VIEW FROM THE HIGHWAY

immodest
of a rural town displaying like that

its hill long
of uneven graves that sink
and pull in their headstones after them

as if the dead wanted
to take back even their names from the world

By Justin Hardecker ( Read more... )

CHILD OF THE SEAMy father knows me by names ( Read more... )

"I know no woman--virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate--whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves--for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meanings, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes ( Read more... )

THE COUNTRY OF MARRIAGEI ( Read more... )

EARLY IN THE MORNINGWhile the long grain is softening ( Read more... )

COURTSHIP

--Both things, I think. but less the hesitation of many hands
touching the stunned dethronement of the master's body, than
their way of touching it again; again. Each time, more surely.

--Carl Phillips

"Beauty is [not] monolithic, one-dimensional, and finally inorganic--[Beauty is neither] without the capacity for evolution, [nor] without susceptibility to time."

--Carl Phillips

ENVOI

We're signing up for heartbreak,
We know one day we'll rue it.
But oh the way our life lights up
The years a dog runs through it.

--Linda Pastan

IN THE GARDEN

I tell my dog to sit
and he sits
and I give him a biscuit.
I tell him to come
and he comes
and sits,
and I give him
a biscuit
again.
I tell my dog Lie Down!
and he sits,
looking up
at me with trust
and adoration.
I pause.
I give him
a biscuit.
This is the beginning
of love and
disobedience.
I was never meant
to be a god.

-- ( Read more... )

THE WORLD I LIVE IN

I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
    reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway,
    what's wrong with Maybe?You wouldn't believe what once or ( Read more... )