Happy Birthday Anne Sexton!!

Her Kind
By Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.

---

one of my favorites (it's like all my dreams/nightmares) and basis of Peter Gabriel's Mercy Street

45 Mercy Street
by Anne Sexton

In my dream,
drilling into the marrow
of my entire bone,
my real dream,
I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill
searching for a street sign —
namely MERCY STREET.
Not there.

I try the Back Bay.
Not there.
Not there.
And yet I know the number.
45 Mercy Street.
I know the stained-glass window
of the foyer,
the three flights of the house
with its parquet floors.
I know the furniture and
mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,
the servants.
I know the cupboard of Spode
the boat of ice, solid silver,
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant's teeth
on the big mahogany table.
I know it well.
Not there.

Where did you go?
45 Mercy Street,
with great-grandmother
kneeling in her whale-bone corset
and praying gently but fiercely
to the wash basin,
at five A.M.
at noon
dozing in her wiggy rocker,
grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,
grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,
and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower
on her forehead to cover the curl
of when she was good and when she was…
And where she was begat
and in a generation
the third she will beget,
me,
with the stranger's seed blooming
into the flower called Horrid.

I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk. I walk.
I hold matches at street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids
sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband
who has wiped off his eyes
in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.

Pull the shades down —
I don't care!
Bolt the door, mercy,
erase the number,
rip down the street sign,
what can it matter,
what can it matter to this cheapskate
who wants to own the past
that went out on a dead ship
and left me only with paper?

Not there.

I open my pocketbook,
as women do,
and fish swim back and forth
between the dollars and the lipstick.
I pick them out,
one by one
and throw them at the street signs,
and shoot my pocketbook
into the Charles River.
Next I pull the dream off
and slam into the cement wall
of the clumsy calendar
I live in,
my life,
and its hauled up
notebooks.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-sexton

#poem #poetry #poets #literature

To David, About His Education
By Howard Nemerov

The world is full of mostly invisible things,
And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,
Or its nose, in a book, to find them out,
Things like the square root of Everest
Or how many times Byron goes into Texas,
Or whether the law of the excluded middle
Applies west of the Rockies. For these
And the like reasons, you have to go to school
And study books and listen to what you are told,
And sometimes try to remember. Though I don’t know
What you will do with the mean annual rainfall
On Plato’s Republic, or the calorie content
Of the Diet of Worms, such things are said to be
Good for you, and you will have to learn them
In order to become one of the grown-ups
Who sees invisible things neither steadily nor whole,
But keeps gravely the grand confusion of the world
Under his hat, which is where it belongs,
And teaches small children to do this in their turn.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52813/to-david-about-his-education

#poem #poetry #literature

OUR WAITRESS’S MARVELOUS LEGS
by Grace Bauer

It’s men I’m prone to eye, but when she comes
to take our order, I’m too distracted
to think beyond drinks, too awed
by the ink that garments her limbs
to consider appetizers, much less entrees.

It’s not polite to stare, I know,
but the fact of her invites it.
Why else the filigreed ankles,
those Peter Max planets orbiting her
left shin, that Botticelli angel soaring
just below her right knee?

She’s a walking illustration, adorned
to amaze, yet as seemingly nonchalant
as the homely white-sneakered HoJo girl
I myself once was, describing the specials
of the day, listing our options for dressings,
then scribbling the choices we make
on her hand-held pad.

My companion can’t help wondering how far
up the ante goes, says he bets there’s a piercing
or two at the end of the, so to speak, line.
I’m more inclined to ponder motivation
and stamina—how long and how much
she suffered to make herself a work of art.
For I have no doubt, she sees her own flesh
as a kind of canvas. Her body as frame
and wall and traveling exhibition,
a personal statement on public display.

Same could be said of the purple tights
I wear beneath my frilly black skirt—
too bold a choice for some people’s tastes,
but not a permanent commitment.
Clothes make the woman more
than the man, despite the familiar adage,
and body as both self and other is
a contradiction we live with, however comfortably
—or not—we grow into our own skins.

I’ll admit part of what I feel
is admiration, even envy.
Whatever she may ever become
in this world, she will never again be drab.
She’ll wear this extravagance
of color and form as she grays
into more—or less—wisdom.

But tonight she simply performs
her duty as server, courteous and efficient
as she does what she can to satisfy
the hunger we walked in with, but not
the hunger the sight of her
inspires us to take home.

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011

https://www.rattle.com/our-waitresss-marvelous-legs-by-grace-bauer/

#poem #poetry #literature

Dating in the Apocalypse Bunker

By Kristen Mears

You take the lamp with your last battery
and meet me at the radios, where it’s quiet,
and we can be alone. I like how the light dims
and flickers, the way it plays across the steel.
I like how we can’t see the sand in the air.
You hold my gloved hand in your gloved hand
and we walk the hydroponic halls. I love you
because your eyes are green, because we eat
protein cans and you tell me about birds,
how your dad still has grass in his vault.
And we’re dressed to the nines, in our cleanest
boots, the dust scrubbed from our tanks
until they gleam. Our utility suits are beeping
beneath our helmet read-outs, but no longer
are we clumsy, like those men who fled to Mars.
And we go not to the movies but to the oxygen
chambers, where we crouch low, lean close
to a vent. You shed your gear first, lips dry
and desert-cracked, and we share that same
recycled air, press our mouths against the wall,
breathe so deeply we see stars.

https://www.palettepoetry.com/2024/10/21/dating-in-the-apocalypse-bunker/

#poem #poetry #literature #specpoetry

Sleepless

Forsaken night turns
her back; now, with no dreams left,
I have a cursed day.

© Simon J Ashcroft, 2024

#haiku #poem #poetry #PoetryCommunity

Old King’s Cold/Grail King

And the old King dies.
transcends his mortal ghost
to gain Olympian plains.
“I am the mighty he;
ruled wisely while I was allowed;
sold my soul to please the crowd;
withered on the vine divine.
There is no more of me to kick around.”
Drink from the golden Grail,
oh New Found King.
Adorned, adored, supreme.
A bright dawn upon the now
offers sparkling hope,
better days aborning.
Don’t despair poor peasant folk,
though you think despair all you
can cling to.
The Fisher King has roared in, high
on his desert adventures.
He brings ebullient tides to
slake the thirst
of this arid land.
I beg you yet again
to take a stand.
Take harness, plow your pastures.
Believe that the seed will take hold.
Listen to shamanic heralds
shouting lines in the sand.
They know great flood impends
after many a hard rain —
but don’t despair!
It is a flood of fertility,
a harbinger promising carpets of grain,
lush vegetation.
All this is foretold if you
do your part.
The old King, so long dying of dank,
festering wounds, has poisoned our past
with ill-fated rule.
Cast out the poison from your hearts.
Tend your fields with bold will
of nobility.
Never forget you are free.
Never forget that responsibility.

#poem #myth #politics

Happy Birthday Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

#poem #poetry #poets #literature

https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night

I Told My Therapist I Put the Bi In Bipolar
Two poems by Bleah Patterson

When I tell my therapist I put the ‘bi’ in Bipolar she asks to see me twice a week

little, I screeched a bucket of water
in the backyard
tadpoles! tadpoles!
look! tadpoles!
but they were— my grandma shakes her head—
mosquito larvae much too small
much too filthy darting around the sludge
of the shallow They’ll bite you
when they’re big, best to kill ’em now
murky part of my
brain emerges manic screech like tadpoles!
tadpoles! look! therapist dips her
fingers into shallow murky
—shakes her head — too filthy too
nasty, it’s always the worst stuff
floating on top says feeling like I could survive
anything if I only wanted to, —big, I
bite razor to wrist, inner thigh— is a
goldfish, belly up, childhood fingers
tapping the tank Why won’t it swim and
my brain is telling me you don’t love me
anymore pink puckered pomegranate lips
chapped not answering the phone
but deep down
an angler fish knows that’s
not true I’m making things up again
imagining the worst I can’t hold my
breath long enough down there
but still they’re in the shallow
the murky not tadpoles!
tadpoles! no, look!

sales lady says stop romanticizing the struggle

but i’m slanted floor boards, always creaking
always leaning too far in one
direction wine out of a chipped mug
and when i take a lint roller to my lipstick
stained cat-hair covered personality
i can’t make anything stick sales lady says
“everyone should own a nice set of dishes, for company”
and i tell her the company i keep is a
handful of bread smeared through the butter dish
forks straight into the still steaming pot
she says my mother must be so proud and
rolls her eyes i say my mother always
told me a little dirt don’t hurt and i took that to
mean it feels good, took that shit
literally, took that and smeared the mud
across my eyelids said i was ready for a
night on the town the sales lady
says “everyone should own a nice pair of heels,
for date night,” but i’m a bare feet on his dash—
bored at the four-star restaurant, let’s
make love on the shingles, orion is mood lighting
she says the boys must love me rolls her eyes
I say fuck the boys I mean that literally
take all of that shit to heart.

https://electricliterature.com/two-poems-by-bleah-patterson/?mc_cid=2618de7d97

Bleah Patterson (she/her) is a southern, queer writer born and raised in Texas. A current MFA candidate and writing instructor, she is a Pushcart nominee and her various genres of work are featured or forthcoming in The Brazos River Review, Write or Die, The Texas Review, Across the Margins, Queerlings, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Beaver Magazine, and elsewhere.

#poem #poetry #literature

“On Similes”
*by Miller Oberman *

I have read my father’s book and, as I suspected, much of it is bad.
Especially the attempts to teach mindfulness, which,

given that once at a bakery he listened at length to a woman
from a mindfulness class he taught gush about its effectiveness

all the while standing on my mother’s foot, is no surprise to me.
Especially bad are the similes.

“Grief is like an unkempt beggar” (242).
“…sniff these last days of summer like a fine wine” (242).

This compared to when he’s not trying so hard.
When, at 42, he has a heart attack and his father comes,

“he holds me as if I’m made of smoke” (109).

https://lithub.com/on-similes-a-poem-by-miller-oberman/

#poem #poetry #literature

Housekeeping
BY Natasha Trethewey

We mourn the broken things, chair legs
wrenched from their seats, chipped plates,
the threadbare clothes. We work the magic
of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.
We save what we can, melt small pieces
of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones
for soup. Beating rugs against the house,
we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading
across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw
the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs
out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.
I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,
listen for passing cars. All day we watch
for the mail, some news from a distant place.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/90616/housekeeping

#poem #poetry #literature

I just learned there is a new Li-Young Lee book of poems out that I missed notice of in May!!

Li-Young Lee: Selections
Poems “descended from God”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/162904/li-young-lee-selections?mc_cid=1300a55b19

#poem #poems #poetry #authors #literature

At the End, There is Always a House
by Sara Eliza Johnson

These days I move from room to room looking for a thing to
haunt. The filaments inside my teeth glow in the dark,
thirty-two beacons no one will see, except the mirror I
return to again and again, hoping for it to swallow me, to
find anything there but my face. Mirror is another word for
hunger. Hunger is another word for dead. Anyone would be
tired of hearing from me, the kind of woman — this repulsive
word — who'll never have a garden or greenhouse, only a
fridge crisper full of broccoli and kale and lettuce, all
rotting to sludge, bananas on the counter blackening like
frostbitten skin. I used to quarter an apple with such
perfection I could have been autopsying my own heart. The
thing is there's no way out of this house. Memory circles
like flies. Even the dead need to eat. Even the dead dream. I
left a note in the memory: You deserve so much more than
desire.

from the journal ALASKA QUARTERLY REVIEW
https://mailchi.mp/poems/todays-poem-at-the-end-there-is-always-a-house-sara-eliza-johnson?e=6ec42bce63

#poem #poetry #literature

Disobedient Methods: On Li-Young Lee
Honoring one of the most influential lyric practitioners of our time.
BY Ocean Vuong

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/1600620/disobedient-methods-on-li-young-lee

#poem #poetry #literature

Letter to the Corinthians
By Elizabeth Willis

When I was a child, my eye was older than an oak.

From the highest chair, I saw string beans move from my brother’s plate into my mother’s mouth when my father looked away. I watched my sister spit her peas behind the sink. A dog moved from the woods toward the kitchen door. The house unfolding like a book.

I read my father’s secret history of anger, my mother’s dissertation on subterfuge, their parlor of doubt, the kitchen of their discontent.

This was my host country and I its virus.

I witnessed a world that couldn’t be explained. Rhymed and unrhymed, its alien talk floated above a blanket of  verse.

In time, I would adopt its pattern language. I would deliver its messages like a page. I would spy with my little eye. I would open and close like a camera.

In the stories of that planet, I would find no character resembling myself, so I would place myself outside them, in a poem.

When I was a child, I hated lace; I buried all the dolls.

I hid in the snow and thought about what it would mean: to disappear. A little ghost whispering help!, testing its alarms.

But when I was grown, I opened the box of broken dolls, and when it was dark, I held the tree by its branches and all the childish words rustled back into the woods, into the purple snow.

I knew there was a story larger than anything.

At the back of the lens, the end was already on fire.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/1584169/letter-to-the-corinthians?mc_cid=02e1f119f8

#poem #poetry #literature

No Quarter

Shatter hard stone walls.
Let fire take vengeance on ice.
Destroy all borders.

© Simon J Ashcroft, 2024

#haiku #poem #poetry #PoetryCommunity

End of Summer
BY Stanley Kunitz

An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.

Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54898/end-of-summer-56d235ce0824f?mc_cid=e9abfd2de4

#poem #poetry #literature #eqinox

Gotham Wanes
BY Bryan D. Dietrich

The mask? Because we were never ugly
enough. Because our ugliness was epic.
Because we were given to it, because
we were so misgiven. You wear one. I
wear one. Yes. Kings, Pharaohs had them
fabricated, poured out in gold and beaten.
Most wore them to the grave. In Mexico
the living wear them, not to scare the dead
away, but as invitation. They leave candy
on the mounds of those they mourn. New
Orleans? Women wear them in order
to bare everything else. Men wear them
in order to watch. I can remember, back
before it all grows grim, making one
out of the news, trying to paste it together.
I remember my mother helping me. I don’t
really remember my father. Something
like a face, like the man in the moon.
I understand we’re hardwired this way,
to make faces before anything else.
It’s why we see the Madonna in mold,
alien architecture in Martian crater creep.
We keep looking for those first faces, first
familia. Every culture, every eon. Witness
the oldest we know, his cave, his wall, one
hundred seventy centuries gone. They call
him Sorcerer. They call me Knight.
We have always lived in the dark.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/54986/gotham-wanes?mc_cid=612b74ec37

#poem #poetry #literature

Trio
by Bruce Snider

a. Driving Home from the Night Shift, Our Mother
Listens to Hank Williams' "Lost Highway"

She cracks the window,
letting the cold air

   slap her awake. Cranking
   the radio, she sings

along as she leans
into the burn of Tiger

   Balm, her shift,
   like her body, a sharpening

of drill bits, the break
room doors. Soon,

   she'll enter the house
   before anyone is awake.

This is her time
when everything is still,

   when she could be
   anything—a thief,

a mouse. Alone,
she'll wipe coffee rings

   from counters, scrub
   sinks, floors. Love,

she'd tell you, is work, and work
is what remains

   when she leans into
   a sleep she can

almost taste, when
our father like the dawn

   rises to slip
   his arm around her waist.

b. My First Boyfriend and I Slow Dance to Jeff Buckley's
Cover of Hank Williams' "Lost Highway"

This new voice is the old
voice of wanting

   what you already have.
   It marks me like

pressed hands in wet
cement, leaves me

   warm against a boy
   in a dorm room

damp with the musk
of hair gel,

   drugstore rubbers
   and knock-off Calvin Klein.

This is not romance.
This is not a story

   of easy need, though
   there's cheap beer

on the dresser,
rumpled white sheets

   on his unmade bed.
   Anything could happen—

his mother could call,
his roommate

   could walk in the door, or
   we could flinch,

dropping down as we inch
into each other, the track

   on repeat: Now, boys, don't
   start your ramblin' round . . .

c. Encore: Months Before His Overdose, Hank Williams Sings "Cold,
Cold Heart" in 1952 on The Grand Ole Opry—YouTube, 2021

Here, as if brought to
life, the echo of some

   lost world: this skinny
   lightning-voiced angel

with his white cowboy
hat askew. Like death,

   the Internet, I've read,
   is a ghostly well,

ever-expanding grave-
yard of last breaths.

   Is this, at last, what
   we're meant to become—

Hank's blazing eyes,
soulful black windows?

   He sings and sings,
   Byzantium's golden bird.

Or is this Christ's after-
life, gates ajar? Now,

   colorless, Hank strums
   his phantom guitar.

He stares. He blinks
and grins. He feels no pain.

   Strange beauty in the lie,
   this screen between

what's twice alive but
dead, what never ends.

   When he stops, I click
   back: he sings again.

from the journal GEORGIA REVIEW

https://mailchi.mp/poems/todays-poem-trio-bruce-snider?e=6ec42bce63

#poem #poetry #literature

Calling Things What They Are
BY Ada Limón

I pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later I yell, Mourning dove afterparty! (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground the afterparty.) I am getting so good at watching that I’ve even dug out the binoculars an old poet gave me back when I was young and heading to the Cape with so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean. Tufted titmouse! I yell, and Lucas laughs and says, Thought so. But he is humoring me; he didn’t think so at all. My father does this same thing. Shouts out at the feeder announcing the party attendees. He throws out a whole peanut or two to the Stellar’s jay who visits on a low oak branch in the morning. To think there was a time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna and no flora. And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in, but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/162174/calling-things-what-they-are?mc_cid=56deb727c3

#poem #poetry #literature

Two Poems from Sarah Carson

https://electricliterature.com/two-poems-by-sarah-carson/?mc_cid=3631611afe

#poem #poetry #literature