Poems

George Bowering

Pale Blue Cover

In the middle of the night Matt would fly to Vancouver so he could take a walk on the sea wall the next day, then go home.

Wouldnt tell anyone, no telephone call, just run a…

Jerome Rothenberg

A Glass Tube Ecstasy

a glass tube

for my leg says Hugo Ball

my hat a cylinder

Ariana Reines

Inner Life

Those tweets I sent about Duke Ellington

While my mom was being evicted again

According to what ethics under the sun

Can I possibly have been speaking? A

Kind of private feeling I can’t even place here

Percy Bysshe Shelley

England in 1819

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn, — mud from a muddy spring;

Samantha Nock

Kiwetinohk Ohci

stop at the edge of everything—
bend down and stick your hands in the dirt.
grab a fist full of soil and pull it close: inhale.

Frank O’Hara

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

Fred Moten

epistrophe and epistrophy

some ekphrastic evening, this'll be both criticism and poetry and

failing that fall somewhere that seems like in between. this both/

and and/or neither/nor machine comes in having been touched

Tomasz Rozycki

Wild Strawberries

I'll tell you how it was, what she remembers:

the scent of rhubarb and strawberries in the wild

where she hid and the cries of the murdered,

they do not want to die away. If possible,

Marjorie Pickthall

When Winter Comes

Rain at Muchalat, rain at Sooke,

And rain, they say, from Yale to Skeena,

And the skid-roads blind, and never a look

Ruth Roach Pierson

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

Durs Grünbein

From a Book of Weaknesses

Gigantic agenda, this life of ours—

that turned out so different, then after all the same.

We picture ourselves when we close our eyes

in a lift that's counting the years in floors.

Lindsay Nixon

niya

Billy-Ray Belcourt

Leonardo DiCaprio

My ex-boyfriend got measurably more attractive

and all I got was a dad bod.

Leonardo DiCaprio has a dad bod,

and for whatever reason this is reassuring to me.

Leonardo DiCaprio finally won an Oscar

Dionne Brand

From Verso 4

I was nine and I stood at the top of the street for no reason except to make the descent of the gentle incline toward my house where I lived with everyone and everything in the world, my sisters and my cousins were with me, we had our bookbags…

Brandon Wint

From: Incantation: Memory of Water

Tonight, a strand of my great-grandmother’s hair

sashes an amber beer bottle discarded by a tourist.

A white thread of my grandmother’s baptismal robe

is a bangle on a wrist of kelp

Sue Sinclair

Notes on Emancipation

I wrote to my mother, but she didn't write back.

It's not true that you can begin anywhere.

I was born in a church.

William Wordsworth

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

Jody Chan

aubade for the BPD subreddit user who wrote can people with BPD love?

bedtime ritual summon a stranger tonight you

linger on my laptop screen

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

Gary Snyder

Riprap

Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.

placed solid,…

Tyler B. Perry

FLOOD

The hallway is an empty

riverbed, smooth and barren.

At three o’clock classroom

doors open like dams.

Gullies of teens stream

out, to become one

Wallace Stevens

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

William Wordsworth

The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

John Donne

The Flea

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

How little that which thou deniest me is;

Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,

William Shakespeare

Sonnet XV: When I Consider everything that Grows

When I consider everything that grows

Holds in perfection but a little moment,

That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows

Doyali Islam

susiya

in the south hebron hills the slanted hills

recall old songs, and the women collect

them like rain. the men have two-syllable

Billy-Ray Belcourt

If Our Bodies Could Rust, We Would Be Falling Apart

the law mandates that a hate crime only be classified as such if there

is ample evidence to show that one’s actions were motivated by

prejudice toward an individual’s nationality, ethnicity, sexuality,

gender, etc.

jaye simpson

urban NDNs in the DTES

had a dozen foster parents

tell me to run from my mother’s truth

Eduardo C. Corral

Autobiography of My Hungers

His beard: an avalanche of honey

an avalanche

of thorns. In a bar too close to the Pacific,

John Donne

A Hymn to God the Father

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,

Which was my sin, though it were done before?

Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,

Susan Musgrave

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.

Noor Naga

Sharing

Nouf is proof God does not want me to die a horse-girl with horse-hair who loves even the flies will not swat them carries them outside with a glass-and-paper trap she brims with glee …