by James Grinwis
In the overture a finch caresses a watermelon with its beak. It is a large watermelon and the bird is very small. You are reminded of several images but one or another stands out.
by Miranda Mellis
I can see the sky so white it’s leached of white and branches of winter trees like rude lace.
by Porter Fox
The soldiers marched off the TV screen in two columns. There were thirty of them dressed in desert fatigues. They barely fit into Frank’s living room.
by Christopher DeWeese
I was a company town,/ a modest house of debtors/ tucked between the wildflowers
by Anne Tardos
Nine words per line and nine lines per stanza.
by Aleš Šteger, translated by Aljaž Kovač and Forrest Gander
Quietly, covertly, bears have toddled into the name Berlin.
by Daniel Grandbois
Despite the soot that tumbles from the sky, our old people look good—the color of milk and veal roast.
by Ava Lehrer
Have you ever seen a rock garden?// She was at the head who asked what it meant./ How do these rocks relate to the end of this man, as well as the end of them?/ They don’t, or they didn’t while I stood there for you.
by Jason Myers
When sanity grew tiresome, I went walking through the ghetto./ I bought kidneys, watched buildings crumble,/ offered no hand, no kind word.
by Adam Scheffler
My robot comes to me in the night afraid of death.
by Rebecca Hazelton
Remember me as an/ elephant figurine,/ chipped trunk, one ear,/ or a tailless squirrel/ languishing in dust.
by Marguerite W. Sullivan
She hired a man to build a gazebo for her. The yard was green and grassy as any, but in an absent moment called out for a structure beyond its billowing color.
by Richard Froude
At Bristol Zoo in the mid 1990s I watched an LED display of the world’s increasing population. The figure was juxtaposed with the decreasing acreage of rainforest. What I mean is, I am interested in sequence.
by Matthew Kirkpatrick
Two nearly identical babies born at the same time on a hot August night. An orderly at the end of a twelve-hour shift, angry and confused by unfair events earlier that day, switches the identities of the children before heading home to a tall Pabst and stale corn chips and a sleeping lover curled on the couch glowing gray from a snowy television. He finishes his drink and leaves his lover in the light. Beneath the glass a trapped star sizzles against the screen.
by Martha Schwendener
That’s pretty, she thinks as the hood of the car tips into the pond and the windshield is covered with green algae and lily pads and little white things that look like flower petals.
by Sarah Riggs
Tell us, lines, what we should say. Let the hand-/ writing govern our movements.
The Will of Achilles
by Robert Kelly
But under the rain/ a different thing. Vine leaves/ Achilles sees, inconsequent/ myrtles. There is no end/ to weather. The gods are done with him.
by Jett McAlister
(Not the light that tethers towards) (a melting/ fortunate, thanks due)
by Elizabeth Logan Harris
Dill brung Rita a whole lot of long flowers after he run his car up in her yard and smashed Julie’s trike. The box them flowers come in was near about the size of a kiddie coffin.
by Bernard Noël, translated by Eléna Rivera
air steams borders leafless branches a low sky/ makes eyes believe that finally they see matter/ what is the space between these open fingers
by Kristin Aardsma
Their knees knock the shudder of bone while their hands/ fist their dresses into peonies.
by Trent England
I was old enough to remember the last tumor in our town. It inhabited a girl my age who shared a last name close to mine, sitting in classes near me.
by Pedro Ponce
Many critics, seeking a precedent for the work of novelist Clarence Winthrop, cite the fictional topographies of Anderson’s Winesburg or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha.
by Elmo Lum
It’s winter: the season of hunching, the season of sleeves and long jackets, of hands in pockets, of woolen caps, flipped-up collars, and darkened streets.
by Greg Pierce
Here’s my best friend Davis’s stupid idea: mix up a bloodlike substance, pour it all over my face, knock on some old guy’s door, tell him we’ve been in a car accident, come in, rob him.
by Anthony Schneider
It is the low season and the pool is not crowded. A fiftyish German couple occupies the area nearest the beach path, buttressed by open bags and facedown magazines. A darkly tanned woman pulls a ululating child across the shallow end.
by Sylvia Legris
Syringes crescendo incrementally. Segmental sound drift. Rostrum-gist shifts from leading edge to trailing. Feathers shed antithetically (molto molting melodeon).
by Jesse Dorris
Freddy caught his reflection in the window of Sophistication—he looked good. His hair had followed orders this morning, succumbing to the blow and comb. He’d ratted it up and over one eye to balance the big white shirt flowing over his tight pants, the studded belt and boots. Tough and put together—no one in Lynch looked like him.
by Susan Steinberg
One does not start with mourning doves. One cannot start with doves surrounding the bedroom. One starts with the trip to Sausalito, the quick ride over the bridge, the city shrinking in the sideview.
by B. Kite
Dr. Sperber sat in the corner, rhythmically clicking his gums.
by Kim Chinquee
Outside, skeletons were knocking.
by Mario Andrea Rigoni, translated by Gregory Dowling
There was a lively and cheerful hubbub on the quay, as we waited for the gangplanks to be lowered and the embarkation procedures to begin. The ship, painted all in white, flaunted its high, elegant flank with a double row of sky-blue stripes on its stern—like upturned circumflex accents—and its name on the prow, Eucalyptus—written in golden characters—already stirring dreams of Greek landscapes.
by Priscilla Long
Wallace Stevens, American poet. Born October 2, 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania. Composed the quintessential Modernist poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” published 1917. Meret Oppenheim, Swiss artist. Born October 6, 1913, in Berlin. Created the quintessential Surrealist object, Breakfast in Fur, exhibited 1936.
by Allison Carter
Alaska turned 10 on a/ summer storm day.// She set out breakfast/ on a rickety table by/ the summer sea// Alaska loves breakfast best.
by Bin Ramke
I walked up all your stars, stairs to wake you, walk you home but you were not there where the taking, talking, was taking place, taking the place of, the pace of a love affair, afar, a fair love and languor, language will do that; Rise, balloon.
by Michele Fialer
When I met him he evinced many qualities which I admired, or enjoyed, and a few qualities which scared me, or which I did not understand, or which I found annoying.
by Cristiana Baik
Good night air glows/ under the quantum/ quiet fury
by Stefani Nellen
We are here, our tentacles coiled in the pond of Martina’s soul, the one untouched by the storm. We see everything. We saw everything. We float here in the cold until her lantern fish mind returns and chases us deeper into the dark. In slow, thudding heartbeats, we pass judgment.
by Scott Henkle
On the 28th of December 1908, an early morning earthquake felled the port city of Messina, in northeastern Sicily. After it came a huge wave and then, when the water had receded or settled into lagoons, fire.
by Mary Morris
I’m standing in the jungle, ankle-deep in mud. It’s dark and hot and the heat seeps through my camouflage gear. My boots, my flak jacket and holster, everything is wet.
by Eric Linsker
Our failure in the waves/ What is left of wind scuffling through wind
by Adam McOmber
The poet’s study was cluttered with his wife’s Egyptian marvels—the plaster head of Isis, a letter opener shaped like the claw of the cat god, Bast, even a shard from an actual canoptic jar that he was to use as a paperweight.
by Yang Zi, translated by Ye Chun and Melissa Tuckey
That night on my way home,/ a strange team appeared in front of me.
by Matt Bell
A brother, a father, a mother, a sister.
Selections from Interviews by Werner Klüppelholz, translated by William Bamberger
Composer Mauricio Kagel was born in Buenos Aires in 1931. While studying to be a composer Kagel was also very involved with world literature and with writers in Argentina: here he tells of studying under Jorge Luis Borges and of playing chess with Witold Gombrowicz.
by Joanna Ruocco
For her 16th birthday, he gave her a wax statue of Desiderius Erasmus.
by Margot Singer
We woke at the same moment, our hearts twanging in our chests.
Adventures in Shangdu
by Cathy Park Hong
The contractors were in such a hurry to catch up with the rest of the world that they rushed off before they finished building Highrise 88.
Augustino
by D. E. Steward
Merely three stops out Kiev’s Green Line Metro\ To Dorohozhycli\ And Babi Yar
Two Poems
by Forrest Gander
What words go with crossing? Orange and security and ventriloquist. This is a special message.
Breathing Room
by Martine Bellen
Instruments of music and surgery,\ Statues of birds and kings
Last Man
by Donald Revell
The hawthorn is God’s hat\ And patterns in the marble\ Swarm like bees
Take This Poem
by Elizabeth Willis
Take this spoon\ from me, this\ cudgel, this axe.
Three Poems
by Sandra Meek
Dark rosette in the lung’s/ pewter lace, early autumn chill
Three Poems
by Robert Kelly
They are blowing the leaves away
The Picture of the Spirit
by Elizabeth Robinson
Clarify now that “you,” “she,” “I” do not know to stand except at an interchange.
Two Poems
by Catherine Imbriglio
I withhold these truths, in formula, from you …
Three Poems
by Ellen Wehle
Lanterns follow the footpath/ Briefly then dwindle.
When the Mimes Left for Paris
by Matt Reeck
road: fissure opening lengthwise
Five Poems
by Ange Mlinko
Babyclothes made of camo—/ There should be a Lysistrata in the forsythia.
Two Poems
by Andrew Mossin
Lair and line./ Canopy and carapace.
Emily Dickinson Undressing
by Daneen Wardrop
In Amherst they’ve just emptied the hundred trunks/ found next door in the attic of her brother and sister-in-law,/ trunks of clothing not catalogued yet,/ and Jane Wald, the Dickinson Homestead director,/ lets me touch them.
by Andrew Malan Milward
In the months before the lake disappeared, I began having lunch every day with my high school guidance counselor.
by Nora Khan
When I was little, just a boy living in Pensacola, I used to chase gopher snakes, and I don’t remember anyone calling them their proper name, indigo snakes, no, they were just gophers, or rainbow wrigglers, or shineys, or oilers, which was my favorite name for them because their skin was truly the deepest jet black you can imagine, and in that ugly, heavy sun the black skin would flint sparks of teal, gold, violet, all the rainbow colors of an oil slick.
by Sébastien Smirou, translated by Andrew Zawacki
the may of the states’ pax plays i accept all while the love/ of lucrezia belle donati rose’s flesh forges the force at last
by Gabriel Blackwell
There are seven Walter Pidgeons seated in a waiting room measuring twenty-two feet by twenty-two feet.
by Michael Parrish Lee
She moves over a snowless sidewalk under dead winter night. Cold gasps of dryness at her neck—the front, now the back.
by Dan Rosenberg
I came to, feeling broke/ about the head,/ a crown of spoons in my hair.
by Rusty Morrison
I fit an elm, like a lens, in the sightline between myself/ and my mother’s death.
by Seth Abramson
Or he attracts the devil he reflects, on all fours
by Jeanine Walker
a door slammed the door was a way home and a way out
by Rosmarie Waldrop
A view of the sea is the beginning of the journey. An image of Columbus, starting out from the abyss, enters the left hemisphere.
by Anthony Madrid
BETWEEN myself and a lover of Spenser, there is a chasm for which no bridge/ Is long enough or strong enough to withstand the blasting winds.
by Joseph Cardinale
In the autumn after my wife vanished I enrolled in an undergraduate course in Astronomy.
by Hai Zi, translated by Ye Chun
Woman of June gathers water, gathers moonlight.
by John High
The two remained anonymous to wind/ & eternal without bells the vacant/ monastery on an edge of sea where
by Fani Papageorgiou
In the Bay of Biscay/ Deep into the sea/ Lives Obadiah/ The giant Nautilus.
by Michael Agresta
I was talking with a friend about real estate. We’d just finished volleyball practice and we were feeling robust.
by Laurence Klavan
Chopping noises. Then—a scream.
by Alexandra Wilder
I do remember the mouth/ as a well-worn nursery rhyme,/ a dusty adding machine.
by Richard Deming
Now that there is nothing left, for instance,/ the taste of fear dries the upper lip.
by Matthew Gleeson
Here I will gracefully withdraw my presence, and leave you with Cortés’s pursuit of the woman in the frogskin smock—
by Matthew Gleeson
In 1493 in Medellín Hernán Cortés murdered his infant brother, after it was prophesied that the young Ferdinand would grow to be stronger and more clever and able in every way than his older sibling.
by John Duvernoy
if you wander away from the picnic the wolves
by Ted Mathys
In all philosophies of consequence a small glass marble is hosted by a vast glass sphere.
by Norman Lock
I had lived always among the trees; and when, at last, I came out onto the Plain, my head reeled and I was sick.
by Melanie Rae Thon
In your father’s house, you and your father and your father’s wife and their children, your sisters, Juliana and Roxie, ate venison steak and mashed potatoes—green beans, sweet carrots—bread torn from the loaf, apples baked with raisins and cinnamon: earth and air, root and animal.
by Melissa Pritchard
Mother’s Day—our last, ma petite mere, sugared battle-ax, thorny womb, my life’s obsession.
by Marin Buschel
People had been disappearing.
by Terese Svoboda
A pink pyramid rises out of the flat ground, its faux granite facing of pressed shell ablaze with reflected sun.
by Elmo Lum
The truth is no one tells me anything. And the truth is even when they tell me something, sometimes the something they tell me is a lie.
by Maureen McHugh
In the middle of that slice there was an eye, a white center,/ the smoothness authentic as the skin of angels
by Vincent Katz
Morning lazy sounds
by Lucy Corin
A soldier came walking down the road, raw from encounters with the enemy, high on release, walking down the road with no money.
by Tim Horvath
It is hard to convey to you, who have never been to Ganzoneer, the comic futility that attends to any attempt to walk firmly there due to the elasticity of her streets, walls, and sidewalks, which send the newcomer flailing and sprawling.
by Shawn Vestal
Julian visits. He’s the kind of person who will say, over dinner, to your wife, that he believes tattoos are ruining pornography.
by Anne Sanow
Which ones do you hate, Mercy, she asks me.
by Nancy Leonard
Anthropologies of dance
by James McCorkle
Over shimmered flats, ray and tarpon,/ shimmering all silver/ light, titanium white
by Christopher Boucher
Then everything became slippery. Suddenly I couldn’t hold my wife’s hand, couldn’t grasp the chess pieces when we played.
by Robert Fernandez
Intending to begin at the billowing page, the flesh calls back its bulls, the divers arrange themselves, occur as gods (loa) occur: that is pliant, beds of mushrooms (pendentives), intersected by light.
by Alexander Vvedensky
translated by Eugene Ostashevsky
VENUS, sitting in her broken-down bedroom and trimming her last nails:
by Suzanne Rindell
Yet another idea of the self:/ a multitude of fragments/ temporarily moving as one,/ each dissent a quick death
by Julie Phillips Brown
A young Lady of distinguished Birth, Beauty, Wit, and Spirit, happened to be in a Box one Night at the Playhouse; where, though there were a great Number of celebrated Toasts, she perceived several Gentlemen extremely pleased themselves with entertaining a Woman who sat in a Corner of the Pit, and, by her Air and Manner of receiving them, might easily be known to be one of those who come there for no other Purpose, than to create Acquaintance with as many as seem desirous of it.
by D.E. Steward
Perspective as in great mountains where we’re less than ants in the dunes
by Martha Ronk
You enter the room in which each item has been carefully placed, not perfectly or according to any specific aesthetic rules, but by whim, one’s idiosyncratic sense that a certain item belongs here or exactly there, next to the other.
by John Holliday
There came a point when I had firmly instituted myself in The Assembly, had inserted myself in The Society, had rightly secured my position in The Outfit whose subject matter and topical goings-on are totally irrelevant and extraneous to the material being processed here,
by Lucas Southworth
There is a man and there is a woman. There is a house with high ceilings, painted white. There are photographs here, all hanging and framed, all shrouded in shadow.
by Scott Henkle
In the fall of 1936 Grazia Cosima Deledda wrote: When I was a young woman I left Sardinia for Rome, where I have lived ever since and where I sit now and write this, having not returned to Sardinia in many years.
by Brian Christian
Both my grandfather and my uncle have had careers as professional drummers, and my father and I are compulsive tappers, our fingers fidgeting endlessly on every available surface—a dashboard, a tabletop, a thigh.
by Sandra Newman
that certain peoples in those isles had heads filled with raw potato instead of brains, and this did not prevent them going on to achieve competitive salaries.
by David Huerta, translated by Mark Schafer
The surface is dark.
by T. Zachary Cotler
Extinct women and men are falling/ through the wires.
by Daniel Grandbois
The old man made a list of things that would not notice his death.
by Russell Banks
At six, well before the rest of the family woke, Jordan Groves left his bed.
by Mark Irwin
long, jointed bones, floating like a bird’s
by Nick Kocz
Roving packs of five-year olds roam the overgrown lots by the abandoned steel mills.
Compiled by Kevin Killian
North of ’51 is a land of endless snow and whispering pines
by Elizabeth Gumport
Every once in awhile, another ghost moves into the pool house.
by Paul Hoover
Sweet love, renew thy force, be it not said/ Thy edge should blunter be than appetite
by Eric Linsker
I forgot it is going to snow
by Martine Bellen
On the seventh day of the seventh month, Golden Bird Chinese Food opens its doors
by Jonathan Thirkield
I remember a tree of a painting.
by Amy Catanzano
Do you believe in the once indivisibility of atoms?
by Sven Birkerts
This morning, going against all convention, I turned right instead of left and took my circuit—one of my circuits—in reverse.
by Rachel Blau DuPlessis
17 May 1986./ Or whenever “now” is.
by Colleen Hollister
It’s not Jenny who runs, or Elizabeth.
by Laynie Browne
Today is day one of the Omer
by Matt Reeck
The rostrum is able to mail./ Malachy owns a keyshop.
by Julia Cohen
Comb the chrysalis from your beard to fasten the milkweed
by Monica McFawn
"Humankind yearns for its amoebaean roots, hence Abstraction." Pause. Pause.
by Kathleen Donohoe
We ought to search for Lil when the woods have thinned for winter.
by Christina Mengert
Inside blaze/ earthly figuration/ the lover in pieces at the mouth
by Andrew R. Touhy
Perhaps three days’ journey south, southwest, across a salt desert leading to an ancient wood dense with black cypress and a strain of ivy so fierce its creeping roots are said to choke even the soil it feeds upon, lies Cieloso, city of floating men and women.
by Tasha Haas
I remembered the sentence when I saw the old man and woman walking on the shore the man with a plank for a leg a war having kept the leg.
Notes on Wakefulness and Being
by Ellen Hinsey
The body resists its knowledge of oneness—as if to exist it must renounce that from which it was issued.
by Tayt Harlin
I had a great deal of trouble getting started. I don’t know whether I was afraid or just thought I was bullshitting the world and myself.
by Caroline Morrell
The moon is the kind of birthplace who,/ if in the process of blooming
by Román Antopolsky, translated by Michelle Gil-Montero
Hand on the wall my/ time in turn to/ mute
by Robert Urquhart
place Pigalle night nine teen o five/ The house of Dr Gachet
by Victoria Blake
On our honeymoon, I caught a stomach bug in Spain
by Rod Smith
The codes reawake
by Jason Grunebaum
Rob Nixon, do you remember me?
by James Grinwis
The Aztec baby came in on the back of the wolf.
by Michael Stewart
The Devil has black tangled hair.
by Kevin Magee
It is an hour. One/ of those hours.
by Juliana Leslie
How to compose a question: to spell the word blue/ in Paul Klee’s painting entitled Paul Klee’s The color blue
by Carlos Dews
The encounter I will describe here occurred in the Buenos Aires mid-winter of 2004; it has taken me until now to muster the courage to recount it and to conclude, as the gentleman involved insisted, that it contains a story that must be told.
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by Erika Howsare
We’d just gotten up./ We’d washed our faces./ Sky-blue mugs of coffee.
by Ariana Reines
The water needs a forder.
by Jason Schwartz
The knife recurs as a figure in certain rooms.
by Megan Pugh
We need new ways of living/ without resorting to crocodiles/ in wading pools
by Thomas Hopkins
My father, like every man of his generation in our country, never quite got over the loss of flight.
by Robert J. Bertholf
What is the relationship in your mind between musical forms and lexical forms in a poem, or what is the process for translating musical form into poetry?
by Rebecca Stoddard
"a swan and its reflection on the water’s black surface"
by Juan Martinez
The Coca-Cola executive was kind to me, though everyone was being kind that summer.
by Eva Hooker
Round uneven sumptuous it heaves up its weight
by Anthony Hawley
Spaces/ farther off/ are spaces/ farther off
by Philip Pinch
I flush out a bird.
by David Shields
Rain falls like needles, but Carla’s parents’ back porch, sheltered by a lean-to roof and enclosed by a tight green net, keeps us dry.
by Jon Thompson
How the entire story is enjambed with color
by Donald Revell
I hear the elephant music/ Of the rusted swings
by Kim Chinquee
I’d just turned thirteen. I was sitting in the hayloft.
by Rachel Levitsky
If I no longer exist, if in fact I may never have existed in the first place, then do I have a name?
by Tomaž Šalamun, translated by Brian Henry
You didn’t satisfy to us, man from Australia
by Noah Eli Gordon
A barge passing below a bridge is an example of a green horizon free from the expectation of green.
by Matthew Cheney
We had all failed by then—failed as husbands,
by Joseph Starr
I won’t need to tell you how we built it, the dwelling, the house.
by Justine Haemmerli
I am going to write a story called “To Be Taken.”
by Joni Tevis
Some cave naked for fear of contaminating the water they mean to study.
by Sandra Meek
Another pearl scimitar / sheathed in fawn
for Disordered Dreamers
by Karen Russell
Emma and I are curled together in the basket of the Insomnia Balloon, our breath coming in soft quick bursts.
by Erin Lambert
If the landscape has a pattern then it begins with your wrist
by Andrew Mossin
A voice comes to one in the dark. Her voice or mine.
by Brian Richardson
Above the Arctic Circle the sun sets and does not rise again for weeks.
by Adam Golaski
From an aperture she has made in the Venetian blinds she watches leaves fall.
by Marcella Durand
Coming across the floor to greet us
by Justin Lacour
Back then nostalgia was a doll, / you could swallow.
by Logan Burns
Upon the comal crop, winter, I separate what’s mine. Mimic me.
by Brian Lucas
Thorny sky the possession enjoyment brings suspended in a circle of blue messages.
by Toby Olson
There are stories handed down through generations, not because children desire and are in need of them, but because their parents now understand them and can remember sitting at the knees of their own parents, listening to the telling.
by Rebecca Reynolds
Take the sentence and divide out:
by Juan Emar
A 1937 story, with an introduction by Pablo Neruda and an illustration by the author, translated into English for the first time by Daniel Borzutzky.
by Terese Svoboda
We don’t start then. It’s an hour later, after snakes, after monkeys.
by Megan Martin
They were bored, highly irritated by the goings-on of the world, not to mention sick and tired of one another, so they decided to make Texarkana again.
by Dawn Raffel
The woman is awake now. She opens her purse.
by Nadia Herman Colburn
In the box there was no beginning and no end, but an openness stopped on all sides by the edges.
by Thomas Hummel
if keeper shall her self infected house / twenty eight after the person dying
by Jason Schwartz
The bed recurs as a figure in certain burnings—the torches fixed to boards, for skeletons, and the boiling oil in pots, in urns, in bowls.
by Marjorie Welish
When next more likely pantheonic backward-looking aspect, / it obtains that coin.
by Aaron Bannister
Conviction is an engine, yes, / but idleness bubbles and babbles, too.
by Michael C. Boyko
The researcher walks to the nine o’clock station and circles the cube, taking notes and making sketches.
by Rosmarie Waldrop
Impossible. Without the idea of counting. To imagine numbers.
by Matthew Cooperman
Poet, translator and publisher, Rosmarie Waldrop has, over the last forty years, brilliantly aided and abetted the conversations of the avant garde between America and the European continent.
Three Poems
by Daniel Coudriet
All of the children held in a blue sweater, / who is it knitting them together with tiny thumbs.
Levittown
by Lesley Yalen
On the broken slate under the Epstein’s carport, eight feet in eight canvas shoes made a circle.
Two Poems
by Catherine Imbriglio
I have no one to talk with about my behavior.
Birth of a Brother
by Sandra Leong
Sometimes I stay home from work without any excuse.
by Ashley VanDoorn
Executives have been instructed with this defense:
by Andrew Mossin
Of surrender or denial, surrender and denial
by Elizabeth Sanger
Finally, how to carry the sky/ at twilight? A rose so cool
by Sarah Riggs
Here is a glass on this table.
by Soyoung Jung
It starts with examining our shores.
by Jenny Boully
And if it were possible to pursue the bleeding heart dove to her nest, what then?
by Can Xue, translated by Rong Cai
When all reasons to ‘live’ are negated, and when one sentences oneself to death
by Andrew Zawacki
Blue as already the shoreline
by Friedrich Hölderlin, translated by Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff
You walk above in the light, / Soulful genius, on a yielding floor!
by Paul McCormick
Memory of silt and blush.
Robert Creeley
May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005
Tributes
by Kimberly Burwick
I leave with that voice? In Austria the alps are blowing
by Ted Mathys
imprisoned on the fissure the figure considers
by Julianne Buchsbaum
an eternity of New Wave
by Noah Eli Gordon
THEY SAID THE SMALLEST HUMAN HORSE WAS DEAD IN YOUR COSTUME
by Catherine Cafferty
I would walk a tightrope for you
by Joseph Campana
1. First, Audrey is in the garden. She will be there in the end.
by Meghan Ferrill
Ibak is my name.
by Toby Olson
Lingers now in peace upon the swollen tide.
by Sandra Meek
Where would it stop, this resemblance / to morning, this striped coat of climates
by Rachel Blau DuPlessis
A half glass carafe,/a choice red ochre chalk
by G. C. Waldrep
Ask if this showing will make a better weave.
by Eric Baus
The way I talk is a result of the way I hear her I was told but it took how long to show up in cursive.
An Interview with Marjorie Welish by Matthew Cooperman
What informs the decision to paint or write is a question about what necessitates the choice.
by Stephen Ratcliffe
pale blue white haze in front of the vertical plane
by Joshua Harmon
shored up inside still
by Kira Henehan
And then I died and went to France.
by Rebecca Black
Play your hand, Madame.
by Ben Doyle
I first drew shoes on an animal a long long time ago.
by Leonard Schwartz
A sound like the wind possibly, sighing at what is significant
by Brian Swann
It drew in my eyes, a slab, on it a huge white fish
by Jen Bervin
Selections from the book forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. Move your cursor over and away from each image to see the poem surrounded by or removed from its original source.
by Patrizia Villani
The man is in the backyard, quoting to the stars a secret
by John Verbos
I’m telling you this because you don’t remember.
by Sally Keith
I keep a math.
by David Foster Wallace
An excerpt from Wallace’s nonfiction book on infinity, forthcoming from Atlas Press.
by Michael Harris Cohen
Before me lies a man.
by Marc Robert
These things without nature, proper nature that is, of a terrestrial kind.
by César Vallejo
Three poems from Vallejo’s The Black Heralds, translated by Rebecca Seiferle
by Terese Svoboda
Ma, there’s rope in my soup.
by Thomas Bernhard
The first appearance in English of a major early Bernhard poem that was Bernhard’s second full book of poetry.
by Brian Evenson and Stacy Dacheux
In January, during the deepest part of winter, after two years of pleading on my part not to mention numerous gifts and blandishments and increasingly lucrative proposals, she once again agreed to be photographed.
by Ben Lerner
When a longing exceeds its object, a suburb is founded.
by Michael Hayes
There was nothing left for me after that but the beach—the grey afternoon—bells of cable cars over the lyme grass and a field of desiccated husks sprawling along the dunes.
by Arielle Greenberg
There’s a tower the lake calls Brother.
by Chris Robson
In prehistoric times there was balance.
by Amy England
We divide the rectangular glass terrarium diagonally across the bottom, into triangular halves of clay and sand.
by Gustaf Sobin
This might have been a story about Vincent van Gogh.
by Lisa Lubasch
Tall words wring hands, though not effortlessly
by Frances Brent
Aunt is sleeping, sitting up, but the chair is missing;
by Micaela Morrissette
Thirty-six percent of unbidden speech is a lie
by Gabe Hudson
But first I want to ask you one simple question. CLARENCE T. FORDHAM, can you tell me what you accomplished yesterday?
by Malinda Markham
there is no mnemonic for lips
by Laird Hunt
Cold has descended on the county.
by Carrie St. George Comer
a woman’s face split like a potato by a bullet, her eye on a spring
by Quintan Ana Wikswo
Up in the hills the talk was of the men all disappeared and presumed dead.
by Timothy Liu
Vocalise haunted still by faces smeared with ash.
by John Taggart
Song after a song after story/one of the stories which end in stumps or falsely
by Matthew Derby
Nobody knows what we are doing here. We are not entirely sure that the war is still happening.
by Heather Ramsdell
Thank you for saying pathos instead of pathetic, keeping us the same size as before.
by Martha Ronk
Compulsive winding, bandaging
by Reginald Shepherd
He’s sleeplessness pulled through/a seive
by Peter Gizzi
not because there is a road/ and a woman walking, nor the trees lining this road,/ the light at half mast
by Duncan Dobbelmann
At 4:14 PM on September the ninth my imaginary trough became deeper, allowing for other realities to sidle up next to this one and demand the attention they had been deprived of during the preceding monomaniacal months.
by Shelley Jackson
Being a disquisition.
by Christopher Sorrentino
Let me clarify: I was a boy who spoke into his eyeglasses.
by Thomas Bernhard
The brain is so unfree, and the system, into which the brain is born, is so free, the system so free and my brain so unfree, that system and brain are coming to an end.
Translated by James Reidel. Click here for German original
by Alec Michod
It’s not like she’s one of those super mega hyper self-conscious overly emotionally hypertrophied wrecks prone to sudden--unexpected--grandiose--fits and spats and family-value-meal freak outs.
by Isaac Babel
A fat, neckless woman, looking like a fish jammed into a frock coat, hurried with lowered head over to the witness box. Translated by Peter Constantine.
by Natazsa Goerke
The narration will drag on into infinity, but the man to whom I owe the most important moment of my life is P. Hammer-Hammer. Translated from the Polish by W. Martin.
by Brenda Coultas
I’m the life-sized rag doll strapped to my master’s shoes dancing salsa in subway.
by Amy Catanzano
Exits got larger and larger
by Julia Elliott
It is true that men, upon occasion, generate wild beasts within their bodies.
by Rabia Sandage
The rain came the day before and washed us all out.
by D.E. Steward
Her hair had become too sparse to hold a pin
by Sheila Kohler
We were by the river on a blue ground-sheet
by Gary Hill
Disturbance (Among the Jars)
by George Quasha and Charles Stein
Standing inside the celestial vault, looking out to the horizon and beyond—
by David Chirico
You arrive in a small seaside town where the installations of a little-known artist are currently on view.
by Amy Havel
Take, for example, the phone call.
by Ben Doyle
The new stories are like the old ones/only smaller.
(Netscape version)
(Internet Explorer version)
by Rosalind Palermo Stevenson
Everything must be kept spotlessly clean.
by Steven Hendricks
1 A slim view of the outside world.
by Duncan Dobbelmann
I withdrew yet farther into my shell, snug as a meadow louse in a weedy mausoleum.
by Joanna Howard
In a lavender twilight, on the west side of an abandoned pasture gone to hay in the greenest part of our state, a mendicant, a scarved pale beauty with silver bell earrings, curled to sleep on kinked metal filings on the floor of a windowless farm shed gone to rot.
by Damon Krukowski
The memory theater burned, and in its ruins I could remember only portions of scripture, commentary, history, poetry, biographies of notable men, successful recipes, homeopathy, botany, and the classification of animals.
by Michael Neff
Pelvis sandstone beside symbols of question
by Dennis Barone
This is how we begin: a little paint here, a little dab there.
by Stephen Ratcliffe
blue plane of water in motion below line of horizon
by Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869)
My chains are no more than links of hair in the flames.
Translated from the Urdu by Andrew McCord.
by Weldon Kees
In the front room, his sister and some of her high school friends were playfully doing something to the dog that was causing it to howl in pain.
by David Shields and Samantha Ruckman
Got strip-searched in Tel Aviv while trying to leave the country.
by Tom LeClair
To compete with other road shows --monster trucks, heavy metal acts, wrestlemanias --and undersell local discounters, we’re a tour de force and four-day display of surprise.
by Shelley Jackson
Herman Godfrey is a machine, a miniature bachelor.
by Eleni Sikelianos
the universe/was the size of a darkening/string
by Michael Eastman
Fourteen photographs of horses, with an introduction by William H. Gass.
by James McCorkle
The dog the dog, the ashes the ashes
by Carol Moldaw
Your mind unkinks itself like carded wool
by Yoko Tawada
the rest of the region turned down to low flame, only the grinning of trees goes on incomparatively long
Translation by Susan Bernofsky.
by Paul West
How do you get to be called a macaque?
by Kathrin Röggla
the rest of the region turned down to low flame, only the grinning of trees goes on incomparatively long
Translation by W. Martin, with the German original also available.
by Meredith Stricker
a series of messages,/exchanges & encounters
by Steven Moore
A report on the memorial service of one of America’s greatest novelists.
by Paul West
When all that metal was flying about, it was safer to have a name for it.
by Jedediah Berry
Story time done but plenty left over.
by Reginald Shepherd
Which it watches, where it waits
by Paul West
The English chair puts you to sleep, the French one readies you for an exam.
by Aimee Parkison
Think of our silhouettes lengthening across the bare stage, the creak of the wooden boards beneath our feet.
by Sally Keith
This truss cuts early Autumn’s blue plane.
by Elaine Equi
My father screamed whenever the telephone rang.
by Michael Bergstein
The universe is only shredded by men, she thought.
An excerpt from Descent from Abyssinia
by Andrew Levy
There are questions from the radar.
Web Conjunctions Archives: 1998
1997