My son took a picture of me
jumping the cemetery wall. Do it again,
he said, as if I'd got out too fast.
Pretend you're really climbing.

In the retake my lazy eye is half shut,
and the other is smiling or crying.

From The Game of Boxes by Catherine Barnett. Copyright © 2012 by Catherine Barnett. Published by Graywolf Press. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

iv.

I know agape means both dumbly
open and love not the kind of love
that climbed the stairs to you.

From The Game of Boxes by Catherine Barnett. Copyright © 2012 by Catherine Barnett. Published by Graywolf Press. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Could have been
otherwise and 
birdsong make us 
nauseous. And
gigantic roiling sunsets
give us vertigo. The
world of flowers is
for insects, not 
us. But tonic
is durance among.

Copyright © 2012 by Forrest Gander. Used with permission of the author.

RAG SMELL.  FIRE smell.  Bed blacked.  Bowl.
The quiet come from living done.
Shadow built the walls, holed and cribbed with light.
Vine felt cracks and fingered in.
Were sky inside
and what the wind-holes left, a wind.
Ay walk the last. What were floor
heaves rock and root.
Flame-eaten walls, rubs of wood,
scraps the burn left licked
now licked with dirt.

Copyright © 2012 by Joan Houlihan. Used with permission of the author.

Done with mortise and tenon,
linseed oil and wax,
she stands back from the highboy
to snap a photograph with her phone,
all the while, defending a shim
to absent interlocutors
who have, admittedly, 
never seen her work	
and died three hundred years ago.

Copyright © 2012 by Devin Johnston. Used with permission of the author.

Awakened too early on Saturday morning 
by the song of a mockingbird 
imitating my clock radio alarm.
				
                *

Walking along the green path with buds 
in my ears, too engrossed in the morning news
to listen to the stillness of the garden.

Copyright © 2012 by Harryette Mullen. Used with permission of the author.

How about an oak leaf
if you had to be a leaf?
Suppose you had your life to live over
knowing what you know?
Suppose you had plenty money

"Get away from me you little fool."

Evening of a day in early March,
you are like the smell of drains
in a restaurant where paté maison
is a slab of cold meat loaf
damp and wooly. You lack charm.

From Collected Poems by James Schuyler. Copyright © 1993 by James Schuyler. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux . All rights reserved.

                 St. Augustine


Light shafts down on 
the assembled congregation of sails 

billows my shirt      sends me to where thin countries 
stretch like needles    to a low and distant shore 

from which    suddenly     canoes appear

Copyright © 2012 by Lola Haskins. Used with permission of the author.

Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November.
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting February alone,
And that has twenty-eight days clear
And twenty-nine in each leap year.

This poem is in the public domain.

When I was four years old my mother led me to the park.
The spring sunshine was not too warm. The street was almost empty.
The witch in my fairy-book came walking along.
She stooped to fish some mouldy grapes out of the gutter.

This poem is in the public domain.

The water understands
Civilization well;
It wets my foot, but prettily,
It chills my life, but wittily,
It is not disconcerted,
It is not broken-hearted:
Well used, it decketh joy,
Adorneth, doubleth joy:
Ill used, it will destroy,
In perfect time and measure
With a face of golden pleasure
Elegantly destroy.
Everyone is asleep
There is nothing to come between
The moon and me.

From Women Poets of Japan, copyright © 1977 by Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

the round spoon
with the curvature
of a concave mirror
scoops out my eye
and swallows it

From The Forest of Eyes by Tada Chimako, translated by Jeffrey Angles. Copyright © 2010 by Tada Chimako and Jeffrey Angles. Used by permission of University of California Press. All rights reserved.

one narcissus
draws close to another
like the only
two adolescent boys
in the universe

From The Forest of Eyes by Tada Chimako, translated by Jeffrey Angles. Copyright © 2010 by Tada Chimako and Jeffrey Angles. Used by permission of University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Fisherman's arm
Up and down
Like a pump handle
The old-fashioned way
Flashing a large silver
Spangle off the bottom
Where lakers lurk in August.
Barefoot Thelonious and Bruno
Run in the grass of memory.

Copyright © 2011 by Willam Corbett. Reprinted from The Whalen Poem with the permission of Hanging Loose Press.

Venom erupted from the trees when the vital system of the brook reset its serum stem. Can suspended snakes compose a more careless music? Do two detached wings count as an exoskeletal gesture? A hiss is the sound the sky would make if these leaves revived their flight.

Copyright © 2011 by Eric Baus. Used with permission of the author.

A two-legged bag
stops me on the street
and asks me
                 what I'm carrying
in bags
under my arm
carrying carrying carrying

Nothing
Nothing
Nothing
Dead Nightingale
Dead Hen

From Dark Things. Copyright © 2009 by Charles Simic. Used with permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.

Out of the dusk a shadow,
   Then, a spark;
Out of the cloud a silence,
   Then, a lark;
Out of the heart a rapture,
   Then, a pain;
Out of the dead, cold ashes,
   Life again.

This poem is in the public domain.

Last week the caption
on page twelve stated
the person photographed
was Jersy Lem when in fact
it was Adolf Hitler.

Copyright © 2010 by Carl Adamshick. From Curses and Wishes (Louisiana State University Press, 2011). Used by permission of the author.