talking to a bug all winter.

  • Bookish | Brush Your Fingers Through Your Hair, Why Don’t You?

    The bookishness that

  • Polaris Mall

    February,  9:37 p.m.  Two Canada geese,

  • Last Words

    If only for those you leave behind,

  • At the End of the Alphabet

    Books bloated and fanned

  • Bruce Smith by Bruce Smith

    By way of introduction to this month’s “Featured Selection,” first a brief introductory essay – or rather a self-interview by…

    Featured Selection

  • Manet’s Asparagus

    Naked as an

  • Wilderness

    The mind is a wilderness like Bartram’s, razed, cemented over, marked by rows

  • Breakfast, the most important poem

    So far, pockets are good

  • Bear and the Crows

    So many in the winter trees they caw

  • God’s Man

    When I was twelve I found it

  • The Summer House

    I let the envelope fall to the floor unopened,

  • Poet’s Walk, Central Park Mall

    Shakespeare, Robert Burns, and Fitz-Greene Halleck

  • Charcuterie

    She penciled fanciful animals

  • Arf

    At the stoplight in Dogleg children swept metal

  • It Was A 3.8

    My mother said go get me a plum.

  • Vortex Street

    I tied my hands behind me so I won’t hurt you.

  • Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton: A POEM CYCLE

    By way of introduction to this month’s collaborative “Featured Selection,” first a brief introductory essay by the poets themselves, followed…

    Featured Selection

  • Human Condition

    The human condition isn’t some grinning

  • For Michael Gottlieb

    All this time me on he leadéd

  • Elegy for a Landscaper

    The holes we find scraped out at the edge

  • Diptych

    I’m hammering nails into the stretchers,

  • Not Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening

    Promises to keep, was a lie, he had nothing. Through

  • Love Poem | Birthday Cake

    It’s an alliance,

  • Phoenix Hairpin Terrace

    Yes                              Feng-huang plus three syllables

  • To Anything at All

    Our father who is neither ours nor a father but farther and nearer,

  • Earthquake

    The voices of self are ended. A sepia

  • Boys’ Room

    French doors, curtains, panes of glass.

  • Breathing Room

    Not every week,

  • Saving The Spider | Diamond Dog, Unleashed in the Airport | Amulet

    I. Not

  • Daniel Bourne: On Krzysztof Kuczkowski

    By way of introduction to this month’s “Featured Selection,” first a brief introductory essay on Krzysztof Kuczkowski’s work by its…

    Featured Selection

  • My Last Deidre | The City of the Orgasm

    I am a not woman.  I am an orgasm.

  • Difficulty

    It's difficult

  • Danger: A Triptych

    I thought at first it was a rock, a pebble my own tire had somehow kicked up in a weird curve.  I kept driving to my

  • Broadcast

    Five blank days of snow,

  • The Suicide’s Wife

    inhabits an invisible island

  • Even the Gun Does Not Want to be a Gun

    It denies the polish

  • Aunt Rolla

    She had the softest face

  • Big Finish

    Now that the last shaft of sunset has collapsed

  • Confusing Myself with the Whippoorwill

    Today, I was a madness of regrettable actions. At the convenience store, I eyed the cashiers warily as they slouched in

  • Thetis

    We see her through her element, not

  • Coal Bin

    Some witchy and slinky,

  • The Injured Future

    Far left cluster the listeners, their heads lifted toward the speaker.

  • Rachel Hadas: The Golden Road

    By way of introduction to this month’s “Featured Selection,” first a brief appreciation of Rachel Hadas’s new book of poetry…

    Featured Selection

  • Natural History of the Soul

    The song thrush hops, runs, stands,

  • Hatfield

    Such lovely matter, rain, abundant rain,

  • High Finance

    You looked up and saw across the field

  • Calendar

    Some people, after the day

  • Arête | Eurydice

    The Hemingway who wrote three stories in a crummy hotel

  • Vita Nova

    Born on the outskirts of the Romanian kingdom

  • The Pair

    Here’s how they climbed out of the nights’ custody.

  • Drink with Mountain, Remembered, Andalucían

    The rosé from Spain

  • Fragment

    The past is a point of departure

  • In the Waiting Room | City of Bridges

    Light poured

  • The House of Wittgenstein

    He never saw the malls of Petaluma, nor met the amazing cricketeer Montezuma. He never heard a laugh track. We’d

  • Exclusive Beautiful Grapheme War

    history means touch, bodies

  • Mark Irwin: Extracts from: Hyle: The fundamental question of poetry by Alain Borer

    By way of introduction to this month’s “Featured Selection,” first some thoughts from Mark Irwin, followed by the work itself,…

    Featured Selection

  • Halloween

    It is as quiet as the death of the dead no one knows

  • More Reason

    Though you may be a scribe in ancient Egypt

  • In the Vestibule

    The in-between is queasy

  • Your Brother’s Face

    You believe your brother will come down

  • Dew Point

    Because of the nipple crust riming a girl’s

  • Sharp Noises at Night

    When I travel to the Midwest, trains

  • La Bagatelle | Method | Dream Glance

    in cursive yellow hung above

  • Salons

    Your friends are all sitting

  • Obit

    At this beat-up plywood slab across the beat-up

  • And Now, As Promised

    How lousy are your prospects when you

  • The Night Was Born

    This night was born in an old and dust-filled pantry, and yesterday’s – in the

  • January 28 | Basho

    Today it is snowing again and I’m thinking of Borges.

  • Lawrence Matsuda and Tess Gallagher: Pow! Pow! Shalazam!

    About the work: In the late summer of 2011 Tess Gallagher and Lawrence Matsuda were e-mailing each other while she…

    Featured Selection

  • Glare

    It just goes so fast,

  • Indelible

    Having worn myself out naming Bewick's wren,

  • Ars Poetica

    The shell of the papershell pecan can easily be broken

  • An Intimate Moment of Protestant Despair Witnessed on the Four O’ Clock Train

    He put down his Wall Street Journal,

  • Hiroshima Bomb

    Confetti spirals flutter into dark green.

  • Imaginary Conversation | In the Orchard

    You tell me to live each day

  • Vernissage

    Survivors of a volcanic explosion, cross-

  • A Love Poem While Dissolving

    I’m trying to say I love you, but Buckminster Fuller declared

  • Early Elegy: Telephone Booth | Early Elegy: Cursive

    Its remains: a plexiglass crypt robbed

  • The Alone-Doors

    Don’t try this at home.

  • Taxidermy: A Translucent Love Poem

    We are bound inside of the taxidermied falcon.

  • Letter to a Young Orgasm | Elegy for the Last Orgasm | The Orgasm and the Magic Maid

    How could she not cry out when you pressed her to your flesh?

  • Kyoto, Without Me

    chills and goes dark.  At this very instant

  • Sarah Arvio: eleven poems from night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis

    eleven poems from night thoughts:  70 dream poems & notes from an analysis from a word to the reader: night…

    Featured Selection

  • On Sadness | On Beauty

    I noticed something strange and beautiful about the word “sad.”

  • Mirror of the Invisible World

    The crown of a milk tooth in a curve of jaw

  • Deceiving the Gods

    The old Jews rarely admitted good fortune.

  • My Courbet, by Jonathan Galassi

    My Courbet

  • The Epileptic

    Conversations with him are like waiting for thunder.

  • Two Stages

    The traveler was certainly sleep-logged when he slipped away from his hotel at sunrise

  • Armed Stasis

    I will make a fact with you Robert Frost.

  • Florida

    The prettiest state,

  • Writing Under the Influence of Me

    It means I drop things, and I keep turning

  • Circus

    How the squirrel, skittish, leaps, lobbing its orange

  • Elegy for a Young Garden

    Shattered bricks, flayed sockets

  • Handel in London, 1741

    Wedged in a chair near the open window,

  • Annunciation

    I learned to hide the wings, almost immediately,

  • The Caravaggio Room

    Yuck, you heave in front of that sick boy

  • Without Apology

    Things happen. We’ve been promised

  • Seventh Circle

    And after the fight the moment of awakening

  • Ars Poetica, with Cow

    She went back to look at the beast, which lay immobile except for one eye watching the girl who stood helpless beside

  • Poem with Allusions

    The thoughts that come on little cat feet

  • On Either Side of the Word Lie

    The letters that must be taken away

  • Wolf

    Ink black, shark toothed, slithering

  • Morgellons

    Jorge Luis Borges translated Thomas Browne

  • My Lovely Garonne

    Because every tenth poem or so the poet described

  • The Birthday Ceremony

    Seventeen rooms of long maroon

  • Spectacle | Dear Bathtub | Freeway

    Your eyewear and my eyewear,

  • Purity | A  Withered  Rose

    Amazing solitude.

  • The Gifts

    The closet where the black sweaters hang. Where the game of backgammon is played

  • AN OTHER ROSE: FOR HENRI MICHAUX | FROM “ROSES: DEDICATIONS” | SINGING “ WITHOUT PEOPLE” | UNTITLED

    There is an other rose – soul of my kith and kin!

  • Errand

    The fawn was

  • Early Christianity: A Poem | Rome

    OK, says James, let them keep their foreskins.

  • from The Violet Blood of the Amethyst

    An exceptionally unhappy heart.

  • Incident in the Park

    Working back from the moment I rose off the bench,

  • What is Unknown

    When I tell her I’ve fallen for What Is Unknown, my mother’s face brightens.  “She’ll be a good girlfriend for you,”

  • Bathroom Mirror

    Often, when dazzled by sunlight,

  • Virginia Woolf: Three Fragments (1910)

    i.How much must we carry with us? Must we bear the souls of errand boys, drovers, butchers in bloody smocks, the

  • Little Torch

    First there was delight, delight in the windchimes,

  • Ghosts

    The first time I saw him he was standing

  • SINGER | LOTUS CROSS-DRESS |

    If you’ve heard the cant of the auctioneer, the

  • Hostile Takeover

    Cheeks puffed, she’s looking up at a horizontal

  • Over the Bright and Darkened Lands | Out in the Tranquil Bay

    I sit in one of the dives.

  • Angles | Bad News

    The master speaks to a tree.

  • What is Grand

    Don’t mumble

  • Jerry Garcia in a Somerville Parking Lot

    Past midnight, a man in his late 60s, tall, with long

  • Bruised Fruit

    These sun-poached pages like an old address book

  • Without You

    I was doing just fine, a job, a home,

  • Door to Door

    He tooled around Long Island

  • Study: Old Watercolor and Joe

    I bought an old watercolor in a primitives shop and brought it home to my in-laws’ on summer vacation.

  • Soaked, by Marilyn Kallet

    At the friary lunch we chat about End of Days,

  • From the Ass’s Mouth: A Theory of the Leisure Class

    Up on stage in the three-quarters empty auditorium,

  • Green Girls

    Wriggling on the bottles:

  • Wait a Minute, It’s Simple

    As I chewed thoughtful fruit breakfast

  • The Night Dancers

    Praise the shadows that slither up candlelit walls

  • In a Room with Many Windows

    In a room with many windows

  • Your Beautiful Mouth

    The sun is the sum of one particular age, the moon

  • Ode to Fluffy | Poem for Engagement

    goodbye fluffy

  • Momin Khan Momin | Mirza Ghalib

    Momin Khan Momin

  • From a Bench at MOMA

    Don’t wanna, don’t wanna,

  • The Plum

    A teacher I loved

  • Vermeer in Greenlandic Norse

    We were stopped in the gallery’s cool

  • To Urania

    Astronomer who rules the tides and skies,

  • The Mercies of Noah’s Wife

    Among the most measly of beasts, she has her pets,

  • Throne Verse

    Two years of cinders built up in the hearth,

  • Painting

    all things look as if

  • Tongue of Language | Nightmare

    Oh tongue of language, moving with your comb

  • Nothing You Can Do Will Save You

    The Buddha had his river, just for now this one is mine,

  • The Peripheral Position of the Sun

    A young woman roars, laughs, splashes the face of a young man, nears the shore where the blinking lights of fireflies

  • Zero Plus Anything is a World

    Four less one is three.

  • Visitor’s Coming

    I’ve laid out

  • Abbatoir Time

    The widower pushed the tailgate shut and fell.

  • The Host of Turns

    We were gathered in this kind of circus-tent,

  • And After the Ark

    what was left behind was astounding:

  • From the River of News

    The President and his opponent both speaking in Ohio—

  • Bad Line in a Bad Paragraph

    Where "grab a bite"

  • Poem in the Old Style

    At the beginning of the play Hecuba was mourning her great losses. She made lists, blamed the Gods: they could

  • Nursing Home

    She had dreams fifty years ago

  • Last Poem

    Reader, today

  • A God | A Poet | “Facesti come quei che va di notte…” | The Mocking of Ceres

    Here lies a god who was obtuse, just like us.

  • The Shape of Things

    I’ve been reading the science books again

  • Standing by a Coppice Gate, Reading “The Darkling Thrush”

    The city gate loomed at century’s end,

  • One and a Half Poems

    Well it began with a microburst from the North when the moon

  • You Have to Lead the Sheep

    A dream struck a dream

  • A Snow Woman

    A window on a side yard in winter.

  • Tool & Die

    In the final unburdening, massive crates are moved

  • from Nothing in the Dark

    My mother would assuage my childhood night-fears by saying There's nothing in the dark that you can't see during

  • Evening

    The blue chair on the terrace, coffee, evening,

  • In the Vanguard

    It takes a few notes, a very few notes, to undo the bare bones of a person. Where formerly we were piecework in a

  • 1945

    The winter trees offer no shade no shelter.

  • The Easy Way to Stop Drinking

    We are as flies in a pitcher plant,

  • What is Pleasure

    The supreme pleasure of love

  • What God Says | Creek

    What you don’t know is that when you lay

  • The Living and the Dead | Arrest Warrant

    I already came here several times this year, aside from the pilgrimage

  • Halfway Through Civilization, Late to Another

    meeting for grown-ups, i hurry across campus,

  • The Recognizable |  Poem Beginning with a Line by C. Dale Young

    Like when an irresistible force

  • Birds There is No Moon

    Birds there is no moon

  • Wraith

    I never walk past that gate I don’t recall a rifle butt, two sharp yelps,

  • On Thumbing Through Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation

    And what of the bird-headed dwarfs

  • No Nonsense | The Layout

    Split off for a sec

  • A Wedding in the Hotel

    Sorry, the dining room’s closed:

  • Serial

    I figure four times, you make it five

  • She Leans

    A house: scoured and scarred by wind, its unpainted

  • Stone Arabia

    The horses bisect the field

  • Ode to Cabeza de Vaca

    What good is it to see for miles and miles,

  • The Park from Above

    What scared them? Scores of wild green parrots

  • Glimmer Train | Strike-Slip

    Redwinged blackbirds in the cattail pond—

  • Georges de la Tour! Georges de la Tour! | Metka | The Cross

    I see how you climb!

  • Tenderly

    I see how you climb!

  • The Sudden Walk

    When evening comes to find you still

  • Else

    At the first instance, to amuse others,

  • How Self-Consciousness Counts

    Why in hell should anyone understand

  • Which Makes Me, I Guess, the Muddy Colorado

    What we learn from most pornography is

  • Frog Dream in July for Lucio’s Brother

    I am a frog; I can

  • BUSH | SERIAL

    Warms thieves.

  • House of Clouds | Song

    Clouds float over Giudecca  Island,

  • The Little Engine

    He is not an engine that could. Busted up, broken and backward, call him “fucked-up,”

  • He Was Amazed

    He was amazed by the curve of his life. What he thought unique had made its arc like any other, as if life had

  • Home

    Those last days in Hollywood—

  • Impressionist

    Once it was declared awful because it was brilliant

  • The Oklahoma Purchase

    William Howard Taft wouldn’t drink before dark.

  • 36.

    A woman was choked by a metal shackle

  • Six Blessings and a Curse

    Weigh odds. Pray. Pay bills.

  • For Night to Fall

    You could tell from the start that the best

  • The Museum of Mortal Sins | Soul

    We stood up to our waists in the icy water

  • Honor Guard

    Who does this body

  • Me Showering

    I am showering, which isn’t much in itself

  • How to Topple a Kingdom

    Read overly-detailed novels.  Prefer

  • En Route

    All over wherever we are the waves are making

  • Tool & Shade

    A brush of two minds still

  • Were We So Fragile?

    What promises didn’t you deliver, beautiful Life!

  • Henry’s Song

    Sometimes sitting in a friend's backyard on a fall evening

  • Say You’re Don Giovanni

    Say you’re Don Giovanni Giovanni and you make

  • The Mind Sliding

    around inside the scene:

  • Hurricane: Hera | Squall: Echo

    You never hear of Ixion, tied to a revolving wheel,

  • Of All the Birds

    The magpie I like least,

  • Before They Came For Us | Civilian Exiting the Facilities | Table for Six

    They met in the woods below our homes, brought their sawed-off shotguns and

  • Faust 1972

    This time, Faust was a nursing mother --

  • Arrow Boy

    They see her as a genie in a pager.

  • Zen Dictionary

    In the Zen Dictionary, intention

  • Ars Polis

    way too human too fast way too boring too quick

  • Home Life

    I was sitting still in an armchair

  • Firing My Father’s Mossberg

    At the shooting range,

  • ANY SINGLE THING | OFFERS OF SKY | THE EQUATION MUST BE BEAUTIFUL

    At the shooting range,

  • Carbide

    As he approached the river a little Fiat drew off the main road and parked among

  • Snow Day, by Jerome Sala

    The camera in the other room points and clicks

  • Pink is the Navy Blue of India

    Flea market guy tells me the pornos are five dollars

  • Reflection

    I am a lion

  • The Bird that Begins it

    In the world-famous night which is already flinging away bits of dark but not

  • Tolstoi Learned to Ride a Bike at an Age When Most of Us Cash in Chips by Annette Barnes & Stuart Friebert

    There we were, watching the parade, while he climbed up

  • Issue 9 Editor’s Note

    To our Readers:   Welcome to Issue #9 of Plume.   Briefly — comme d’habitude —-   In this issue,…

    Editors Note

  • Far Country

    When you were in that country

  • Creek

    Now it is easy to find where the creek dwindles, where it thickens at last, where its

  • Travel Light

    By all means take my suitcase, which now again

  • Trouble

    And so it took shape, & from what.

  • The Freud Museum

    It’s 1938. Here’s moss on red brick

  • Crazy Hairdo, Crazier Head | Some Things to Consider Before We Proceed

    Spector pinned down twins LaFlora and LaFauna like butterflies, trimmed their

  • To Say

    There are dead children all over and under this earth

  • Booklet, Hand-Pressed Paper, Containing Locks of School-Children’s Hair, c. 1861

    Wound on a bobbin like thread.  Woven into a wreath

  • How to Pray

    Falling down on your knees is the easy part, like drinking

  • Zacharia, Malachi

    When the shepherd is stricken

  • The Third Visitor

    The Third Visitor understands

  • Dentist, Mexico, 1959

    The room was big, not small.

  • κάθαρσης

    Dr. Clark ordered daisies

  • Bosnia, Kentucky

    Court documents say her name is Azra Bašic. In 1992, twin knives

  • A Toy Airplane

    The tumor

  • N18P6

    the shape doesn’t

  • The Beautiful Hand

    Not a word.

  • Poem

    I’m going to pretend I’m a painter and just

  • Unified Theory

    The night is blue and staggered with stars.

  • Imagined Corners

    At the corner where the transept cuts the nave,

  • Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.

    Chic and petite, blind to her destiny

  • The Mirror

    We dream of two dragons

  • Moment of Truth

    A matador imagines he has

  • Nude with Pebbles

    Flowers fall.  And I noticed

  • Ready to Be the Lover She Remembers Forever

    The gods are everywhere

  • Throw it All Away

    My granddaughter who.  The one alive in speech descends.  A plate

  • Ars Poetica

    The dark night caught Jerome by surprise

  • Pour Ainsi Dire

    Drinking. What is boozing? If not a liquid manner of corresponding, thanks to wine,

  • Zodiacal Light: A Dialogue

    To see it, you look to the north

  • Plume

    The old wheelbarrow aimed like a cannon

  • Ödön von Horváth | Brief Incident in Short a, Long a, and Schwa | My Friend’s Creation | Contingency (Vs. Necessity)

    Cat, gray tabby, calm, watches large, black ant.  Man, rapt, stands staring at cat and

  • A Place

    As a foreigner, I wasted a lot of energy

  • Preludium

    In The Odyssey,

  • Of Weeping

    First there is the weeping one weeps when one reads a good poem,

  • Barrage Balloons, Buck Alec, Bird Flu and You

    First there is the weeping one weeps when one reads a good poem,

  • In Memory

    I remember the night my father died

  • Vesuvius

    No gazette ran the story,

  • The Ant’s Plunder

    When I stuck out my hand to grab the iron door handle, a hidden ant attacked my right

  • My Heart in Evening

    In the evening one hears the sharp shrieks of bats.

  • The Death of Erik Satie

    The arches aspire to points

  • Rare Moment

    A clear choice

  • Three Fascinations

    to wake to an alarm

  • The Gone and the Going Away

    The world I know keeps going farther

  • Tiger Story

    Somewhere during my first or second year a tiger came into my life

  • An Oracle

    Why does the line end sooner than the page?

  • Home-Boys: Baby & Me (a Sapphic)

    Ex-gang members. Driveby days over. Zero

  • from Landscapes on a Train

    There once was a church. There once was a steeple. These things fall into

  • from “From Nothing”

    One note, another, in the parlor’s angled light,

  • News from Nowhere

    The sea handles laundry

  • Halloween

    No gazette ran the story,

  • Wilhelmina Shakespeare

    Blond hair, blue eyes, buck teeth:  we taunted you

  • white paper #46

    Obama Waffles Mix