by Richard Deming
Now that there is nothing left, for instance,/ the taste of fear dries the upper lip.
by Matthew Gleeson
Here I will gracefully withdraw my presence, and leave you with Cortés’s pursuit of the woman in the frogskin smock—
by Matthew Gleeson
In 1493 in Medellín Hernán Cortés murdered his infant brother, after it was prophesied that the young Ferdinand would grow to be stronger and more clever and able in every way than his older sibling.
by John Duvernoy
if you wander away from the picnic the wolves
by Ted Mathys
In all philosophies of consequence a small glass marble is hosted by a vast glass sphere.
by Norman Lock
I had lived always among the trees; and when, at last, I came out onto the Plain, my head reeled and I was sick.
by Melanie Rae Thon
In your father’s house, you and your father and your father’s wife and their children, your sisters, Juliana and Roxie, ate venison steak and mashed potatoes—green beans, sweet carrots—bread torn from the loaf, apples baked with raisins and cinnamon: earth and air, root and animal.
by Melissa Pritchard
Mother’s Day—our last, ma petite mere, sugared battle-ax, thorny womb, my life’s obsession.
by Marin Buschel
People had been disappearing.
by Terese Svoboda
A pink pyramid rises out of the flat ground, its faux granite facing of pressed shell ablaze with reflected sun.
by Elmo Lum
The truth is no one tells me anything. And the truth is even when they tell me something, sometimes the something they tell me is a lie.
by Maureen McHugh
In the middle of that slice there was an eye, a white center,/ the smoothness authentic as the skin of angels
by Vincent Katz
Morning lazy sounds
by Lucy Corin
A soldier came walking down the road, raw from encounters with the enemy, high on release, walking down the road with no money.
by Tim Horvath
It is hard to convey to you, who have never been to Ganzoneer, the comic futility that attends to any attempt to walk firmly there due to the elasticity of her streets, walls, and sidewalks, which send the newcomer flailing and sprawling.
by Shawn Vestal
Julian visits. He’s the kind of person who will say, over dinner, to your wife, that he believes tattoos are ruining pornography.
by Anne Sanow
Which ones do you hate, Mercy, she asks me.
by Nancy Leonard
Anthropologies of dance
by James McCorkle
Over shimmered flats, ray and tarpon,/ shimmering all silver/ light, titanium white
by Christopher Boucher
Then everything became slippery. Suddenly I couldn’t hold my wife’s hand, couldn’t grasp the chess pieces when we played.
by Robert Fernandez
Intending to begin at the billowing page, the flesh calls back its bulls, the divers arrange themselves, occur as gods (loa) occur: that is pliant, beds of mushrooms (pendentives), intersected by light.
by Alexander Vvedensky
translated by Eugene Ostashevsky
VENUS, sitting in her broken-down bedroom and trimming her last nails:
by Suzanne Rindell
Yet another idea of the self:/ a multitude of fragments/ temporarily moving as one,/ each dissent a quick death
by Julie Phillips Brown
A young Lady of distinguished Birth, Beauty, Wit, and Spirit, happened to be in a Box one Night at the Playhouse; where, though there were a great Number of celebrated Toasts, she perceived several Gentlemen extremely pleased themselves with entertaining a Woman who sat in a Corner of the Pit, and, by her Air and Manner of receiving them, might easily be known to be one of those who come there for no other Purpose, than to create Acquaintance with as many as seem desirous of it.
by D.E. Steward
Perspective as in great mountains where we're less than ants in the dunes
by Martha Ronk
You enter the room in which each item has been carefully placed, not perfectly or according to any specific aesthetic rules, but by whim, one's idiosyncratic sense that a certain item belongs here or exactly there, next to the other.
by John Holliday
There came a point when I had firmly instituted myself in The Assembly, had inserted myself in The Society, had rightly secured my position in The Outfit whose subject matter and topical goings-on are totally irrelevant and extraneous to the material being processed here,
by Lucas Southworth
There is a man and there is a woman. There is a house with high ceilings, painted white. There are photographs here, all hanging and framed, all shrouded in shadow.
by Scott Henkle
In the fall of 1936 Grazia Cosima Deledda wrote: When I was a young woman I left Sardinia for Rome, where I have lived ever since and where I sit now and write this, having not returned to Sardinia in many years.
by Brian Christian
Both my grandfather and my uncle have had careers as professional drummers, and my father and I are compulsive tappers, our fingers fidgeting endlessly on every available surface—a dashboard, a tabletop, a thigh.
by Sandra Newman
that certain peoples in those isles had heads filled with raw potato instead of brains, and this did not prevent them going on to achieve competitive salaries.
by David Huerta, translated by Mark Schafer
The surface is dark.
by T. Zachary Cotler
Extinct women and men are falling/ through the wires.
by Daniel Grandbois
The old man made a list of things that would not notice his death.
by Russell Banks
At six, well before the rest of the family woke, Jordan Groves left his bed.
by Mark Irwin
long, jointed bones, floating like a bird's
by Nick Kocz
Roving packs of five-year olds roam the overgrown lots by the abandoned steel mills.
Compiled by Kevin Killian
North of '51 is a land of endless snow and whispering pines
by Elizabeth Gumport
Every once in awhile, another ghost moves into the pool house.
by Paul Hoover
Sweet love, renew thy force, be it not said/ Thy edge should blunter be than appetite
by Eric Linsker
I forgot it is going to snow
by Martine Bellen
On the seventh day of the seventh month, Golden Bird Chinese Food opens its doors
by Jonathan Thirkield
I remember a tree of a painting.
by Amy Catanzano
Do you believe in the once indivisibility of atoms?
by Sven Birkerts
This morning, going against all convention, I turned right instead of left and took my circuit—one of my circuits—in reverse.
by Rachel Blau DuPlessis
17 May 1986./ Or whenever "now" is.
by Colleen Hollister
It's not Jenny who runs, or Elizabeth.
by Laynie Browne
Today is day one of the Omer
by Matt Reeck
The rostrum is able to mail./ Malachy owns a keyshop.
by Julia Cohen
Comb the chrysalis from your beard to fasten the milkweed
by Monica McFawn
"Humankind yearns for its amoebaean roots, hence Abstraction." Pause. Pause.
by Kathleen Donohoe
We ought to search for Lil when the woods have thinned for winter.
by Christina Mengert
Inside blaze/ earthly figuration/ the lover in pieces at the mouth
by Andrew R. Touhy
Perhaps three days' journey south, southwest, across a salt desert leading to an ancient wood dense with black cypress and a strain of ivy so fierce its creeping roots are said to choke even the soil it feeds upon, lies Cieloso, city of floating men and women.
by Tasha Haas
I remembered the sentence when I saw the old man and woman walking on the shore the man with a plank for a leg a war having kept the leg.
Notes on Wakefulness and Being
by Ellen Hinsey
The body resists its knowledge of oneness—as if to exist it must renounce that from which it was issued.
by Tayt Harlin
I had a great deal of trouble getting started. I don’t know whether I was afraid or just thought I was bullshitting the world and myself.
by Caroline Morrell
The moon is the kind of birthplace who,/ if in the process of blooming
by Román Antopolsky, translated by Michelle Gil-Montero
Hand on the wall my/ time in turn to/ mute
by Robert Urquhart
place Pigalle night nine teen o five/ The house of Dr Gachet
by Victoria Blake
On our honeymoon, I caught a stomach bug in Spain
by Rod Smith
The codes reawake
by Jason Grunebaum
Rob Nixon, do you remember me?
by James Grinwis
The Aztec baby came in on the back of the wolf.
by Michael Stewart
The Devil has black tangled hair.
by Kevin Magee
It is an hour. One/ of those hours.
by Juliana Leslie
How to compose a question: to spell the word blue/ in Paul Klee's painting entitled Paul Klee's The color blue
by Carlos Dews
The encounter I will describe here occurred in the Buenos Aires mid-winter of 2004; it has taken me until now to muster the courage to recount it and to conclude, as the gentleman involved insisted, that it contains a story that must be told.
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by Erika Howsare
We'd just gotten up./ We'd washed our faces./ Sky-blue mugs of coffee.
by Ariana Reines
The water needs a forder.
by Jason Schwartz
The knife recurs as a figure in certain rooms.
by Megan Pugh
We need new ways of living/ without resorting to crocodiles/ in wading pools
by Thomas Hopkins
My father, like every man of his generation in our country, never quite got over the loss of flight.
by Robert J. Bertholf
What is the relationship in your mind between musical forms and lexical forms in a poem, or what is the process for translating musical form into poetry?
by Rebecca Stoddard
"a swan and its reflection on the water’s black surface"
by Juan Martinez
The Coca-Cola executive was kind to me, though everyone was being kind that summer.
by Eva Hooker
Round uneven sumptuous it heaves up its weight
by Anthony Hawley
Spaces/ farther off/ are spaces/ farther off
by Philip Pinch
I flush out a bird.
by David Shields
Rain falls like needles, but Carla’s parents’ back porch, sheltered by a lean-to roof and enclosed by a tight green net, keeps us dry.
by Jon Thompson
How the entire story is enjambed with color
by Donald Revell
I hear the elephant music/ Of the rusted swings
by Kim Chinquee
I’d just turned thirteen. I was sitting in the hayloft.
by Rachel Levitsky
If I no longer exist, if in fact I may never have existed in the first place, then do I have a name?
by Tomaž Šalamun, translated by Brian Henry
You didn’t satisfy to us, man from Australia
by Noah Eli Gordon
A barge passing below a bridge is an example of a green horizon free from the expectation of green.
by Matthew Cheney
We had all failed by then—failed as husbands,
by Joseph Starr
I won’t need to tell you how we built it, the dwelling, the house.
by Justine Haemmerli
I am going to write a story called “To Be Taken.”
by Joni Tevis
Some cave naked for fear of contaminating the water they mean to study.
by Sandra Meek
Another pearl scimitar / sheathed in fawn
for Disordered Dreamers
by Karen Russell
Emma and I are curled together in the basket of the Insomnia Balloon, our breath coming in soft quick bursts.
by Erin Lambert
If the landscape has a pattern then it begins with your wrist
by Andrew Mossin
A voice comes to one in the dark. Her voice or mine.
by Brian Richardson
Above the Arctic Circle the sun sets and does not rise again for weeks.
by Adam Golaski
From an aperture she has made in the Venetian blinds she watches leaves fall.
by Marcella Durand
Coming across the floor to greet us
by Justin Lacour
Back then nostalgia was a doll, / you could swallow.
by Logan Burns
Upon the comal crop, winter, I separate what's mine. Mimic me.
by Brian Lucas
Thorny sky the possession enjoyment brings suspended in a circle of blue messages.
by Toby Olson
There are stories handed down through generations, not because children desire and are in need of them, but because their parents now understand them and can remember sitting at the knees of their own parents, listening to the telling.
by Rebecca Reynolds
Take the sentence and divide out:
by Juan Emar
A 1937 story, with an introduction by Pablo Neruda and an illustration by the author, translated into English for the first time by Daniel Borzutzky.
by Terese Svoboda
We don't start then. It's an hour later, after snakes, after monkeys.
by Megan Martin
They were bored, highly irritated by the goings-on of the world, not to mention sick and tired of one another, so they decided to make Texarkana again.
by Dawn Raffel
The woman is awake now. She opens her purse.
by Nadia Herman Colburn
In the box there was no beginning and no end, but an openness stopped on all sides by the edges.
by Thomas Hummel
if keeper shall her self infected house / twenty eight after the person dying
by Jason Schwartz
The bed recurs as a figure in certain burnings—the torches fixed to boards, for skeletons, and the boiling oil in pots, in urns, in bowls.
by Marjorie Welish
When next more likely pantheonic backward-looking aspect, / it obtains that coin.
by Aaron Bannister
Conviction is an engine, yes, / but idleness bubbles and babbles, too.
by Michael C. Boyko
The researcher walks to the nine o'clock station and circles the cube, taking notes and making sketches.
by Rosmarie Waldrop
Impossible. Without the idea of counting. To imagine numbers.
by Matthew Cooperman
Poet, translator and publisher, Rosmarie Waldrop has, over the last forty years, brilliantly aided and abetted the conversations of the avant garde between America and the European continent.
Three Poems
by Daniel Coudriet
All of the children held in a blue sweater, / who is it knitting them together with tiny thumbs.
Levittown
by Lesley Yalen
On the broken slate under the Epsteinís carport, eight feet in eight canvas shoes made a circle.
Two Poems
by Catherine Imbriglio
I have no one to talk with about my behavior.
Birth of a Brother
by Sandra Leong
Sometimes I stay home from work without any excuse.
by Ashley VanDoorn
Executives have been instructed with this defense:
by Andrew Mossin
Of surrender or denial, surrender and denial
by Elizabeth Sanger
Finally, how to carry the sky/ at twilight? A rose so cool
by Sarah Riggs
Here is a glass on this table.
by Soyoung Jung
It starts with examining our shores.
by Jenny Boully
And if it were possible to pursue the bleeding heart dove to her nest, what then?
by Can Xue, translated by Rong Cai
When all reasons to ëliveí are negated, and when one sentences oneself to death
by Andrew Zawacki
Blue as already the shoreline
by Friedrich Hölderlin, translated by Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff
You walk above in the light, / Soulful genius, on a yielding floor!
by Paul McCormick
Memory of silt and blush.
Robert Creeley
May 21, 1926 ó March 30, 2005
Tributes
by Kimberly Burwick
I leave with that voice? In Austria the alps are blowing
by Ted Mathys
imprisoned on the fissure the figure considers
by Julianne Buchsbaum
an eternity of New Wave
by Noah Eli Gordon
THEY SAID THE SMALLEST HUMAN HORSE WAS DEAD IN YOUR COSTUME
by Catherine Cafferty
I would walk a tightrope for you
by Joseph Campana
1. First, Audrey is in the garden. She will be there in the end.
by Meghan Ferrill
Ibak is my name.
by Toby Olson
Lingers now in peace upon the swollen tide.
by Sandra Meek
Where would it stop, this resemblance / to morning, this striped coat of climates
by Rachel Blau DuPlessis
A half glass carafe,/a choice red ochre chalk
by G. C. Waldrep
Ask if this showing will make a better weave.
by Eric Baus
The way I talk is a result of the way I hear her I was told but it took how long to show up in cursive.
An Interview with Marjorie Welish by Matthew Cooperman
What informs the decision to paint or write is a question about what necessitates the choice.
by Stephen Ratcliffe
pale blue white haze in front of the vertical plane
by Joshua Harmon
shored up inside still
by Kira Henehan
And then I died and went to France.
by Rebecca Black
Play your hand, Madame.