From I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by William Brewer. Used with the permission of Milkweed Editions.
From I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by William Brewer. Used with the permission of Milkweed Editions.
All day on all my days,
the lives I’m not to process wash in;
anxieties lullaby on
and quite like to be gotten among;
but now—and now—one old,
abundant flower just screws up the room.
Copyright © 2016 by Graham Foust. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 4, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
At least once a week
I walk into the city of bricks
where the rubies grow
and the killers await
the coming of doves and cats.
I pass by the homes of butchers
and their knives sharpened by insomnia
to the river of black sails
and the torn-up sea and the teeth of dogs.
She waits for me in a narrow bed,
watching the rain
that gathers on the broken street
and the weak light of dusk
and the singing trees.
Copyright © 2015 by Pablo Medina. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 17, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
I thought I could stop
time by taking apart
the clock. Minute hand. Hour hand.
Nothing can keep. Nothing
is kept. Only kept track of. I felt
passing seconds
accumulate like dead calves
in a thunderstorm
of the mind no longer a mind
but a page torn
from the dictionary with the definition of self
effaced. I couldn’t face it: the world moving
on as if nothing happened.
Everyone I knew got up. Got dressed.
Went to work. Went home.
There were parties. Ecstasy.
Hennessy. Dancing
around each other. Bluntness. Blunts
rolled to keep
thought after thought
from roiling
like wind across water—
coercing shapelessness into shape.
I put on my best face.
I was glamour. I was grammar.
Yet my best couldn’t best my beast.
I, too, had been taken apart.
I didn’t want to be
fixed. I wanted everything dismantled and useless
like me. Case. Wheel. Hands. Dial. Face.
Copyright © 2020 by Paul Tran. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 9, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
Take a good look, she says about her inventory. Palatially housed, her inflammatory and multifaceted set of selves. Old brain inside the new brain, inside the skull. The exact velocity of quantum particles cannot be known. Like wave equations in the space of certain dimensions. I never thought that things would go this far. Angular momentum of closely-knit and sexually adventurous people. Any piece of matter, when heated, starts to glow. It’s that kind of relationship that’s built on friction.
“40” from NINE. Copyright © 2010 by Anne Tardos. Used with permission of the author.
I saw the civil sun drying earth’s tears —
Her tears of joy that only faster flowed,
Fain would I stretch me by the highway side,
To thaw and trickle with the melting snow,
That mingled soul and body with the tide,
I too may through the pores of nature flow.
But I alas nor tinkle can nor fume,
One jot to forward the great work of Time,
‘Tis mine to hearken while these ply the loom,
So shall my silence with their music chime.
This poem is in the public domain.