Poetry

Five Poems - K. Eltinaé

fulani blues

I have a hard time telling mother
she should get out and exercise
so we talk about people she admires for hours.

Fulan al fulani's son married a girl
he saw on his uncle's wedding dvd.
Took them three weeks to ask about the family,
will you come for the wedding?

Five Poems - Ace Boggess

Love Is the Journey

Days I’ve driven around the city
because I came too early to pick you up from work.
Sitting in an idling car, running in place,
waiting, didn’t seem an option.
I needed movement, action
on a small scale. I circled blocks,
listening to music, smoking out the open window, 

Five Poems - Lynne Sachs

When filmmaker Lynne Sachs turned fifty, she dedicated herself to writing a poem for every year of her life, so far. Each of the fifty poems investigates the relationship between a singular event in Sachs’ life and the swirl of events beyond her domestic universe. Published by Tender Buttons Press, Year by Year Poems juxtaposes Sachs’ finished poems, which move from her birth in 1961 to her half-century marker in 2011, with her original handwritten first drafts.

Eight Poems

Merry Go Round

Making Love in This Language

I've never made love
in Romanian, never moaned in my native tongue.
Though I've laid on mown lawns wondering what my parents gasped
when they made me.
Or what they faked when
making love to their latest US-born
spouses in this language with countless words
for anger, for abandonment, yet none
to inhabit the rawness of flesh after sex,
none for that sacred spentness.
Maybe ecstasy is a sport
in a stadium my friends swear
the South rise

Double Buns

Benny

 

I hover around the buffet’s sushi section.

The sushi chefs replace each piece as they are taken from the table.

I place two pieces on my plate and one in my mouth every five minutes for forty-five minutes.

I slink away for a minute to talk to my uncle.

He has flown in for the dinner, thrown by the yeshiva, honoring his father, my late grandfather.

I like talking to my uncle about women, but when other people approach us, he starts preaching about the joys of travelling.

Capstone

Lit Night Trees
among the blue desks was a meager
audition for adulthood crumpled
 
into a mess of wooden shadows reciting
barbell lines on the film school second
 
floor (stair steps closer to Orion) how
I was dreaming young of the world’s
 
grand magnanimousness suffused
with balloons that smelled of palm frond
 
everglades my school-sanctioned camera
would record the nightglow trees by lights  
 
of Coe Lake where it snowed pine cones

Broken Compass

Broken Compass

1.

I prefer to think

I first felt the muse flutter

those immortal nights

when I was young

and even suffering seemed new.

 

But life is again becoming dull,

where again I find this empty shell

echoes

2.

The second time

I put my foot down,

Box

i want to put you in a box
i would tape around the box
i would kick the box
you’d rock and rock in the box
i’d hold the box close to my chest
i’d hear your whisper inside
you do what you think is best,
so i’d ship the box
then i’d ask for it back
you’d grow tired in the box
but you know you cannot rest,
penance, we’d call it
you would laugh        
and i would not,
i’d think about your long limbs in the box
how—if i e

Between the Sky & Earth, We Find More People, More Space

Between the Sky & Earth - image

So, I sing -gon (γωνία) —

 

Bend to life like           the shallow spring I played in

& got high next to

 in the summers watching carefully

for watersnakes

& kingfishers

 

So, I sing -gon (γωνία) —

 

Angle my body,                       like a corner into you

forgetting that the hope of sleep

brings just another

boring tomorrow

 

So, I sing -gon (γόνος) —

 

Follow my mother

& hers back to a city,

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