June 2011
65 posts
3 tags
“Living backwards means only
I must suffer everything twice.
Those picnics were...”
– Margaret Atwood, Precognition
“There came a point when I knew I hadn’t known
the word pank existed. Spank...”
– Bob Hicok, “Pank You Very Much”
3 tags
“When your mother hits you, do not strike back. When the boys call asking
your...”
– Jeanann Verlee, Unsolicited Advice to Adolescent Girls with Crooked Teeth and Pink Hair
9 tags
“Hemingway’s looking down the
twin-barrel of the shotgun
into a blue metallic...”
– Mark Terrill, Ways In, Ways Out
4 tags
“He thought of each marriage as a strophe
in the poem of his adult life–those...”
– F.J. Bergmann, Uses of Metaphor
3 tags
“Every corner of this house
has the deposits you’ve left
behind. You are woven...”
– Joseph Kerschbaum, You’re All Over the Floor
4 tags
“You must know that I do not love and that I love you,
because everything alive...”
– Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XLIV
3 tags
“I leave the number and a short
message on every green Volvo
in town
...”
– Ronald Koertge, The Ubiquity Of The Need For Love
3 tags
“I used an arrow to kill the spider.
I used a steamroller to flatten the worm....”
– Kim Addonizio, Weaponry
3 tags
“Having used every subterfuge
To shake you, lies, fatigue, or even that of...”
– James Merrill, A Renewal
3 tags
“is easy, no one
telling you what to do
or when to do it no one questioning...”
– Elizabeth Burk, Living Alone
3 tags
“Today, a lady said:
I stay with phones and bibles in my room, don’t sleep....”
– Michelle Amerson, Delusions
4 tags
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a...”
– Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
3 tags
“I put my hand
up your sleeve,
looking for
god-knows-what
and your arm seems...”
– Dorothea Grossman
4 tags
“What is it, it does not
move like love, it does
not want to know, it
does not...”
– Untitled, Margaret Atwood
6 tags
6 tags
3 tags
4 tags
3 tags
“since i find you will no longer love,
from bar to bar in terror i shall move...”
– Denis Johnson, Sway
4 tags
“In the first kingdom
of the stars,
everything is always
half-beautiful.
...”
– The Second Kingdom, Richard Brautigan
3 tags
“Because my husband would not read my poems,
I wrote one about how I did not...”
– my husband discovers poetry, diane lockward
3 tags
“Waking up once a day
is misery enough.”
– “Why Henny Youngman Doesn’t Take Naps,” Dorothea Grossman
4 tags
“there is ghazal swimming inside of her, wanting to be born. on the matter of...”
– Barbara Jane Reyes, [asking]
3 tags
“To understand
each other: anything
but that, & to avoid it
I will...”
– Margaret Atwood, Their attitudes differ
3 tags
“When she says margarita she means daiquiri.
When she says quixotic she means...”
– David Lehman, When a Woman Loves a Man
3 tags
“My lover asks me:
“What is the difference between me and the sky?”
The...”
– Nizar Qabbani, My Lover Asks Me
6 tags
“If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the...”
– William Carlos Williams, Danse Russe
5 tags
“Fathers are
more fathering
these days they have
accomplished this by
being...”
– Grace Paley, Fathers
3 tags
“I sat drinking and did not notice the dusk,
Till falling petals filled the...”
– Li Po, Self-Abandonment
4 tags
“I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all...”
– Louise Glück, Celestial Music
4 tags
“Fragile like a child is fragile.
Destined not to be forever.
Destined to...”
– Mary Jo Bang, You Were You Are Elegy
3 tags
“stuck in an unnamed place
half way between love and in love,
you call me late...”
– Elena Georgiou, The Space Between
5 tags
“not one girl i think
who looks on the light of the sun
will ever
have wisdom...”
– Sappho, Not One Girl
(trans. Anne Carson)
3 tags
“What are you going to do
when your girlfriend’s pregnant
neither of you...”
– Jim Daniels, What I Did
4 tags
“Lived to see you throwing
Me aside. That fought
Like netted fish inside me....”
– Hesitate To Call, Louise Glück
3 tags
“That time I thought I was in love
and calmly said so
was not much different...”
– Each From Different Heights by Stephen Dunn
3 tags
“A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As...”
– ars poetica, by archibald macleish
4 tags
“Fact is, the invention of women under siege
has been to sharpen love in the...”
– Rita Dove, excerpt from Canary
3 tags
“Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall...”
– Gwendolyn Brooks, To the Young Who Want to Die
4 tags
“The problem with words of emotion
is how easily meaning drains
from their...”
– Linda Rodriguez, Meditation on the Word Need
“Wear dark glasses in the rain.
Regard what was unhurt
as though through a...”
– Adultery, Carol Ann Duffy
4 tags
“Be terrified.
It’s you I love,
perfect man,
Greek God, my own;
but I...”
– Carol Ann Duffy, Medusa
4 tags
“Someone or something is leaning close to me now
trying to tell me the one true...”
– Marie Howe, Prayer
4 tags
“Talent only leads up to the door where the real reason for writing—or continuing...”
– Survival in Two Worlds at Once: Federico Garcia Lorca and Duende - Tracy K. Smith
4 tags
“That Mississippi chicken shack.
That initial-scarred tabletop,
that...”
– Kim Addonizio, My Heart
3 tags
“I am saying primroses lined the pathway of toothless hedges.
I am saying the...”
– Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, In the Event of Change
3 tags
“When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the...”
– Jen Bervin, artist and poet
3 tags
“She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of...”
– Adrienne Rich, Living in Sin
3 tags
“Sometimes we are asked
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we...”
– Tony Hoagland, excerpt from Self-Improvement 