Find and share the perfect poems.
one day they showed me a dark moon ringed
with a bright nimbus on a swirling gray screen
they called it my last chance for neverending life
but the next day it was gone it had already
launched itself into the gray sky like an escape
capsule accidentally empty sent spiraling into the
unpeopled galaxies of my trackless gray body
Monica Youn, “Blackacre," from Blackacre. Copyright © 2016 by Monica Youn. Used with the permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.
Pica pica
after Martha Collins
because it is to create an acute
angle an angle shaped like a
wedge because it is to give
birth to what you already know
to be expendable after it
has cleaned after it has fed
One figure is female, the other is male.
Both are contained.
One figure is mythical, the other historical.
To the extent that one can be said to have existed at all, they occupy different millennia, different continents.
But, to the extent that one can be said to have existed at all, both figures are considered Asian—one from Colchis, one from Korea.
To mention the Asianness of the figures creates a “racial marker” in the poem.