Featured Topic: Dreams
Featured Product: Seasons
Featured Writer: poets better and more famous than me
Featured Form: Rondel
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Worrying the Stone
The wandering sermon has run too long and yawning congregants rise to their feet while a quavering singer strains his song, aching over the chorus he repeats repeats like a lonesome widow worrying the stone of long desires that she cannot quite complete despite love's...
He Moves the Mountains
Never have I seen blue hills above the green ripped from their bedrock and thrown into the deep. And will I ever? But have I passed through the needle's eye? Camel that I am, reborn among the sheep tramping out again to die. Image Credit to Abby Laux For more poems...
A Balloon and his Friend
The little girl did not know what he was at first— the yellow thing that did not drop if you let go. Still he filled her with so much joy she'd either burst or grow wings so she could float with him through the air. He smiled from above while she laughed along below;...
Tahlequah by Mark Hernberg
She swam to these shallow waters to give birth. Knowing only the quickening of her heart, the heart inside her; resonance of body within body, sea within sea. Her newborn calf sputtered brine, tasting the new waters. Each breath a new ocean. Again she sings him her...
At the Wading Pool
The wading pool is shrinking with the wasted sun and the yellows of summer drain slowly away exposing red bricks beneath the glittering spray. With cast-off toys and leaves littered about their feet, the bone-soaked nine-year-olds will squeal, crash, and run through...
Deeper than her lungs could go: an Elegy for J35 and her pod
She let go yesterday; she thought she could let go, let him slip from her nose, and gently from the sun to sink deeper than her lungs could go; it was done. She carried her son for nine suns, and eighteen moons before. Could she let go, when the tide turned within her...
Jonah
It's told that Socrates chose the hemlock over this greater terror: banishment. But tortured Jonah, standing on the dock the hour he spied the boat to Tarshish went in secret to the furthest corner of the earth to hide his hate beneath a Spanish tent. He refused to...
The Leaves Remember
Why are my poems so obsessed with doom? Is there no light their dark will not consume, no work they will not turn into a chore, nor child they cannot drown in metaphor? Sometimes beauty is neither fraud nor thief; sometimes a leaf is just a common leaf— a welcome...
A Child’s Sleep
I wonder if the tearful child, not yet perceiving what it means to fall asleep, might believe she dies each night. Afraid to go alone, she chokes on her goodbyes, "Please don't forget me! O please leave the door ajar!" But the swallowing Unknown will not share her...
The Icebox
In my dream, I held too many things in my hands and my fingers grappled and fumbled with the load afraid I'd drop one as I stumbled down the road for I'd balanced several things atop an icebox and my dream-drunk brain was slow, weighted down with sand until I knelt to...
There are Moments that Poems are Unworthy Of
There are moments that poems are unworthy of. Like the photographs that can never truly show the setting sun nor capture the new fallen snow. Their radiance flattened; their laughter hollowed out. Our highest metaphors blaspheme both life and love; all our symbols...
Wood, Stone, and Water: a Triptych of Dawn, Heat, and Rain
This triptych poem can be read in multiple ways; in a sense, it is six smaller poems woven together to make a whole. It can therefore be read vertically (discussing three objects: wood, stone, and water) as well as horizontally (discussing three times: dawn, noonday...
The Only One I Sing To
Your milk-fattened fingers, sticky with joy, dirty the fold of my shirt, and you squirm, unaware that you might be dropped. Twice now you've made me panic thinking I'd lost my hold on your wriggling belly when your head suddenly flopped to one side. Little One, I am...
Apocalypsis
EPHESUS These are the words of the first and the last who holds the seven stars in his right hand. The cloudless mornings now are overcast and the first light of your golden lampstand though not yet a shade, now darkens, dwindles. You know the heft of love and quiet...
Ephesus
These are the words of the first and the last who holds the seven stars in his right hand. The cloudless mornings now are overcast and the first light of your golden lampstand though not yet a shade, now darkens, dwindles. You know the heft of love and quiet work;...