Simile

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride...

Naomi Shihab Nye
b. 1952

Not the Music

Not the music.

It is this other thing

I keep from all of them

that matters, inviolable.

 

I scratch in my journals,

a mouse rummaging through cupboards,

nibbling on a crust of bread, apple skins,

chewing the edges of photographs, the small

details of a life. I hoard and save,

place one thing inside...

Lorna Crozier
b. 1948

Family Reunions

The other people quit their stone fields to come here.

They slip in from nights that even the snow abandons.

They leave ashes in their glasses

          and stains on the table.

The house is littered with bits of their hair and skin.

Bones clatter through the holes in their pockets.

 

All night long their hands scythe the air....

Karen Connelly

Spacetime

We Twitter, Tinder, Tumblr through eternity. Loquacious

text messages flit from fingertips, waves of data spill

through our skulls. Every cm2 of oxygen overflowing

with bank PINS, girls in yoga pants, the frequencies

of whale cries. Digital clouds brim with selfies and rain

videos on how to cook coconut shrimp. Sepia-filtered

...

Yusuf Saadi

The Fatigue

The Fatigue is just fatigue. It

sprays my body like

a numbing agent. Say the

way I sleep might not be

working, say the way I eat

might not be working.

Hope to god the meds

start working. The other day

she said you need firmer

boundaries. Sometimes

this looks like an earlier

bedtime. Fuel your...

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch

The New School

Do you remember, Nancy,

when we sat in the Creole restaurant

and glanced up at the television to see students running

with their hands in the air and photographs

of two young men?

Their angular faces. Trench coats.

We didn’t understand what was happening,

our brains felt like mush, it wasn’t the wine,

it was like being...

Lara Bozabalian
1976

diaspora babies

diaspora babies, we

are born of pregnant pauses/spilled

from unwanted wombs/squalling invisible-ink poems/written in the margins

of a map of a place

called No Homeland

 

old gong gong honoured uncle is the man i won't become/

BBQ pork-scented sorrow and red

bean paste buns he sold on street corners in Chinatown/...

Kai Cheng Thom

After Betty Goodwin's The Memory of the Body (1993)

As Whitman sang the body electric

Goodwin sings the body forested:

dense stand of dark-trunked saplings

illumined by a blood-streaked sky,

ominous forest where

abandoned children wander

vulnerable to the spell of wolves,

stepmothers and jealous queens—

omnivorous forest, perilous to enter.

 

I mean the...

Ruth Roach Pierson

Question:

What do they think about you,

the people who pass you on the street?

What would you like them to see?

 

They see the druggie, the whore, the junkie.

I’d like them to see me as their daughter,

a sister, a lover, their mother.

 

They see garbage, blood, feces.

They see us in...

Susan Musgrave

Jacknife/2

Each day, I am apprenticed to the boy

I want to be.

 

He rifles the ball

and I catch it

 

or I fumble.

His red head ducks and weaves,

 

thinking, end zone.

I tag him

 

or I don’t.

He swaggers

 

no matter what.

With the deftness

 ...

Elizabeth Philips
1962

School for the Deaf

You gasp, awakened by

a bucket of cold water.

 

A gauzy autumn morning. A drained sunrise.

You shiver, strain to see the house

parent’s fingers whipping & flicking in

the fibrous grey light—wordless yet

communicative fingers.

 

You wipe your face with

your sheet, bite back a sob.

 

...

Adam Pottle

Duras (Poverty)

“The link with poverty is there is there in the man's hat, too, for money has got to be brought in, got to be brought in somehow,” M.D., The Lover.

 

Poverty is in the language, it is in her gaze back. It seeps and oozes into every poverty-stricken word.

Each word is used sparingly as if each word were currency.

 

It is everywhere. It...

Cynthia Cruz

Holy Ghost

 

We had no paper

then, or we had

 

no pen, or no words. How

to say it. We had

 

no voice. No listeners.

Just deaf night

 

and the flames that chased us

up the stairs, that

 

found us

panting, singed. There was

 

no story then, no

greater...

Deanna Young
1964

From the Window of My Home-Town Hotel

On the lee slope of the small coastal mountain

which conceals the sun the first hour after its rising,

in the dry, steep ravines, the live

mist of the heat is seething like dust

left over from an earlier world.

A crow with a swimmer's shoulders works

the air. And a little bird flies up into a

tree and closes its wings, like a...

Sharon Olds
1942 -

susiya