Find and share the perfect poems.
At school he studies the human body: aorta, valve, muscle, vein. At home he redesigns it out of cardboard and twine until it looks like a coat he might hang on a hook with other missing coats.
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.
I stared at the tiny xeroxed faces
we wore like blurry jokes
pinned to our lapels.
Outside, the light raked the dry brown foothills
we slid down on flattened cardboard boxes,
decades ago, out of control, fast,
Up late scrolling
for distraction, love, hope,
I discovered skew dice.
In the promotional video
you see only a mathematician’s hands,
like the hands of god,
picking up the dice one at a time,
turning them over and over
before returning them
A recent study found that poems increased
the sale price of a home by close to $9,000.
The years, however, have not been kind to poems.
The Northeast has lost millions of poems,
reducing the canopy. Just a few days ago,
high winds knocked a poem onto a power line