SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
A figure of speech in which human characteristics are given to an animal, object, or abstract idea.
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
That feeling of my soul getting yanked
I wonder where my soul hides when I’m sick
My heart feels as if it’s getting beat up
Is it because the restless ocean is clumping up?
I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
scurried around a classroom papered with poems.
Even the ceiling, pink and orange quilts of phrase...
they introduced one another, perched on a tiny stage
to read their work, blessed their teacher who
in this house
the body of a poem, still warm,
hangs on the nail of the mundane
touched to its core
like a reproach, like proof,
that i was here
and you were here
It was clearly understood,
there was no ownership of land,
so clearly does the land, in fact, own me.
My water from the river and my nitrogen,
a buffalo protein.
It turns out there wasn't a door, so she stood looking at the wall, and then
at the ground, and then again at the wall, and then about the sky. The sky
was doorless, which was comforting, especially at night, when she could
There's a general presumption that rhyme is an affair of
two. Most expected are, of course, end-rhymes in formal
structures—ABAB, etc., but even thinking more loosely,
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,
some ekphrastic evening, this will 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
This is a prayer for the dead and dying -
and those that may never know a life on the outside
I hope your sins don’t meet you at your grave -
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
The fish are drifting calmly in their tank
between the green reeds, lit by a white glow
that passes for the sun. Blindly, the blank
glass that holds them in displays their slow
The sludge-slow flow of the visible current
opens a path we can’t continue, tugs
at what no hand can pull along.
It’s how even water loses memory,
travels a direction it cannot find,
WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
I like people.
I’d like some paper people.
They’d be purple paper people.
Maybe pop-up purple paper people.
Proper pop-up purple paper people.
One night, fire fell into a reed bed
It burned like love falling onto a soul
As fire’s head warmed to its work
every reed turned into a candle at its own grave
at least in our waking life
most commemoration
doubles as force
since even
the most benign
zodiacal conceptions
are tinged eurocentric
when brown women die
Two dicks, sitting in
my daughter’s inbox,
like men without hats,
waiting for any door
to open.
*
Sighting a stranger’s penis
Civility–died on June 24, 2009, at the
age of 68. Murdered by a stroke whose
paintings were recently featured in a
“The link with poverty is there is there in the man's hat, too, for money has got to be brought in, got to be brought in somehow,” M.D., The Lover.
this job hates me
this job wouldn’t make me feel so shitty if it didn’t
i’m nothing but nice to this job
but when this job is done with me it always sneaks out while
Before dawn,
I pick you up,
then bring you closer.
My fingers slowly roll
over your body,
removing seeds attached to you,
free them into the air.
I hear you sigh
I only know rivers
Waters elongated to the unrumpled recitatif
of endless land
The Bow knows
Has tongued and grooved the firmament, baby,
of this Last Best
Draw a line through our scattered bodies. The pattern of fallen calves in this meadow will mirror
the constellation above. Look up. We whip our tails to a silent song:
On the lee slope of the small coastal mountain
which conceals the sun the first hour after its rising,
in the dry, steep ravines, the live
mist of the heat is seething like dust
left over from an earlier world.
What's it like at the centre of the AGO?
Hmm. Imagine being coloured, drawn, and placed
in a wooden frame, another hung woman, positioned
l am
gap tooth black girl
back corner of class
scribbling left-handed
poetry on blank paper
save the school's
curriculum for later
I am
Unknown to you, I walk the cheerless shore.
The cutting blast, the hurl of biting brine
May freeze, and still, and bind the waves at war,
Ere you will ever know, O! Heart of mine,
absence. displacement.
waiting. then comes rejection.
anger follows. shame makes
the beds
the shadows jostle between
the walls of the scarcely visited cities.
At first there's no lake in the city, at first there are only
elevators, at first there are only constricting office desks;
there are small apartments and hamburger joints and
We’re all aware that human hair is dead
Yet we spend thousands taking care of it.
It’s like an endless funeral.
The moment your hair hits air, it’s toast.
It only lives inside the follicle.
big ghosts contra
band my diction war
korea's north sees red as
america flags china's chopped limb
british crowns hong kong
cut for duplicity more capitalist than capitalist
He wakes up naked and drunk as a bear
on sun-fermented garbage.
Hungover and queasy and riled up by
bees.
Nothing going well today, he moans,
life being short and the craft, ah, long.
Out of their torments men carved a flower
which they perched on the high plateaus of their faces
power lines held by birds
of prey the hostile expanse above
ditches teeming floral invasive
wayside fleurs
late summer the shoulder sang
holds breeze by
He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps
when Mom unlocked and opened the front door.
O God, he said. O God.
A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet—
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which…
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife,
Shut in upon itself and do no harm
In this close hand of Love, now soft and warm,
And let us hear no sound of human strife
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
Blousy guitar I don’t want to count the beats Hey Hey
My pen I have bed hair in the best way Daughter
of sunlight and air and I’m glad you were born
In my dream my mother comes with me.
We are in the meadows we call
The Flats, walking the dogs.
Walk straight past the water trough,
she says, do not engage the moss.
i twist and gasp
open and close my mouth
searching for air
whenever a sturgeon is caught in the rainy river
i know
the feel of strange hands touching my body
the struggle
It’s the first day of summer and we’re so happy
To see the sun and the satchel of colours it schleps
All those dark kilometres. The sky is so blue
And the sea is blue and the small islands in the sea
