Me in Paradise by Brenda Shaughnessy

Oh, to be ready for it, unfucked, ever-fucked.
To have only one critical eye that never
divides a flaw from its lesson.

To play without shame. To be a woman
who feels only the pleasure of being used
and who reanimates the user's

anguished release in a land
for the future to relish, to buy
new tights for, to parade in fishboats.

To scare up hope without fear of hope,
not holding the hole, I will catch
the superbullet in my throat

and feel its astounding force
with admiration. Absorbing its kind
of glory. I must be someone

with very short arms to have lost you,
to be checking the windows
of the pawnshop renting space in my head,

which pounds with all the clarity
of a policeman on my southernmost door.
To wish and not jinx it: to wish

and not fish for it: to wish and forget it.
To ratchet myself up with hot liquid
and find a true surprise.

Prowling the living room for the lightning,
just one more shock,
to bring my slow purity back.

To miss you without being so damn cold
all the time. To hold you without dying otherwise.
To die without losing death as an alternative.

To explode with flesh, without collapse.
To feel sick in my skeleton, in all the serious
confetti of my cells, and know why.

Loving you has made me so scandalously
beautiful. To give myself to everyone but you.
To luck out of you. To make any other mistake.

Asylum by Carey Fries

I still hate myself for what I did, taunting feral
cats in the isolation room, a suede bite

glove. So cold, they hissed at the fog
of my breath, squeezed their bodies to kennel

back corners, yellow eyes flashing. I couldn't leave
the door open for long; some loose, tore

bags of cat food, spilt kibble, bits of shredded paper bag
littering white floor. My fingers thumping wearily

along silver bars, knowing any second one could pounce
down the ten foot stack and maul me.

So I took a hose from the yard, dragged it as if choking
a snake, the long jade body writhing

and sticking to intolerant ice. I climbed
on top of the cages, my head at the drop

ceiling, poking through, running water
over the floor. The cats groaned, maybe afraid.

With my thumb over the flow, I doused every
pair of eyes I could see, the entire room dripping.

Feral cats scrambled up walls, drowned claws
scraping beige paint. I managed to detain

only two with a net, but felt triumphant even so, though
the cats were soaked and later died because of it

and the cold. I believed it was their fault, that I
couldn't get near enough to dry or warm them and anyways

they were going to be destroyed, and I hated them
because they were homeless ungrateful bastards, who had

created other bastards to replace them before they got here.
Because they could look me in the eye with no shame

or request for love and it scared me, made me breathe
a heavy fog, because they couldn't help their stiff

looks, bodies proud as African lions
defending an awkward, encased pride.

And maybe I can say I was thrilled
to torture them, tease them. A leather glove guarding

my fist. They snarled and swung out long
claws, curled around my hand as if

playing. I wanted to break that spirit.

After Prayers, Lie Cold by C.S Lewis

Arise my body, my small body, we have striven
Enough, and He is merciful; we are forgiven.
Arise small body, puppet-like and pale, and go,
White as the bed-clothes into bed, and cold as snow,
Undress with small, cold fingers and put out the light,
And be alone, hush'd mortal, in the sacred night,
-A meadow whipt flat with the rain, a cup
Emptied and clean, a garment washed and folded up,
Faded in colour, thinned almost to raggedness
By dirt and by the washing of that dirtiness.
Be not too quickly warm again. Lie cold; consent
To weariness' and pardon's watery element.
Drink up the bitter water, breathe the chilly death;
Soon enough comes the riot of our blood and breath.

Lies I've Told My 3 Year Old Recently by Raul Gutierrez

Trees talk to each other at night.
All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.
Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.
Tiny bears live in drain pipes.
If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.
The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.
Everyone knows at least one secret language.
When nobody is looking, I can fly.
We are all held together by invisible threads.
Books get lonely too.
Sadness can be eaten.
I will always be there.

Love Poem from First Indian on the Moon by Sherman Alexie

I was a fisherman for 15,000 years
before you stumbled onto my shore
your leg sea-heavy and awkward.

Do you remember?

How strange to know corn saved your life
but it's always simple gifts that matter most.

So when I give you a can of commodity corn
instead of a dozen roses
it doesn't mean I don't love you
it means I want to save you

from hunger, disease, the long winter.
I can wrap you in old blankets
that smell like me

and I can hold you
with these hands
that held the spear,
that still hold the tribe

inches above the surface
of this river, this water

still and almost perfect, waiting
for the sudden
motion of arm, that strike
of stone into flesh.

We have learned that love is never civilized.

Why Do You Stay Up So Late by Marvin Bell

Late at night, I no longer speak for effect.
I speak the truth without the niceties.
I am hundreds of years old but do not know how many hundreds.
The person I was does not know me.
The young poets, with their reenactments of the senses, are asleep.
I am myself asleep at the outer reaches.
I have lain down in the snow without stepping outside.
I am frozen on the white page.
Then it happens, a spark somewhere, a light through the ice.
The snow melts, there appear fields threaded with grain.
The blue moon blue sky returns, that heralded night.
How earthly the convenience of time.
I am possible.
I have in me the last unanswered question.
Yes, there are walls, and water stains on the ceiling.
Yes, there is energy running through the wires.
And yes, I grow colder as I write of the sun rising.
This is not the story, the skin paling and a body folded over a table.
If I die here they will say I died writing.
Never mind the long day that now shrinks backward.
I crumple the light and toss it into the wastebasket.
I pull down the moon and place it in a drawer.
A bitter wind of new winter drags the dew eastward.
I dig in my heels.

When You Are Old by W. B. Yeats

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And his face amid a crowd of stars.

When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone by Galway Kinnel

1
When one has lived a long time alone,
one refrains from swatting the fly
and lets him go, and one hesitates to strike
the mosquito, though more than willing to slap
the flesh under her, and one lifts the toad
from the pit too deep to hop out of
and carries him to the grass, without minding
the poisoned urine he slicks his body with,
and one envelops, in a towel, the swift
who fell down the chimney and knocks herself
against window glass and releases her outside
and watches her fly free, a life line flung at reality,
When one has lived a long time alone.

2
When one has lived a long time alone,
one grabs the snake behind the head
and holds him until he stops trying to stick
the orange tongue - which splits at the end
into two black filaments and jumps out
like a fire-eater's belches and has little
in common with the pimpled pink lumps that shapes
sounds and sleeps inside the human mouth -
into one's flesh, and clamps it between his jaws,
letting the gaudy tips show, as children do
when concentrating, and as very likely
one does oneself, without knowing it,
when one has lived a long time alone.

3
When one has lived a long time alone,
among regrets so immense the past occupies
nearly all the room there is in consciousness,
one notices in the snake's eyes, which look back
without giving any less attention to the future,
the first coating of the opaque, milky-blue
leucoma snakes get when about to throw their skins
and become new - meanwhile continuing,
of course, to grow old - the same bleu Passe
that bleaches the corneas of the blue-eyed
when they lie back at the end and look for heaven,
a fading one knows means they will never find it
when one has lived a long time alone.

4
When one has lived along time alone,
one holds the snake near the loudspeaker disgorging
gorgeous sounds and watches him crook
his forepart into four right angles,
as though trying to slow down the music
flowing through him, in order to absorb it
like milk of paradise into the flesh,
until a glimmering appears at his mouth,
such a drop of intense fluid as, among humans,
could form after long exciting at the tip
of the penis, and as he straightens himself out
he has the pathos one finds in the penis,
when one has lived a long time alone.

5
When one has lived a long time alone,
one falls to poring upon a creature,
contrasting it’s eternity’s-face to one’s own
full of hours, taking note of each difference,
exaggerating it, making it everything,
until the other is utterly other, and then,
with hard effort, possibly with tongue sticking out,
going back over each difference once again
and canceling it, seeing nothing now
but likeness, until ... half an hour later
one stares awake, taken aback at how eagerly
one drops off into the happiness of kinship,
when one has lived a long time alone.

6
When one has lived a long time alone
and listens at morning to mourning doves
sound their kyrie eleison, or the small thing
spiritualized upon a twig cry, “pewit-pheobe!”
or at midday grasshoppers scratch the thighs’
needfire awake, or peabody birds send schoolboys’
whistlings across the field, and at dusk, undamped,
unforgiving chinks, as from marble cutters’ chisels,
or at nightfall polliwogs just burst into frogs
raise their ave verum corpus – listens to those
who hop or fly call down upon us the mercy
of other tongues – one hears them as inner voices,
when one has lived a long time alone.

7
When one has lived a long time alone,
one knows that consciousness consummates,
and as the conscious one among these others
uttering their compulsory cries of being here -
the least flycatcher witching up “che-bec!”
or red-headed woodpecker clanging out his music
from a metal drainpipe, or ruffed grouse drumming
“thrump thrump thrump thrump-thrump-
thrump-thrump-rup-rup-ruprup-rup-r-r-r-r-r-r”
deep in the woods, all of them in time’s unfolding
trying to cry themselves into self-knowing -
one knows one is here to hear them into shining,
when one has lived a long time alone.

8
When one has lived a long time alone,
one likes alike the pig, who brooks no deferment
of gratification, and the porcupine, or thorned pig,
who enters the cellar but not the house itself
because of eating down the cellar stairs on the way up,
and one likes the worm, who by bunching herself together
and expanding works her way through the ground,
no less than the butterfly, who totters full of worry
among the day lilies, as they darken,
and more and more one finds one likes
any other species better than one’s own,
which has gone amok, making one self-estranged,
when one has lived a long time alone.

9
When one has lived a long time alone,
sour, misanthropic, one fits to one’s defiance
the satanic boast, it is better to reign
than submit on earth, and forgets
one’s kind – the way by now the snake does,
who stops trying to get to the floor and lingers
all across one’s body – slumping into its contours,
adopting its temperature – and abandons hope
of the sweetness of friendship or love,
before long can barely remember what they are,
and covets the stillness in inorganic matter,
in a self-dissolution one may not know how to halt,
when one has lived a long time alone.

10
When one has lived a long time alone,
and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,
and the bullfrog head half out of water repeats
the sexual cantillations of his first spring,
and the snake lowers himself over the threshold
and disappears among the stones, one sees
they all live to mate with their kind, and one knows,
after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken
away from one’s kind, toward the kingdom of strangers,
the hard prayer inside one’s own singing
is to come back, if one can, to one’s own,
a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,
when one has lived a long time alone.

11
When one has lived a long time alone,
one wants to live again among men and women,
to return to that place where one’s ties with the human
broke, where the disquiet of death and now also
of history glimmers its firelight on faces,
where the gaze of the new baby looks past the gaze
of the great granny, and where lovers speak,
on lips blowsy from kissing, that language
the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak
blether the song that is both earth’s and heaven’s,
until the sun has risen, and they stand
in the light of being made one: kingdom come,
when one has lived a long time alone.

Shapechangers In Winter by Margaret Atwood

I.
Through the slit of our open window, the wind
comes in and flows around us, nothingness
in motion, like time. The power of what is not there.
the snow empties itself down, a shadow turning
to indigo, obliterating
everything out there, roofs, cars, garbage cans,
dead flowerstalks, dog turds, it doesn’t matter.
you could read this as indifference
on the part of the universe, or else a relentless
forgiveness: all of our
scratches and blots and mortal
wounds and patched-up jobs
wiped clean in the snow’s huge erasure.
I feel it as a pressure,
an added layer:
above the white waterfall of snow
thundering down; then attic, moth-balled
sweaters, nomadic tents,
the dried words of old letters;
then stairs, then children, cats and radiators, peeling paint,
us in our bed, the afterglow
of a smoky fire, our one candle flickering;
below us, the kitchen in the dark, the wink
of pots on shelves; then books and tools, then cellar
and furnace, graying dolls, a bicycle,
the whole precarious geology of house
crisscrossed with hidden mousetrails,
and under that a buried river
that seeps up through the cement
floor every spring,
and the tree roots snouting their slow way
into the drains;
under that, the bones
of our ancestors, or if not theirs, someone’s,
mixed with a biomass of nematodes;
under that, bedrock, then molten
stone and the earth’s fiery core;
and sideways, out into the city, street
and corner store and mall
and underpass, then barns and ruined woodlands, continent
and island, oceans, mists
of story drifting
on the tide like seaweed, animal
species crushed and blinking out,
and births and illnesses, hatred and love infra-
red, compassion fleshtone, prayer ultra-
violet; then rumours, alternate waves
of sad peace and sad war,
and then the air, and then the scintillating ions,
and then the stars. That’s where
we are.

2.
Some centuries ago, when we lived at the edge
of the forest, on nights like this
you would have put on your pelt of a bear
and shambled off to prowl and hulk
among the trees, and be a silhouette of human
fears against the snowbank.
I would have chosen fox;
I liked the jokes,
the doubling back on my tracks,
and, let’s face it, the theft.
Back then, I had many forms:
the sliding in and out
of my own slippery eelskin,
and yours as well; we were each other’s
iridescent glove, the deft body
all sleight-of-hand and illusion.
Once we were lithe as pythons, quick
and silvery as herring, and we still are, momentarily,
except our knees hurt.
Right now we’re content to huddle
under the shed feathers of duck and goose
as the wind pours like a river
we swim in by keeping still,
like trout in a current.
Every cell
in our bodies has renewed itself
so many times since then, there’s
not much left, my love,
of the originals. We’re footprints
becoming limestone, or think of it
as coal becoming diamond. Less
flexible, but more condensed;
and no more scales or aliases,
at least on the outside. Though we’ve accumulated,
despite ourselves, other disguises:
you as a rumpled elephant—
hide suitcase with white fur,
me as a bramble bush. Well, the hair
was always difficult. Then there’s
the eye problems: too close, too far, you’re a blur.
I used to say I’d know you anywhere,
but it’s getting harder.

3.
This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year’s threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future;
the place of caught breath, the door
of a vanished house left ajar.
Taking hands like children
lost in a six-dimensional
forest, we step across.
The walls of the house fold themselves down,
and the house turns
itself inside out, as a tulip does
in its last full-blown moment, and our candle
flares up and goes out, and the only common
sense that remains to us is touch,
as it will be, later, some other
century, when we will seem to each other
even less what we were.
But that trick is just to hold on
through all appearances; and so we do,
and yes, I know it’s you;
and that is what we will come to, sooner
or later, when it’s even darker
than It is now, when the snow is colder,
when it’s darkest and coldest
and candles are no longer any use to us
and the visibility is zero: Yes.
It’s still you. It’s still you.

You Don't Know What Love Is by Kim Addonizio

You don’t know what love is
but you know how to raise it in me
like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to
wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.
How to start clean. This love even sits up
and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.
Any day now she’ll try to eat solid food. She’ll want
to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive
to some cinderblock shithole in the desert
where she can drink and get sick and then
dance in nothing but her underwear. You know
where she’s headed, you know she’ll wake up
with an ache she can’t locate and no money
and a terrible thirst. So to hell
with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt
and your tongue down my throat
like an oxygen tube. Cover me
in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

Polemic #1 by Honor Moore

This is the poem to say "Write poems, women" because I want to
read them, because for too long, we have had mostly men's lives
or men's imaginations wandering through
our lives, because even the women's lives we have details of
come through a male approval desire filter which diffuses
imagination, that most free part of ourselves.
One friend is so caught on the male-approval-desire hook she
can't even write a letter. Ink on paper would be clear
evidence of failure to be Sylvia
Plath or Doris Lessing, or (in secret) William Butler Years,
Hilda Dolittle, the poet who hid behind "H.D.", splashed
herself with ink just before writing to make her
feel free, indifferent toward the mere means of writing.

I would take
ink baths if I'd be splashed free of male approval desire.
This male-approval-desire filter and its
attached hook, abbreviated M-A-D filter and hook,
have driven many women mad, could drive me mad, won't because
I see all the other women fighting the M
Male A Approval D Desire, and I clench my fists to hold
their hands, and I am not as alone as my grandmother
was who painted, was free and talented and
who for some M-A-D reason married, had kids, went mad and
stopped finishing her paintings at thirty-five.
M-A-D is the filter through which we're pressed to see ourselves--
if we don't, we won't get published, sold, or exhibited--
I blame none of us for not challenging it
except not challenging it may drive us mad. It is present
in the bravest of us. It comes out in strange shapes, escapes
like air through the tiniest hole in the strongest
woman's self. It is a slaughterhouse waiting for the calf
or lamb-sized art, for the sausage-ready little pig poems
which never get to the supermarket: They
are lost in the shuffle, or buried as ladies' poems have been
in bureau drawers for years. Male Approval Desire is a cog
in the Art Delivery Machine: It instructs
by quiet magic women to sing proper pliant tunes for
father, lover, piper who says he has the secret, but
wants ours; it teaches us to wear cloaks labeled
Guinevere, become damsels, objects in men's power joustings
like her; lets us shimmer, disappear, promise to rise like a
Lady of the Lake, but we drown--real, not phantom.
The Art Delivery Machine is ninety-nine and forty-
four hundredths percent pure male sensibility, part of
a money system ninety-nine and forty
four hundredths percent pure white-male-power-structure

controlled. So
you may wonder why I write this poem and say "Write your own poems,
women!" Won't we be crushed trying? No. We have more
now, fifty-six hundredths percent of the Art Delivery
Machine. We can't be stopped. So I write this polemic I
call a poem, say "Write poems, women." I want to
read them. I have seen you watching, holding on and

watching, but
I see your lips moving. You have stories to tell, strong stories:
I want to hear your minds as well as hold your hands.

We Say We Love Each Other by Minnie Bruce Pratt

You say: The trouble is: we don't understand
each other.
Your sounds have fascinated me
from the first, the way you laugh in your throat
like a saxophone. But last time the radio played
reedy brass, low sexy, I started crying. (Last time,
in the car alone, and jazz being played in a room
in a distant city).
Lately I understand this:
I want your voice, mysterious music of your body,
yet our words, gestures, are from different languages.

If we are sitting on the couch, eating oranges,
sweet acid, like lovemaking,
and the phone
rings in another room:
you answer, you murmur,
my stomach vibrates, deep drum flutter at your sound.

You come back. I do not ask Who was it?
To me, intrusion, a push into your room.
To you, removal, uncaring of closeness:

Then we are sitting on the couch, abrupt
separate. The bitter orange rinds sit
in a neat pile on the round dish before us.

I am sitting in a place made for me
by women, generations, Scot, Irish, sitting
on a little bit of land, holding on,
survival on an island, isolation, a closed mouth
in their own kitchen, self-containment.

You are sitting in a place made for you
by women, generations, Jews in Spain, Holland,
Russia, the Pale, Poland, Roumania, America,
the pogroms, no bit of land safe, none
to be owned as home, survival by asking, asking,
knowing where every one was, enemy, family.

Later if we talk about this moment, we observe,
abstract. Even as I write, I make it distant,

but we are sitting on the couch: separate, not abstract.
History speaks like a voice through our bodies:
how often we do not know that it is this we do not
understand.
Fascination with what we have not known:
Your hand gripping my chin, drawing me to your mouth.
My interest in a yellow gingko leaf, in veins in my palm,
my look up, the sudden kiss I give you.

What we fight bitterly: voices scraping against
demanding, selfish.
Where is the future we spoke of,
between us, stronger by difference?
We sit on the couch
trying to understand each other, pointing to an object:
What did you mean?
Lists, signs, paper with pictures,
paper with words, poems, photographs,
repeating, explaining, exasperation, anger.
Asking:
What did you mean?
The other says she loves: how believe
when her words, her gestures, are not the ones that speak
love to you?

We sit on the couch. You rub my feet,
my heels are small oval drums. The radio plays
something we can't dance to. The room smells of oranges.
After a while, we say again we love each other.

Trying Again by Dahlia Ravikovitch

If I could only get all of you,
how could I ever get all of you -
even more than beloved icons,
more than a quarried mountainside,
more than mines
of burning coal,
say the mines of extinguished coal
and the breath of day burning like a furnace.

If I could get you for all the years,
how could I ever get you from all the years -
how to stretch out one arm
like a river branching in Africa,
like dreaming the Bay of Storms,
dreaming a ship that went down,
the way you imagine clouds as a bed,
lilies of clouds spread beneath you,
but when you need them they won't support you,
don't believe they'll support you.

If I could get hold of every particle of you,
if I could get hold of you like metal -
say pillars of copper,
a pillar of purple copper (that pillar
I remembered last summer) -
and the bottom of the ocean I've never seen,
the bottom of the ocean I see
under the weight of a thousand layers of air,
a thousand and one held breaths.

If I could only have all of you
as you are now,
how could you ever become
like a part of me.

Riveted by Robyn Sarah

It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we are past the middle now.
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do. But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrow seats
all through the tedious dénouement
to the unsurprising end - riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.

How I Am by Jason Shinder

When I talk to my friends I pretend I am standing on the wings

of a flying plane. I cannot be trusted to tell them how I am.
Or if I am falling to earth weighing less

than a dozen roses. Sometimes I dream they have broken up

with their lovers and are carrying food to my house.
When I open the mailbox I hear their voices

like the long upward-winding curve of a train whistle

passing through the tall grasses and ferns
after the train has passed. I never get ahead of their shadows.

I embrace them in front of moving cars. I keep them away

from my miseries because to say I am miserable is to say I am like them.

Some Of My Happiest Moments In Life Occur On AOL Instant Messenger by Tao Lin

i will create a new category
on my instant messenger buddy list

i will call it
'people i like who don't like me back'

and i will move your screen name into that group
and i will invite you to my house and show you

and you will say, 'if i didn't like you why did i come over'
and you will look at my face
and i will have an honest answer for your question
i will tell you that you came over to be polite

and after a while you will go home
and you won't call
and i won't either
and after awhile i won't like you anymore
and after awhile we'll forget each other
and after awhile you will be beautiful and alone inside of your coffin
and i'll be cold and alone inside of my coffin

Thirst (for John) by Nicole Blackman

Your mouth as necessary on mine as rain on the desert
(I remember thirst).
I remember unloading guns beneath a complex heaven
(they cut into my dreams).
I remember how bitterness tasted
(it was something sweet).

Now in the black black behind you sleep
I am trying to hold your oceans
I am struggling to sparkle in your sky
I will collect your snowfalls in my arms
and watch them unfold.

. . .

In the North, you ache with loss
and wish for a sick day
to curl yourself away and cry.
The warmth of your voice
now burnt with loss
and everyone knows.

Everyone knows you are far too far
too transparent
to hide away such a wanting.
Now whom is needed
and whom is needful?

You are older than I
but hand your small self over
-- a bird nestling into my hand.
I am broken, I am broken
you say as I stroke you to sleep.

Making the day's tea of desperation
I know you are sterling.
No, I won't tell them.
No, I won't share you.
I am killing myself trying not to care.

. . .

I know you're too fine for this
They've raised your hopes
now they've come to dash them.
Let me throw you deep into the stars
so you can see your heaven
and speak to your dead.

(Lay on me the hands that never kill.
Stain my skin with breath
laced in coolth and stun.
Trace my form in the dark until it glows.)

You are younger than your years
and I am older than mine.
Some midnight I will meet you in the midst
and cross your palm with my mouth.

. . .

Come here little bird
let me lick your feathers back.
Come here to your complicated cat.

I have done my best to steer you away
now I swim in blame and sleep in fear.
When we go public, my china bird
I'll tell you the story.

When you hurt me
I won't let it show.

There Comes the Strangest Moment by Kate Light

There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free—
what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite
looks upside down from how it used to be.

Skin's gone pale, your brain is shedding cells;
you question every tenet you set down;
obedient thoughts have turned to infidels
and every verb desires to be a noun.

I want—my want. I love—my love. I'll stay
with you. I thought transitions were the best,
but I want what's here to never go away.
I'll make my peace, my bed, and kiss this breast...

Your heart's in retrograde. You simply have no choice.
Things people told you turn out to be true.
You have to hold that body, hear that voice.
You'd have sworn no one knew you more than you.

How many people thought you'd never change?
But here you have. It's beautiful. It's strange.

Straw House, Straw Dog by Richard Siken

1
I watched TV. I had a Coke at the bar. I had four dreams in a row
where you were burned, about to burn, or still on fire.
I watched TV. I had a Coke at the bar. I had four Cokes,
four dreams in a row.

Here you are in the straw house, feeding the straw dog. Here you are
in the wrong house, feeding the wrong dog. I had a Coke with ice.
I had four dreams on TV. You have a cold cold smile.
You were burned, you were about to burn, you're still on fire.

Here you are in the straw house, feeding ice to the dog, and you wanted
an adventure, so I said Have an adventure.
The straw about to burn, the straw on fire. Here you are on the TV,
saying Watch me, just watch me.

2
Four dreams in a row, four dreams in a row, four dreams in a row,
fall down right there. I wanted to fall down right there but I knew
you wouldn't catch me because you're dead. I swallowed crushed ice
pretending it was glass and you're dead. Ashes to ashes.

You wanted to be cremated so we cremated you and you wanted an adventure
so I ran and I knew you wouldn't catch me.
You are a fever I am learning to live with, and everything is happening
at the wrong end of a very long tunnel.

3
I woke up in the morning and I didn't want anything, didn't do anything,
couldn't do it anyway,
just lay there listening to the blood rush through me and it never made
any sense, anything.

And I can't eat, can't sleep, can't sit still or fix things and I wake up and I
wake up and you're still dead, you're under the table, you're still feeding
the damn dog, you're cutting the room in half.
Whatever. Feed him whatever. Burn the straw house down.

4
I don't really blame you for being dead but you can't have your sweater back.
So, I said, now that we have our dead, what are we going to do with them?
There's a black dog and there's a whiet dog, depends on which you feed,
depends on which damn dog you live with.

5
Here we are
in the wrong tunnel, burn O burn, but it's cold, I have clothes
all over my body, and it's raining, it wasn't supposed to. And there's snow
on the TV, a landscape full of snow, falling from the fire-colored sky.

But thanks, thanks for calling it the blue sky
You can sleep now, you said. You can sleep now. You said that.
I had a dream where you said that. Thanks for saying that.
You weren't supposed to.

You Loved A Woman Once by Keetje Kuipers

She told you of childhood summers, mayflies trembling
beside the bridge of her nose, hunting frogs. Skinning them
on a brick, the house smelling like their small, fried legs.

All she wanted was for you to carry her home in a canoe
with paddles, life vests, a flare. You promised
to teach her how to swim when she was in your arms.

Your own body, broken into so many times, became a clear lake
for her to bathe in. Remember pulling the one tiny, suckering
leech from below her neck, the pale collarbone Braille it left.

You said the boat was her shoulder in your mouth, even when
you couldn't bear her epaulets of freckles, even when nothing
but a body would do and there was no body but her own.

Below her—lily pads, dragonflies, the worms
dug up last summer and thrown from the dock to see fish
rise in a boil—now all snapped raw in the frozen pond. And speaker,

coded "you"—what about the light straining through her dampened
hair, will you catch it in your jaws? There's the smell of paper
on her skin and you pressing her body like a flower in a book.

Creed by Meg Kearney

I believe the chicken before the egg
though I believe in the egg. I believe
eating is a form of touch carried
to the bitter end; I believe chocolate
is good for you; I believe I'm a lefty
in a right-handed world, which does not
make me gauche, or abnormal, or sinister.
I believe "normal" is just a cycle on
the washing machine; I believe the touch
of hands has the power to heal, though
nothing will ever fill this immeasurable
hole in the center of my chest. I believe
in kissing; I believe in mail; I believe
in salt over the shoulder, a watched
pot never boils, and if I sit by my
mailbox waiting for the letter I want
it will never arrive—not because of
superstition, but because that's not
how life works. I believe in work:
phone calls, typing, multiplying,
black coffee, write write write, dig
dig dig, sweep sweep. I believe in
a slow, tortuous sweep of tongue
down the lover's belly; I believe I've
been swept off my feet more than once
and it's a good idea not to name names.
Digging for names is part of my work,
but that's a different poem. I believe
there's a difference between men and
women and I thank God for it. I believe
in God, and if you hold the door
and carry my books, I'll be sure to ask
for your name. What is your name? Do
you believe in ghosts? I believe
the morning my father died I heard him
whistling "Danny Boy" in the bathroom,
and a week later saw him standing in
the living room with a suitcase in his
hand. We never got to say good-bye, he
said, and I said I don't believe in
good-byes. I believe that's why I have
this hole in my chest; sometimes it's
rabid; sometimes it's incoherent. I
believe I'll survive. I believe that
"early to bed and early to rise" is
a boring way to live. I believe good
poets borrow, great poets steal, and
if only we'd stop trying to be happy
we could have a pretty good time. I
believe time doesn't heal all wounds;
I believe in getting flowers for no
reason; I believe "Give a Hoot, Don't
Pollute," "Reading is Fundamental,"
Yankee Stadium belongs in the Bronx,
and the best bagels in New York are
boiled and baked on the corner of First
and 21st. I believe in Santa
Claus, Jimmy Stewart, ZuZu's petals,
Arbor Day, and that ugly baby I keep
dreaming about—she lives inside me
opening and closing her wide mouth.
I believe she will never taste her
mother's milk; she will never be
beautiful; she will always wonder what
it's like to be born; and if you hold
your hand right here—touch me right
here, as if this is all that matters,
this is all you ever wanted, I believe
something might move inside me,
and it would be more than I could stand.