I HAVE THIS FANTASY
by Heather Bell

I have this fantasy
that I am dressed in a leather jacket
smoking a cigar
just standing there
holding Kafka or Adrienne Rich
by the spine
when an old boyfriend walks up with his
yellow-haired wife and says

Hey, remember me? Sean.

And I reply, casually

Sean? Maybe. The Sean with the big dick or the Sean with the small dick?
And his eyes dart around because he wants to say

Big dick.

but then he’s admitting to me seeing his dick at all
with his wife standing right there

who is holding a ratty looking purse
and what I think is a dead raccoon or
maybe her jacket

So he says

Sorry, I might be mistaken.

but damn, I look so good standing there in my cheetah-print leggings
and puffy hair and the sort of eyeliner that looks professional

that he repeats

But I really think we might have known each other at some point.

And I grin a little, lean in,
and whisper just loud enough for his wife to hear

Small dick, eh?

And I go home and I put on my pink bathrobe and sit on the couch and
I feel triumphant and my kids are running around with scissors

and the leggings are thrown over the loveseat
like a flag

—from Rattle #46, Winter 2014

---

Heather Bell: “Poem writing can be an interesting beast. I wrote this poem in particular in honor of Sean (real name), who once said, ‘I do not know how you are ever published, or why. Your poems simply make no sense.’ So, Sean, this one is for you.”

https://www.rattle.com/i-have-this-fantasy-by-heather-bell/

#poem #poetry #literature

Narcissus
Callie Siskel

Time "Person of the Year" was "You."
I was a sophomore in college. I held the mirror up to my friend.
Outside a fraternity, I stood in a circle of women telling each other how pretty they were.
On the walk back to my room, I passed a monument: water running over granite.
The man I loved wanted me in his bed, so I could tell him he was exceptional.
There is a difference between Echo and the spring: one repeats, one colludes.
In his childhood bed, we had sex, and I turned bright red.
He said, "Someone had a good time," and I knew it was over.
I moved out of the dorm with a friend, paid less for the smaller room.
At dinner, she said the chef was staring at her. I agreed.
If I told you how she stranded me, the focus would shift to her, as it always did.
There is beauty in submission, but it depends on what one gains from it.
When a poet came to campus, old and failing, she bared herself like a wet stone drying.

(My guess is that the poet that came to campus was Sharon Olds. :) )

from the book TWO MINDS / W. W. Norton & Company

https://mailchi.mp/poems/todays-poem-narcissus-by-callie-siskel-6079344?e=6ec42bce63

#poem #poetry #poets #literature

The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

#poem #poetry #reality

Briony in Scotland sent such great poem.

Where is God?

It’s as if what is unbreakable ~
the very pulse of lfe ~ waits for
everything else to be torn away,,
and then in the bareness that
only silence and suffering and
great love can expose,
it dares
to speak rhrough us and to us.

It seems to say, if you want to last,
hold on to nothing. If you want
to know love, let in everything.
If you want to feel the presence
of everything, stop counting the
things that break along the way.

~Mark Nepo
from: Reduced to Joy.

#MarkNepo #poem #poetry

The Reply Guy

Just learned the word reply guy. Immediately I thought up this little internet #poem.

I want to be a reply guy

turn them popular into my mates

I want to be a reply guy

worship superior primates

I want to be a reply guy

pester the chief of the pack

I want to be a reply guy

get a little lovin back

But as soon as I see their self-righteous streams,

their courtly manners, their sovereign regimes

I say fuck'em

And then I block'em

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92bHpzudD3E

#Gaza #Palestine #ceasefirenow #freedom #Rafah #Neverforget #poem

my latest poem

Ich lausche dem Waldwind

wie dem Schicksalswind.

Beide erzählen sie vom heiteren Leben,

dem stillenFrieden in den Gründen der Seele.

---

I listen to the forest wind

like the wind of destiny.

They both tell of serene life,

the quiet peace in the depths of the soul.

#poem #ya
p.s. it's a deepl translation

BOTTOMLANDS DREAM
by Doug Ramspeck

The boy fell from the Monahegnee Bridge,
and his parents buried him, and the years
were a cottonmouth swimming in an oxbow
lake, and the boy became an owl as he fell
and lived in the woods so that when he held
himself motionless, he felt himself becoming
the gray bark of the tree. And sometimes
the boy swooped low across the bottomlands
behind the house of his parents, and sometimes
they watched him going by, and maybe he held
a mouse in his talons, or maybe the sun’s eye
blurred across the glass and transformed him
into a diffused smear of photons. One time
when he fell, he was caught in the updraft
of a prayer lifting itself toward the heavens,
and another time he landed in the lake then
became a catfish swimming along the muddy
bottom, his body twisting and raising swirls
of murky visions. And his parents dreamed
sometimes of opening their arms at the bottom
of the bridge and catching him. And the boy
became a cottonmouth twisting his way
across the water’s surface, and the water
rippled out behind him and made of everything
a transitory motion, something there then gone.
And the boy whispered in the air as he went by,
I fall and fall but never strike the ground.

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

---

Doug Ramspeck: “I wrote this poem in the fall, while being distracted by a bear with her two cubs as they climbed the oak trees outside my office window and fed on acorns and sometimes napped.” 

https://www.rattle.com/bottomlands-dream-by-doug-ramspeck/

#poem #poetry #literature

The Horses
By Ted Hughes

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird,—
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline—blackening dregs of the brightening grey—
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey—ten together—
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew's tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging—
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys, in the red levelling rays—

In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

https://us12.campaign-archive.com/?e=58c6df03ad&u=c993b88231f5f84146565840e&id=1b1a8287d2

#poem #poetry #literature

Ancient and Forgotten

In deep, velvet night, we see
ages lost, visions, gone.
Lost in ancient mystery,
musing, in reverie,
of past peoples, overseas;
call of forgotten homes,
far away.

Wind strained sails, on freedom’s song,
carried you to my shore,
to break bonds that held us, long;
build new ties, kind and strong;
bind hands and lives, make us one,
as dreamed in mystic lore,
and foretold.

From the land of the river,
to the isle of the sea,
etesian gusts would never
hold your wild endeavour,
to find your fated treasure,
as you came home to me,
and your life.

By burning firebrand, witnessed,
we pledged a wordless oath –
in blood, both sealed and promised
as ancient Gods had wished;
beneath kind stars, that whispered
their blessings on us both,
we clasped hands.

Can we, again, hear beating,
of waves on that, far shore?
Know hands, that bled, still bleeding?
Hearts, that laughed, now keening
for days, lost, save in dreaming,
of all that was, before
time’s parting?

© Simon J Ashcroft, 2024

#poem #poetry #DreamsAndVisions #mysticism #meditation

Green Burial Unsonnet
by Dante Di Stefano

In the milliseconds & minutes &

millennia when I no longer am the

bundle of meat & need unpoeming itself

in the still hours of a full or empty

house, I dream my eye socket encased

underground with root & worm &

watershed threading through it. | | The

summers become hotter & hotter. | |

Unbearable & luminous, the refrain of

the song of extinction—

My children & my children’s children

will inherit the edges of cumulonimbus

clouds, the unexpected sunflower

blooming from a second-story rain
gutter, the gentleness of the marbling
sunlight on the fur of a rabbit stilled in

a suburban backyard. | | I am in love
with the Earth. | | There are still

blackberries enough to light the brain

with the star charts of a sweetness—

& yet & yet & yet, the undertow of the

expanding universe repeats to the

mitochondria in my cells. The tiny

bluebird in my throat continues to build

her nest with twigs & mud & scraps of

Amazon packing tape. | | I feel the now
of now fluttering diastole & systole in

my biceps & lungs & toe bones | | The

oranges & reds & yellows of my many

Octobers leaf to life & spill from my

mouth: unaccountable acorns, midnight
loam, overgrown meadows,

a wee spore adrift among the fireflies—

About this Poem

“I would like to have a green burial someday. My wife and I often worry about the world our six-year-old daughter and two-year-old son will inherit and wonder what else we can do to preserve the Earth in all its beauty. This textbox prose poem ‘unsonnet’ challenges the tradition of the sonnet (and lineated poetry) even as it enacts some of the form’s structural and lyrical mechanisms. This formal tension also calls to mind the tension between inherited social norms (our dependence on fossil fuels and factory farming, for example), and efforts to move into a more sustainable, greener future.”
—Dante Di Stefano

https://poets.org/poem/green-burial-unsonnet?mc_cid=4e9acd195e

#poem #poetry #literature

Poem: For Warmth by Thich Nhat Hanh

I hold my face in my two hands.
No, I am not crying.
I hold my face in my two hands
to keep the loneliness warm—
two hands protecting,
two hands nourishing,
two hands preventing
my soul from leaving me
in anger.

Written after the bombing of Ben Tre, Vietnam when an American military man made the comment, "We had to destroy the town in order to save it."

From the book Call Me By My True Names (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1999)

#poem #ThichNhatHanh #violence #MassMurder #bombing

In the mountains, move slowly. If you must creep, then creep.
Magnificent in the distance, meaningless closer up,
mountains are but a surface standing on end. The snail-
like and, it seems, horizontal meandering trail
is, in fact, vertical. Lying flat in the mountains, you
stand. Standing up, you lie flat. Which suggest your true
freedom's in falling down. That's the way, it appears,
to conquer, once in the mountains, vertigo, raptures, fears.

В горах продвигайся медленно; нужно ползти — ползи.
Величественные издалека, бессмысленные вблизи,
горы есть форма поверхности, поставленной на попа,
и кажущаяся горизонтальной вьющаяся тропа
в сущности вертикальна. Лежа в горах — стоишь,
стоя — лежишь, доказывая, что, лишь
падая, ты независим. Так побеждают страх,
головокруженье над пропастью либо восторг в горах.

#mountain #mywork #myphoto #air #sky #poetry #brodsky #poem

PSALM FOR WORKING WOMEN
by Lynne Thompson

A microwave is my savior; I shall not starve.

It alloweth me to eat quickly. It leadeth me
to purchase Stouffers in bulk.

It restoreth dehydrated onions. It delivers me
from pre-heating for pre-heating’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley
of canned goods, I shall fear no tin containers
for plastics art with me and glass and ceramics,
they comfort me.

It preparest a roast turkey in thirty-six minutes;
four for carrots when they’re ’waved on HIGH.
My rumaki comes out crisp.

Surely, defrosting and warming shall follow me
all the days of my life and I shall dwell
in the land of a Hotpoint forever.

—from Rattle #23, Summer 2009

https://www.rattle.com/psalm-for-working-women-by-lynne-thompson/

#poem #poetry #literature

Vulnerable

Sometimes, loneliness
stalks the crowded room, and laughs
to find the wounded.

© Simon J Ashcroft, 2024

#haiku #poem #Poetry

Ballad from the Soundhole of an Unstrung Guitar
by Diane Seuss

The best I ever wrote was in an attic.
No chair. Manual typewriter on an upended box.
No screen on the lone window, which I removed.
Bats flew through.

I woke up one night and Blue was in bed with me.
Nah, I said, and he put on his wire-rimmed glasses and left.
Somehow, I ended up with two kittens. Littermates.
I wonder how they lived and died, where they went.

The only furniture was the mattress on the floor.
A wooden box full of someone's Mardi Gras beads.
No ethics. No lock on the door.
No worries about vermin, rabies, fleas.

Where did I pee in the middle of the night?
There must have been a bathroom down those narrow stairs.
A shower somewhere.
A gold shower curtain laced with mold.

Blue once told me I walked in on him peeing and laughed.
That it ruined his life.
Well, Jesus, I'm sorry.
I would never have apologized back then.

I knew no forms.
Just a swarm of bees in the rafters who agreed to leave me be.
I made a line break when I took a drag on my Salem Light.
Menthols were pure as poetry.

Where are the words now, that you wrote in that hellhole?
On the typewriter ribbon I stuck in a knothole.

#poem #poetry #literature

They ignore the suffering of millions saying they do not understand it but I ask them:

In what language does a child cry?

— Karim Wafa Al-Hussaini

#KarimWafaAl-Hussaini #Gaza #genocide #suffering #poem #poetry

From nowhere with love, on the -eenth of Marchember,
dear respectful my darling, doesn't matter
even who, for the face, speaking frankly,
is impossible to remember, not yours, and
no-one's best friend, sends his regards being on one
of the five continents, related to cow-boys;
I loved you more than angels and even Himself
and am further from you now than from them both;
late at night, in the sleeping valley, in its very pit,
twisting at night on the blank bed-sheet --
as not mentioned below at least, -- with a throb
I whip up the pillow by moaning "you"
from beyond the seas, its shores connecting
in the dark, with my body your body through
all it's features, as a crazy mirror, reflecting.

Ниоткуда с любовью, надцатого мартобря,
дорогой, уважаемый, милая, но не важно
даже кто, ибо черт лица, говоря
откровенно, не вспомнить уже, не ваш, но
и ничей верный друг вас приветствует с одного
из пяти континентов, держащегося на ковбоях.
Я любил тебя больше, чем ангелов и самого,
и поэтому дальше теперь
от тебя, чем от них обоих.
Далеко, поздно ночью, в долине, на самом дне,
в городке, занесенном снегом по ручку двери,
извиваясь ночью на простыне,
как не сказано ниже, по крайней мере,
я взбиваю подушку мычащим «ты»,
за горами, которым конца и края,
в темноте всем телом твои черты
как безумное зеркало повторяя.

1975-1976

#brodsky #poem #poetry #reflection #love

This is my life!!!

THE NEW BATTERY SHOULD COME TOMORROW
by Ruth Bavetta

Got up this morning thinking about going to see my daughter.
Which led to thinking about the remote for the garage door opener
which had stopped working when I replaced the battery.

Which led to searching online for garage door repairmen. Which led to
wanting to check the remote again before I called a repairman.

Which led to getting dressed so I could go outside. Which led to
remembering to brush my teeth. Which led to discovering my Waterpik
wasn’t working. Which led to researching online to find out
what the problem could be. Which led to

scrabbling around to find the extra tips that came with the Waterpik
and figuring out which was which and how to replace the tip.

So with Waterpik repaired I went outside and tried again
to make the garage door opener work. Which led to
my discovering that the little red light in the remote wasn’t on.

Which led me to fiddle with the batteries again. Which led to
my discovering I had ordered the wrong battery for it. Which led to
a protracted Amazon session looking for the proper battery

and figuring out which were in stock and would come soon
and didn’t come only in a pack of fifty.

So now I’m exhausted and I’m not going anywhere.

from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

Ruth Bavetta: “I write at a messy desk overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Once, it was important to me to make sense of life. Now, I’m convinced that there is no sense-making. There is only what is and what has been. I am human, separate and mortal, and that’s where the poetry comes from. This poem is pretty much an accurate report of an actual morning a couple of years ago. This kind of thing happens with increasing frequency as we age. What can we do but laugh about it?”

https://www.rattle.com/the-new-battery-should-come-tomorrow-by-ruth-bavetta/

#poem #poetry #literature

THE TUNER
by Colette Inez

for E.C.

Choose how the forest
was deprived of a tree.
Blight, wind, fire?
I once lost a cantankerous man,
who tuned pianos.
Tall, an oak to me,
he goaded music from the keys.
I almost see him biting on his pipe,
tamping down the London Dock.
Blown back leaves, birds, moths,
the gestures here.
Pendulum, tool box auctioned off.
Summer roars another blast of green.
“I like to see a piano perspire,”
he’d say to me, slamming the lid
of the Baldwin.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

---

Colette Inez: “A poem is born right here, somewhere in my heart, in my blood vessels, in my gut. It comes to the brain much later. I have to feel them actually pulsing in my body, and then when they get shaped, when the brain, the controller, the pilot, whoever one’s metaphor, however this metaphor can extend, takes over. I like to think that my brain is the lesser part of my poems and that my heart, in the best of my poems, is the one that rules.”

https://www.rattle.com/the-tuner-by-colette-inez/

#poem #poetry #literature