Category: Poetry

All spring the tulips 
trapezed along a string 
of isolate storms
to arrive at the bright edge 
of the season 
weathered threadbare.

Even now  
the wind rears 
like a hurrah of horses
trouncing their flame silks  
into banners of light.

Behold the lungta,
watch them billow —
each petal a prayer flag 
tethering 
the earth to the sky.

– Megan Muthupandiyan…

...continue reading

after Anita Beth McDaniel Swaim

1.

In a familiar wave, you set
your wires down for an edge,
are told you have taken on excess,
so you receive a cut
and feel the land fall away to the west.

You see how foreign dust
developed at a border.

You will never grow any larger.

2.

Musically, you are a rattle
breaking through tall grass,
a weighted drum of plow
felt in wooden yoke.

Even the reluctance of rain
hangs on a beat, drifting, and
again into a steep rush
sung into wide-valleyed theater.

You know to blow hard-lunged
with no warning
that spring of whirring strands unraveling
with train sounds hurled howling
in unrelenting night.

So few applaud come morning,
so few to applaud.…

...continue reading

I see an oddly maligned portrait, out there beyond the field, where the trees curl up the sides of the nubby landscape, where intentions are laid bare in the shade of their leaves, drooping, thick and unctuous in the summer air. Is the way he moved his arm, motioning toward nothing in particular, an indication?

Heavy wasps float through the haze on sagging wings. Hot breath is drenched on us, despair comes and goes, all the colors from before are different now, so that it becomes harder to remember that I am me.

I float, with the leaves, the leaves and me, we float downstream in the sluggish current of the brown creek. Being younger now, I have a sense that it doesn’t end, but in a flash the tributary joins the river and loses its brief individuality.…

...continue reading

this man
who surfaces
at rush hour
to homeward
bound cars 

tucked in a
once-tan jacket
grey beard
(the kind Caribbean
economists wear)

walking in a side waddle
bad feet, wrong shoes

propelling into the street
when lights change
to stop cars
knock on windows…

...continue reading

At a sandwich shop in San Francisco
I asked to be called Travis.
I walked by the Natural History Museum
where a cave of Neolithic men
were learning to play the spoons
for all the hairy babes preening fistfuls of knotted hair.
A bear of smoke crawls over their backs,
shaped like the Rottweiler outside my window in the morning.
Police sirens float over, and he harmonizes.
ah-roo-roo-roo
but low
as if he wants me
to
hear
them
too

– Andrew Gibson…

...continue reading

Old calico with gummy kidneys and knotted joints,
fur no longer smoothable, like a carpet that someone
spilled paint on, never the same. The vet tech inserted

the port in one leg, and she meowed her last protest.
I thought of my mother, who as she aged closer
and closer to her final, feeble 93, said, “We treat

our old dogs and cats better than we treat ourselves
at the end.” I held Madeline, named wittily, I thought,
given a cat’s propensity for sleep, for Keats’s young woman

who dreams of her lover. When the tech started the pink drip,
Miss M looked in my eyes, knowing; I like to think
it was a look of thanks. The tech asked if I wanted time

alone with her, but I didn’t want to feel her warmth
ebb away; instead, I imagined her waking somewhere,
running off with her young and supple tom.…

...continue reading

When we discovered oil in our backyard
bubbling beneath a suspicious strawberry that produced
fruits redolent of racetracks and truck stops
the nice man from ExxonMobil who showed up unannounced
assured us our financial worries had ended
and the fun could begin

Handing us a handsome business card
he promised to retire our mortgage
            provide a substantial monthly stipend
            and gift us an immodest bonus check
in exchange for the exclusive right to install a bobbing derrick in the garden
where the tomato vines normally flourished

Agreeing to this felicitous arrangement would not only benefit our banking
he assured us
but additionally
and this was the really neat aspect of the deal
we’d be doing our small part to guarantee America’s energy independence
from foreigners who hate our freedom

Explaining your great good luck to someone who doesn’t have it
can be tricky
so we told him
it sounded wonderful and very generous and we’d really like to help
win whichever of our nation’s ongoing wars was most important
but unbelievably
providentially we like to think
just last week
the wife and I discovered a vein of gold while digging in the potato patch
and after praying on it and paying off some bills
we’d made a pact with our Lord and Savior
to convert the excavation site into
a community swimming pool

– MK PUNKY

Note: This poem is excerpted from MK’s collection The Year of When: 365 Poems Beginning with the Same Word.…

...continue reading