Savages
Dorianne Laux

Those two shelves, down there.
                                         - Adrienne Rich

For Matthew, Mike, Michael and Carl

They buy poetry like gang members
buy guns -- for aperture, caliber,
heft and defense. They sit on the floor
in the stacks, thumbing through Keats
and Plath, Levine and Olds, four ( Read more... )

Civilization
Carl Phillips

There’s an art
to everything. How
the rain means
April and an ongoing-ness like
that of song until at last

it ends. A centuries-old
set of silver handbells that
once an altar boy swung,
processing . . . You’re the same
wilderness you’ve always

been, slashing through briars,
the bracken
of your invasive
self. So ( Read more... )

Coffee and Oranges ( Read more... )

Blackouts ( Read more... )

A Bitterness ( Read more... )

Dream Song 77 ( Read more... )

Playboy's Guide to Lingering
Joseph J. Capista

We read lingerie as lingering.
An innocent mistake, yes, though

we didn't dally in Patel's humid
newsstand amid hanks of cigared

tobacco and men in coveralls logger-
heading with the Pennsylvania Lotto

to expand our budding tongues
but to confuse the single shelf

of cryptograms and crosswords
with the candied ( Read more... )

Love After Love ( Read more... )

self-exam (my body is a cage)
Nick Flynn

Do this: take two fingers, place them on
the spot behind your ear, either

ear, the spot where your skull drops off

into that valley of muscle
& nerve-that is the muscle that holds up

the skull, that turns the dumb bone
this way & that, that nods your face up &

down when you think you
get it-press deeper, ( Read more... )

Disgraceland
Mary Karr

Before my first communion, I clung to doubt
         as Satan spider-like stalked
                the orb of dark surrounding Eden

for a wormhole into paradise.
       God had formed me from gel in my mother’s womb,
                injected by my dad’s smart shoot.

They swapped sighs until
         I came, smaller than a bite ( Read more... )