Red Paper Heart When I think about my childhood there are a dozen cameramen rushing around the field in the back of my brain, trying to loc…
As the ancients detail it
ecstasy passes over us
in a mist of particles
it lives bare
dies unburied
I finally understand it is raining
it is beautiful
a couple of hawks in a tree
and not the tree entire
–Jane Miller, http://poems.com/poem.php?date=15853
Take me to the supermarket
of your hips and I’ll build a home.
A darkening. Some days nothing
good happens and I think
I deserve a treat. I develop
a habit of going
to the mall every day
to buy an Orange Julius.
People get into car accidents.
Keep filling the page.
–Lily Ladewig, from “When I Dance”
I know you won’t ever be able to say
exactly what you’re feeling either,
the way worry might pop open overhead
like fireworks oozing pure midnight —
will we ever see the sun? —
for my love, Charles (1938-2000) / / / Say: 言
“I was on the planet with nothing to do and no one to like me. And as soon as I found myself there, I realized I had created the circumstances in which I had begun to write poems in the first place, to the extent I now wander the earth, a ghost, with no intent to write, but carrying a spark in my fingertips, which keeps me in a state of constant fibrillation, neither dead nor alive, a will-o’-the-wisp of stress, art, and the hours.” -Mary Ruefle, The Most of It
“So I’ll offer this: in addition to being exhausted and discouraged by the relentless barrage of bathroom humor and frat-party antics, I’m bored. I’m in this world of poetry and books for ideas and language and beauty. Seriously. So I’ll say to whoever needs to hear it, put your shit back in the can and let’s talk about things that might actually be funny or engaging or matter once the whiskey has worn off.”
I think the god
who put us here
forgot to punch
holes in the jar
I’d breathe
but I think oxygen
needs me more
that is
more me
–Sampson Starkweather, from La La La
Poem by Kimberly Bruss.
“God? you say, but not aloud. Since there is no god, you have to be both you and god. Yes, god says. You turn over on the couch and push your face into the dark.”
— Arda Collins, from “Snow on the Apples”
“I am unbalanced - but I am not mad with snow./ I am mad the way young girls are mad,/ with an offering, an offering… // I burn the way money burns.”
–Anne Sexton