Good Night by Wilhelm Müller

I came as a stranger; as a stranger now I leave. The flowers of May once
welcomed me warmly; a young girl spoke of love, her mother even of marriage.
Now all is bleak--the pathway covered with snow.
The time of departure is not mine to choose; I must find my way alone in
this darkness. With the shadow of the moon at my side, I search for traces of
wildlife in the white snow.
Why should I linger and give them reason to send me away? Let stray hounds
howl outside their master's house. Love likes to wander from one to another,
as if God willed it so. My darling, farewell.
A quiet step, a careful shutting of the door so your sleep is not disturbed,
and two words written on the gate as I leave, "Good night," to let you know I
thought of you.

Nearly A Valediction by Marilyn Hacker

You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I've ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that alone
again, inventing life left after you.

I don't want to remember you as that
four o'clock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a foreign currency.
The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me.
You've grown into your skin since then; you've grown
into the space you measure with someone
you can love back without a caveat.

While I love somebody I learn to live
with through the downpulled winter days' routine
wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine-
assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust-
balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust
that what comes next comes after what came first.
She'll never be a story I make up.
You were the one I didn't know where to stop.
If I had blamed you, now I could forgive
you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox-
imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind,
want where it no way ought to be, defined
by where it was, and was and was until
the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled
through one cheek's nap, a syllable, a tear,
was never blame, whatever I wished it were.
You were the weather in my neighborhood.
You were the epic in the episode.
You were the year poised on the equinox.

The Language by Robert Creeley

Locate I

love you some-

where in

teeth and

eyes, bite

it but

take care not

to hurt, you

want so

much so

little. Words

say everything.

I

love you

again,

then what

is emptiness

for. To

fill, fill.

I heard words

and words full

of holes

aching. Speech

is a mouth.

No Mona Lisa by Penny Arcade

I am magnum mouthed
honey snatched
my flavor changes constantly
No Mona Lisa
I stroll like a sailor
bullets pass thru me and I keep moving.
No Mona Lisa
I don't hang around
but if I have it for you
you are lucky
you can take it to the track
you can take it to the bank
you can deposit it
No Mona Lisa
No sidelong glance
no rolling eye
supposition, preposition
have no place in my communication.
When I talk
you know exactly what I mean.
Mona Lisa has no mouth,
no cunt,
she stops at the waist.
I hate that bitch!
My head turns from side to side
My brain, mouth and cunt all work.
No Mona Lisa
I can't be displayed, restored
or evaluated.
No Mona Lisa
I read the writing on the wall behind me.
No Mona Lisa
I don't preview.
No Mona Lisa.
No auction.
No rebate.
No Mona Lisa
I don't discount, price down or go on sale.
No Mona Lisa
When I'm in love I stay wet all the time!
Mona Lisa has no mouth, no cunt, she stops at the waist.
I hate that bitch!
No Mona Lisa
No side long manipulation.
I never had a father.
I never learned how to be that kind of whore.
You need a daddy to practice that kind of stalking.
You need a daddy.
I never apprenticed to my mother.
I wasn't well for that center of attention and protection.
I was nobody’s angel.
nobody’s princess.
nobody's baby.
I grew wild, uncultivated, ungroomed, unprotected,
To a position of power
I'm a loner. You are lucky.
I know what you want, when you want it, how you want it.
I deliver without a sermon.
My religion has no pope, no choir, no hope
I'm a loner. You are lucky.
No Mona Lisa
I never learned how to simmer contentedly.
I boil over continuously.
Hot sweet syrup between my legs
When I am in love I stay wet all the time!
No Mona Lisa
I cannot be catalogued or dissertated
I cannot be viewed from a different angle,
a different perspective.
I cannot be seen in a different light.
Mona Lisa has no mouth! No cunt! She stops at the waist!
I hate that bitch!
Mona Lisa sits.
I stand
two lightening bolts in my fists
a crescent moon over my cunt.
No Mona Lisa
I cannot be swayed, rehung or framed.
I don't need special lights, special glass
or a smoke free environment.
No Mona Lisa
No refracted light, no insurance.
I am no collector's item.
no curators pet.
I am no one's voyeur, no one's witness.
I cannot be replicated, calendared
or placed on coffee mugs.
No Mona Lisa
I am 3D
You can touch me.
I touch back.
I bite back, spit back, talk back.
No Mona Lisa
No Gioconda smile
No Mona Lisa
I tell you the truth.
I am ruthless.
You are lucky.

Someone Should Write Me A Love Poem, But I'm Stuck Doing It MySelf by Daphne Gottlieb

1. when i was in high school, i had to memorize the
conjugation of the latin verb "to love."

2. i have no idea what happened to my mother's wedding
ring. last night at 12:17 am, i really needed to know.

3. "beautiful" and "amazing" just mean "beautiful" and
"amazing." nothing more.

4. i memorized the latin verb by singing the forms to the
tune of "the mexican hat dance":

amo
amas
amat

amamus
amatis
amant

5. someone called at 1:19 in the morning. the area code is
from somewhere in arizona. i don't think i know anyone
in arizona. there wasn't a message.

6. if someone lets you sleep over and has to go to work while
you're still asleep and they let you sleep in even though though
they don't really know you, it's nice to leave a thank you
note. or make their bed.

7. i haven't been beautiful in days and i need more sleep.
don't think about it too much. it doesn't mean a thing.

8. i have had my shirts altered so i can wear my heart on my
sleeve.

9. told me i'm beautiful and amazing and where are you,
who told me i'm beautiful and amazing, next time please
write it down, i will be beautiful all day after i make the
bed, amazing after i throw the latex away; how is it, the
everywhere of our hands and no trace of handwriting
anywhere

10. i still sing:

amo
amas
amat

amamus
amatis
amant

On the Necessity of Longing by Mikael de Lara Co

Let me tell you about longing.
Let me presume that I have something
new to say about it, that this room,
naked, its walls pining for clocks,
has something new to say
about absence. Somewhere
the crunch of an apple, fading
sunflowers on a quilt, a window
looking out to a landscape
with a single tree. And you
sitting under it. Let go,
said you to me in a dream,
but by the time the wind
carried your voice to me,
I was already walking through
the yawning door, towards
the small, necessary sadnesses
of waking. I wish
I could hold you now,
but that is a line that has
no place in a poem, like the swollen
sheen of the moon tonight,
or the word absence, or you,
or longing. Let me tell you about
longing. In a distant country
two lovers are on a bench, and pigeons,
unafraid, are perching beside them.
She places a hand on his knee
and says, say to me
the truest thing you can.
I am closing my eyes now.
You are far away.

Love Song by Ted Hughes

He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment's brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face

The Smile by William Blake

There is a smile of love,
And there is a smile of deceit;
And there is a smile of smiles,
In which these two smiles meet.

(And there is a frown of hate,
And there is a frown of disdain;
And there is a frown of frowns
Which you strive to forget in vain,

For it sticks in the heart's deep core,
And it sticks in the deep backbone.)
And no smile that ever was smiled,
But only one smile alone-

That betwixt the cradle and grave
It only once smiled can be.
But when it once is smiled
There's an end to all misery.

Remainder by Charles Jensen

Take one away from one and suddenly there's not much left. The absence of one comes on like first frost: the weakest plants die first, then others, then others, until the world itself bears a whitish ripple from the point of departure outward. I feel for you when you get lost. There are dogs trained to find you under packed snow or in case of disaster. The world isn't ending. The world hasn't begun to end. Its least forgivable trait is persistence, the way what you lose forever leaves a hole that can never be refilled. The blindness comes with time or with snow. Everything goes white. Like how a star dies, beautiful and tragic. I'd like to be lost like that, not just vanished but leaving no trace but your thought of me. Your cold lack of me.

Quarter View , From Nauset by Carl Phillips

Love, etc. Have been remembering
the part in Sophocles
where a god advises the two heroes

they should be as
twin lions, feeding—how
even the flesh of late

slaughter does not
distract them from keeping
each over the other

a guarding eye.
What part of this is love, and
what survival

is never said,
though the difference it makes is
at least that between a lily and, say,

a shield. I think of you
often, especially here,
at the edge of the world or a

part of it, anyway,
by which I mean of course
more, you will have guessed, than

the coast, just now, I
stand on. Against it,
the water dashes with

the violence of two men who,
having stripped it, now take for their
own the body of

a third man on the bad
sofa of an even worse
motel room in what eventually

is movie—one
we've seen ... The way
what looks like rape

might not be. You'd like
the light here. At
times, a color you'd call anything but blue.

Two of Us by Neil Azevedo

Prologue

...and then silence like a lung.
I could not catch the air, and I hung
onto myself dying into a distance
cut close as blades — my hands’ resistance
heavy against wind. Opening an eye
I saw nothing but light and sky
dripping off my body. I was waking
into my new belief, limbs shaking
with speed and depthless tremors —
I was blind.
I felt my feathers
suddenly moist and an aching chill.
Ice crawled quickly through my stilled
wings. What extinguished all the light
on my body? And then pain, and then heat.

1

You must become the habit of yourself
to see an isolated wing beating
its sullied ascension throughout trees,
to hear the feet of mice that creep
through walls and over themselves,
and how they feel the birds’ pattern
of flying between sky and street
with straw and strands of blackened hair.
You are what you learn by heart,
becoming aware of the ones you please
by failing to find and failing to see —
memory like the gathering of chains.
I swear there are ways you can forget
all the world, even your own name.



2

From the beginning we learned to wait in bed,
mattress-warm and messy with our shifting,
our hope, our being awake together,
and she said, "you think he’s here yet?"
In our room we relied on trust,
hearing Mrs. Lawrence’s every flush,
expecting not to feel our feinting pulse,
watching traffic tease along our walls,
our sleepless bodies shaping the sheets,
our living leaning into our living well.
We listened for evening in the evening bells
hungering for lull, and we grew vividly
spectral, softly still, beautiful for his touch.
We accepted all he had and stayed full.

3

I tongue the sore to free its pain,
unshade the lamp to see damage
in my mouth, our bed, the ashtray full
of ashes, reflections of buses pulling in,
the hot bulb’s light on my lashes, her
among the dusk and things that creep
between the cars parked along the street.
I am disabused to a kind of quiet
that doesn’t ask and resembles her voice.
Alone, I believe in its vagueness,
swish of cars, wrinkle of a plastic bag,
the body when it thinks it has disease.
My tongue floods with the flavor of tin.
She is forgetting how to comfort me.

4

It is assortments that matter and not I.
Before I fixed Ramen noodles in the sink,
before I swept the bugs, reordered the shoes,
retrieved some butts and found the pills,
before white released fingers in my skin,
before black could take away and red sustain,
I cupped a mouse fleeing for a crack.
In my hand I pressed its soft neck,
lessened the pressure — in that way ushered
blood from its white mouth. In its sight
did I shed the shadow of black wings?
Its little legs gnawed and gnashed for light.
While leaving, she moved over me last night,
and (thank you Lord) I didn’t feel a thing.

5

Begin with the back of my neck, she says,
and I trace her shoulders with the hanger,
slap her lower back, twist her arm
to press against her hair. I shelter pain,
become fair, am making room for fire.
Now a blindfold, quiver in her spine,
in her knees. I do not stop. Now a gag.
Below her ass, on my own knees, I pause
and she says don’t stop, and her skin
says that, and her body. This is not right,
and I hit her across the thighs and say
you are not doing it right, and she cries
hard trying hard to refrain. I say sorry
and that is the presence of new pain.





6



Don’t rinse the dryness from your mouth.
Ignore the spasms. Only take a sip.
Are you finished throwing up? Hold on.
I brought your favorite: Peanut M&M’s.
a hand in these new hours, a small effort
to assist and clean, to almost help.
For awhile it will be hell, and for now
I’ll be your hands. Let me wash the sheets,
make tomato soup, soak your jeans,
keep you from needing to get up, remove
what is unsightly. You made a common
mistake: mixing crosses with white doves.
Just hold still — it will again grow lovely.

7

We’ve been gentled by October afternoons,
window-light undoing the dark inside
the wallpaper’s pattern, separating
age-marks from dried rain. I made you
wait to see what the decaying might create:
a privacy, a blackened shape, stilled sight.
I could not shut off that light, the waiting
for sheets, for needing your hair, for the cold
thing I always have to have before I stop,
before I turn away from you to sleep,
to everything unlit, our habit of home,
mice inside the walls, need filling
their legs and our study of their claws
that is a way to pause and not to dream.

8

In the lobby, in dusk failing to the dim
and television lights, she spreads herself
through men and movements from the screen,
her bare shoulders and her thin hands,
her feminine calm of being watched.
A trace of music in her veins, she glows,
consumed by visual ghosts, is dark enough.
She often drinks herself to this cold tile,
but here, she is what they need, placed
and similar to something theirs. Awash,
I am only atmosphere shadowed by images,
by love that is the sex of men. I lurk,
and in the end, accept vacancy, having
given love for the freedom of her calm.

9

There are two ways the skin feels cold.
From our mattress on the floor
she rises from me without her shirt
for a shower without heat, and this is safe
cold, inflicted from the outside in,
the success and repose in what we stole,
unwrapping candy, hiding pills, selling
for our own need. The State let her live
as a ward at Thirty-fourth and Gold,
but here the blue light in the window,
always the landlord requiring rent,
and our solution — to offer me up — and her
in the shadow watching me mother
his moment of pleasure. This is the other.

10

And the man across the hall came to life.
He felt my pink arms and my red thighs —
my scars, he said, they would wear off,
and smoothed the spot between his legs.
He drew along my face until we kissed,
my shyness focused on the scents
of paper, sweat, strawberry, and smoke.
We hid from her until we broke repose
and all soft things. We loved by his firm line.
He’d boast that I (or this) was his design,
embarrass me with notions of myself.
Around my cock he was the breath he breathed,
carefully drawing shades, checking the lock
against the hall outside. I never cried.

11

I can hear her clothes lying on the floor,
gnats swarm by light, lights tremble with power.
She is naked and scouring the room
for something that will last. I give more
to waiting than to helping look for
what she is looking for. All my motion
searches the bed for its cold fact. I hear
her concentrating and pretend I am
sleeping. Soon I will feel a shaking,
hear her fraught hands rattle the dresser
from drawer to drawer. Soon she will stop
walking the patterns and will come to bed,
because there is a sound to despair
just as there is no sound in the dead.

12

As the chair settles back to a sentinel,
blinds return to being patient spies,
I spread the light across our silent room,
push milk-crates up against the door
now shut, fill them with blankets
and scurry to my comfortable corner.
Recently I have begun to receive
instruction from the human night,
invisible patterns and the larger dark.
For I negotiated that one dreamed thing
remain unreal, a new childhood by
being still, and I will keep it clean
of the whole outside, while everything
gallops over like the white giraffes.

13

Her smiles now are only seen, free
of happiness, sculpted with the strong love
of the unhappy and only surface in her sleep.
She was the first to ever shoot me up.
She is a body placed upon the sheets.
As I want to be, I go to her,
see lights assemble on the wall, hear
Latino boys laughing from the street.
I do me then her just before the birds’
songs irritate the pain of being up.
I lay into white darkness and alcohol,
and realize my mistake. She is heavy
as I try to shake my love awake,
but coolness keeps me absolutely still.

14

Damp with sleep, their wings draw air
from the dark. They pump and press
into a forest where understanding is
the world of my world, where their voices
carry my stilled voice, swallows
heavy in their throats of dirt and mice,
throats moist with water of creeks and wells.
Their claws are white as pills. These birds
haunt my pulse as they do the pines,
a pain I seek because it’s me they hunt.
I ask them to strew me among heights —
starlight bound to their dead trees.
I am learning how to fly at night,
and am my own shadow when I come down.

15

I’m better now, I mutter through the mask
but mean please, let me go. The EMT’s
flash in and out, complain about the smell.
They lace me into the gurney’s straps,
remove the lights from the window.
Oxygen has the scent of her clean hair.
As they restore my breathing, I cannot see
one cold hand covering my hand.
My thought of me returns and I am scared.
It was within her that I wanted
to fade, but for the darkest mouse
fleeing for the street, for the secret of not,
I find myself simply here. As we leave
the building, I heave for heart and skin
until the technician slips the IV in.

Envoy - The Way To Dover

Sometimes it’s necessary to run away;
we have our needs and shouldn’t be ashamed.
And if sometimes it’s she whose love
we can’t imagine having to withdraw
from, then to flee, the instinct to conceal.
Better to pretend to be crazy, better
to achieve our basest selves than to show
what we don’t show and beg for status quo.
If pity is to sincerely hope we do,
ourselves, not find the precipice
we’ve hidden from our love, we will still
only have what we’ve found comfort in.
And always the bastard we must kill,
and our only prayer: I will endure.

Letter To The Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back by Jeffrey McDaniel

I wanted you to be the first to know - Harper & Row
has agreed to publish my collected letters to you.

The tentative title is Exorcist in the Gym of Futility.

Unfortunately I never mailed the best one,
which certainly was one of a kind.

A mutual friend told me that when I quit drinking,

I surrendered my identity in your eyes.

Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny,

the way monogamy is funny, the way
someone falling down in the street is funny.

I entered a revolving door and emerged
as a human being. When you think of me
is my face electronically blurred?

I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniest
satellite dish in the universe, your smile
as the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed.

Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder.

I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash,
how I once held the soft audience of your hand.

I've been ignored by prettier women than you,
but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence
so far, without spilling a drop.

Thank You, My Fate by Anna Swir

Great humility fills me,
great purity fills me,
I make love with my dear
as if I made love dying
as if I made love praying,
tears pour
over my arms and his arms.
I don’t know whether this is joy
or sadness, I don’t understand
what I feel, I’m crying,
I’m crying, it’s humility
as if I were dead,
gratitude, I thank you, my fate,
I’m unworthy, how beautiful
my life.

Curiosity by Virginia Tamez

I sometimes wonder
if instinct kicked in
if your feet kicked,
or if you just hung there
and didn't fight it
(because you'd wanted it
for so long)

I sometimes wonder
if your neck broke
or if you suffocated
if you saw spots
or if your eyes were shut
what image played in
your mind those last few
moments
(and how many moments
did it take?)

I sometimes wonder
were you crying
and what were you thinking
(if you were thinking at all)
if you took your glasses off
if you were wearing green
how much air was between
your feet and the ground

if you hoped that someone
would save you in time
what kind of rope you used
if it burned your skin
and would it be so
fucking unreasonable
to burn every rope I find

I sometimes wonder
what I was dreaming about
why I wasn't with you
and if you were mad at me
and if you hate me
and if this will always hurt
so numbingly much.

Gravity by Maura O'Connor

Today I am fragile
pale
twitching
insane and full of purpose.

I'm thinking of my lover:
my soft hips pressing his coarse belly,
my tongue on a salmon nipple,
his hand buried in my thick orange hair
the telephone ringing.

I'm thinking we tend our illnesses
as if they are our children:
fevered
screaming
demanding attention and twenty dollar bills,
hours we could have spent making love with the television on.

Faith is a series of calculations
made by an idiot savant.
I'm in love.
I'm alone
in this city of painted boxes
stacked like alphabet blocks
spelling nothing.

There are things I know:
trees don't sing
birds don't sprout leaves
roses bloom because that's what roses do,
whether we write poems for them
or not.

I concentrate on small things:
ivy threaded through chain link,
giveaway kittens huddled in a soggy cardboard box,
a fat man blowing a harmonica
through a beard of rusty wires
brown birds chattering furiously on power lines.

I try not to think about
lung cancer, AIDS,
the chemicals in the rain;
things I can't imagine any more than
a color I've never seen.

My heart is graffiti on the side of a subway train,
a shadow on the wall made by a child.
Nothing has been fair since my first skinned knee

I believe death
must be.

I cling to love as if it were an answer.
I go on buying eggs and bread,
boots and corsets,
knowing I'll burn out before the sun.

I'm thinking of
the days I tried to stay awake
while the billboards and TV ads
for condoms, microwave brownies, and dietetic jello
lulled me to sleep.

A brown-eyed girl once told me a secret
that should have blown this city
into a mass of unconnected atoms
Our sewage is piped to the sea.
Beggars in the street
are hated for having the nerve
to die in public.

Charity requires paperwork,
Relief requires medication

as if we were the afterthoughts of institutions
greater than our rage.

Gravity chains us to the asphalt with such grace
we think it is kind.

We all go on buying lottery tickets
Diet Coke and toothpaste
as if the sky over our heads
were the roof of a guilded cage.

We provide evidence that we were here:

initials cut into cracked vinyl bus seats,
into trees growing from squares
of concrete,
a name left on a stone, an office building,
a flower, a disease, a museum,
a child.
Tonight the stars glitter like rhinestones
on a black suede glove.

In the coffin my room has become,
I talk to God
about the infrequency of rain
about people who can't see the current gentleness
running under the pale crust of my skin.

I tell him under
the jackhammer crack, the diesel truck rumble,
even the clicking sound traffic lights make
switching from yellow to red,
there is a silence
swallowing
every song,
conversation,
every whisper made beside graves
or in the twisted white sheets of love.

I tell him I can't fill it
with dark wine, blue pills,
a pink candle lit at the altar
the lover
touching my hair.
God doesn't answer.
God doesn't know our names.

He's only the architect
designing the places we occupy
like high rise offices or ant hills

I know this
the way I know
sunrise and sunset
are caused by the endless turning
of the Earth.

Someone Who Used To Have Someone by Miriam Waddington

There used to be someone
to whom I could say do you
love me and be sure that the
answer would always be yes;
there used to be someone to
whom I could telephone and
be sure when the operator
said do you accept the charges
the answer would always be yes;
but now there is no one to ask
no one to telephone from the
strangeness of cities in the
lateness of nightness now there
is no-one always now no-one
no someone no never at all.

Can you imagine what it is
like to live in a world where
there is no-one now always no
no-one and never some some-
one to ask do you love me and
be sure that the answer would
always be yes? I live in a world
where only the billboards are
always they’re twenty feet tall
and the circle the city they
coax and caress me they heat
me and cool me they promise and
plead me with colour and comfort
you get to sleep with me
tonight (the me being ovaltine)
but who wants to get to sleep
with a cup of ovaltine what
kind of sleep is that for some-
one who used to have someone
to ask do you love me and
be sure that the answer
would always be yes?