How Poems Work Rob Budde on Ken Belford’s “Slick Reckoning” In the poem there are no forbidden gaps. What is added & what is replaced fills the lattice spacing of…
Category: How Poems Work
LAWS OF REST Examine your clothing before going out, for you may be carrying something without knowing it. Do not place a wick into a bowl of oil, for then…
DREAM SONG 4 Filling her compact & delicious body with chicken páprika, she glanced at me twice. Fainting with interest, I hungered back and only the fact of her husband…
WAVING ADIEU, ADIEU, ADIEU That would be waving and that would be crying, Crying and shouting and meaning farewell, Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre, Just to…
Bough Down, Karen Green. Siglio, 2013. by Elisa Gabbert In comedy, a “callback” is a joke that makes reference to an earlier joke, to “build audience rapport.” In Bough Down, a…
Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache I. We come into the world. We come into the world and there it is. The sun is there. The brown of the river…
Passing Remark In scenery I like flat country. In life I don’t like much to happen. In personalities I like mild colorless people. And in colors I prefer gray and…
Death Fugue Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night we drink and we drink it…
Doris: the muscular work Time’s a free illusion of right’s triumph, of reward, which cordons, Of justice, meaning boundaries; bound. Where law’s unruly or limitless Respect may be owed perhaps,…
to mother as an aid to memory You become a different person than you thought, some intimate animal falling over itself. These bones build a holy sepulcher for blessed days.…
There are states of heightened awareness in which the smallest stimulus can set you off—when nervous or frightened, when being tickled, during laughing fits. Farrah Field’s poems create worlds this…
GATE BY W.S. MERWIN Once I came back to the leaves just as they were falling into the rattling of magpies and the waving flights through treetops beyond the long…