Before the puppet show, Melissa and I split a stolen Valium. As the children gathered, a dreamy feeling descended on ...

Call to me at the bottom of the stairs and wrap me in your breathless summering. Confession: my lips are ...

Geometrically speaking, lines are illusion because lines have no width. Yet we know the end from the beginning. Velocity differs ...

My favorite thing About Keats Is his belief that I might Leave the world unseen I once left An imaginary ...

On the terrace, huddled against sun, the ticking air and hissing in the grass— at the palazzo belfry suddenly a ...

Meanwhile, in the airy labyrinth, in a bathtub full of corn liquor, in the red barn on a hillside. While ...

The coyotes are judging me. The coyotes are excellent judges of character attuned to minute oscillations of will opportunistic in ...

so it begins [spring] leopards from a crowd of moss hills bloom I don’t live there; I built my ship ...

The palm trees outside the window are waiting to wed. But the officiate is late. They stare at each other, ...

a simple star-crack unwinding in ropes of flat out shaking silver. The white bird is not raveled in thought when ...

I could be a constellation, I have a cryptic, enticing tale it has lions and swords and those things, blood ...

in Afrika there is a way you beg forgiveness for future sins today in a broken language the same way ...

Begin by skinning an animal. This plastic woman has, like, 200 acres, and she has so many couches, and she ...

I never knew you were Baptist. Nor, I suspect, did you. Perhaps it was the funeral director or your most ...

It is a relief to pass beyond the flesh and become instead a column of information. Puerile, we watch pulp ...

Category is a submarine, Soviet, riveted together in pointless hurry by convict labor, Lesser Class, something for Black Sea, obsolete ...

when he beat me up he had me against a row-house screen door, blows like birds flying at my ears ...

Bury me under feathers. My mother wanted me to be an actress, a singer. I paint in wings, in white, ...

Sunlight through kitchen window, porridge swirled with raspberry jam. Mouths clotted red, a bluebird sings: on this morning, how can ...

charred, acrid smell of gunpowder smokes from the holes in Philando’s body, which carries the stigma(ta) of all things dark, ...

His back toward us, he faces history and history is armed with AR 47s, water cannons, grenades, Andrew Jackson, and ...

Philadelphia smelled like Vermont today, after light rain. A fly buzzed four or five clusters of crocus. The sky draped ...

The day a little gloomy, sky not exactly low but grackles higher than they ought to be, their oily, boat-wake ...

I’ve seen the future and it will be puffy-eyed. We’ll rise like an army of teeth, you and me seeded ...

The mood of the river is to glitter which also is a way to deflect, if I had to name ...

Ghosts ruined our party. We were a mess when the lampshade began to shake. I was so drunk on whiskey ...

I walked alone at night inside the throbbing dome of men who thought I was a man and did not ...

I made it to the moon and nothing changed. If I had something urgent to say nothing changed. If I ...

All the fruits bursting with prophecies without an easy way through the branches of apricot tree. Outside, the snow crowded ...

When I lift the lid of the compost bin heat swells toward me, the first layer: clippings from grass mown ...

a sky reproduced in pixels. or oil acrylic. to match what then is believed seen. how our seeing displaces the ...

she plunged below the line of the ocean and saw lava exploding into the emptiness she saw sea become land ...

Its shadow is helpless here festering the way your fingers lean over the watermarks not yet covered with paper though ...

In a God’s-eye view all the edges are sharp Tiny but distinct Jerome picnics on a ledge with his apocryphal ...

but nowadays your garbled barbles never tasted better. no matter how much your bog moss makes love to the gutter, ...

My bag disappeared with my passport, my keys a little vial containing a sliver of bone. I was stalked by ...

Scientist of The Lambs Scientist on the western front Scientist I’m hunting rabbits Scientist speak no evil Scientist not at ...

Dear June,   I read your letter from the woman whose date stole a bottle of rosemary from her cabinet, ...

along the pathway through live oak and cedar trees ant trails lead to dead cicadas and worms I look for ...

Midnight ticks in a quiet lab around one sleepy dork who, suddenly sits up, hearing two black holes larger than ...

Black skin tastes better when the wheat has already been threshed; just a kiss. I watched her "paint her face" ...

I flick brother’s ear; say you could hide something in here. Stonefruit maybe, or the yolks we collect from Narragansett ...

I can hold my breath for three minutes flat in the superstore aisle between woks and waffle-irons screaming catchphrases in ...

When I first showed up the halo of my silhouette dissolved like a jolly rancher I began to put my ...

Leafing out, the trees blur in green mist, celandine poppies bright fingerprints at their feet. The persistent creek has hollowed ...

And that spring a man beat his 94-year-old grandma then ran off with her jewelry and SUV. Judge set bail ...

I remember when the doctor first told me the red-with-yellow-frosting sores on my legs were something called impetigo, all I ...

If I opened my eyes from this pretended sleep, I wouldn’t be salting the driveway before dawn, though the snow ...

Today’s look: be merciful I gently suggest that you check the earth on which you stand— Ye are actually pretty ...

dark, darker when I frown into this mirror a depth takes my forehead inside there is a little white man ...

someone else’s car / a big dude dragging me up a flight of stairs / seeing my brother / we’re ...

A door you thought locked, not. How riddles work. Sometimes the truth’s warped I mean wrapped in humor, & often ...

I lose the trail, or it eludes me. Led astray, the bent-down saplings keep their flex, may even rise ...

This November blew down to the just-reaped fields a hectic of leaves. More golden leaves than fevered leaves but the ...

On my flight back to Washington at 4 am in air marbled by night and snow I leaned against the ...

So They Will Time is the lightbulb burning for the first three traffic lights And blinking after that Is the ...

Walking home from the protest We pour water from the bottle another marcher gave us over this temporary sign With ...

and horns crawl like an apology out of my skull; my tongue splits in two and gropes the air in ...

Suspect in transgender slaying says 'manhood' was threatened” - NY Daily News, April 1, 2016 Manhood: more fragile than the ...

yes, let's argue over semantics while decapitated bodies and babies litter hospital floors in aleppo and not-my-president unites with Russia ...

Two months ago they played FUCK MARRY KILL He picked me as Fuck and the other brown girl to Marry ...

shhh… this is not an essay. no, this is not that. not a poem. not a bomb. not hydrogen. this ...

The shoes are made of iron presumably to preserve the symbolic footwear, but they are attached along the Danube’s stone ...

anarchy isn’t for everyone can you hear me now find your soul paint here on a saturday night light is ...

Walt Whitman With Light On A Lake The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. The land and the ...

My mother’s mother, Widow of the Episcopal Bishop of Idaho, sat her namesake My sister, seven, On her lap and ...

Get cozy. You pull me under starlit covers, coax the past from my throat. The blue-veined suburbs. Winters gathered like sticks ...

Any interested parties herein? I sought to execute a release, they ended up executing me. The conscious pain and suffering, ...

if he hadn’t planned to go hunting with his father if his father had kept the rifle locked away if ...

I will, and I will Walk into the morning Light falling like snow: a flurry: Life. Cold is and I ...

CHAMELEON He liked to watch me change. I slipped a bra strap over my left shoulder. The room darkened. As ...

the glass of water he breaks after our only night out this week, a slow drown for him at the ...

Michele LeavittSHEEPSCOT WELLSPRING CEMETERY Mercury shrinks to the bottom of the gauge, and you follow the stone wall to a ...

I threw my sandwich wrapper out in a trash can. On the side of the trash can was the word ...

Magnolia to aloe, silver-sheened river, and shallow. We are minor in the composition but figure prominently. Often now I think ...

you know that photo stuck into the side of a frame in the den you know, the photo of Katie ...

They are cutting down all the trees for Christmas. Pine and spruce lay bundled on warehouse floors, and I drink ...

Winter beforelight. Lamp by lamp the house of night shuts. Dawn enlarges; a father turns off the lights, loves each ...

I don’t know whether I’m awake or sleeping, but I know the past is the prison we break into, a ...

mother i have strayed here too long. a winter mist rising at five o’clock and oustide’s dim. outside’s lust. (Mother ...

She led us knee-deep into mud. Horses squealed and thrashed as the earth dragged them under. Mire sucked at our ...

Giggling girls have power the radio tells me after the election. An epidemic of contagious laughter spread through a girls’ ...

WHAT IT IS is how I hate my face. is how my face is amnesia. is how i love my ...

Abide with me the night shadows caterwauling on the walls—Lava Lamp Red as the squad car pulling up to the ...

The week has been long, one of the longest in my heart's slim record-book. But the moon is at its ...

The city guys are stringing Christmas lights on the locust trees. The men are lifted up in buckets. First, any ...

OUTHOUSE BLUES Three Poems by Herman Beavers Featured on Life As Activism Outhouse Blues #1 Accounts coming due, enunciated in The ...

I forget to butter the skillet, so my egg spreads like pond scum, and it’s filmy and stuck, and the ...

on a cramped ship headed toward Ellis Island. Fog, fog horns for a lullaby. The black pines, a frozen pear ...

What should I remember, what release? My mother’s hot hand in mine as she was dying. My dog’s heart stopping ...

was triangle & the sayings of an apple full of iodine. what was told before the kiss. has a toad ...

everyone in the cathedral is a song living as voices in the corridor it takes too much remembrance to see ...

When the sun sags into the damp puddle At your paws and The wind in unison sings a last song ...

CAUSE by Matthew Gellman Nearly 37 million people are living with HIV around the world. The bird has a wet, ...

he best way to remember is to be born again completely, slick with red and heat, til the cord is ...

The Illuminati holds its annual recruitment dance In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in that bar with the antique signs, And the program includes ...

A lover explains the definition of kerning, I listen to how the spaces between letters are adjusted for the viewer ...

No, you are not my shining demon— You’re the god Rimbaud wrote of, right? While lambasting the men of his ...

Some days in May, a sunrise of redbuds will apron the clouds and light pour across development lawns gold with ...

¡THAN CALL BRAD FOR HELP! by John Manuel Arias to ease the tension Ammit picks her teeth with a quetzal ...