Poems of the Week

After Rapture I am found kneeling beneath the last _____blasted tree. Winter on my shoulders and a sparrow’s red skull lodged _____in my mouth. I have cut my hair to feed the fire. Remnants of a city _____dusting my lips. No nations left to die for or hide in. Only this voice— _____woven through the cracks of a halved piano: that sound a doe makes when the arrowhead _____replaces the day with an answer to the ribs’ quiet hollows. I reach _____for the charred branch and push. Blood dots the dust beneath me. My wet face titled _____skyward. I push until he starts to crown, my name already dripping from his lips. He writhes _____through me, scraping for that precious shard of light, where the wolves _____have already gathered— their half-moon fangs brightening the hour. But I push _____anyway. I open. I wound. And you— dear reader, you will call [...]

THE ICE :“What are you dreaming of?” :“The ice.” :“But you are on the ice.” :“I am thinking of the ice I will be on.” :“We are standing on the ice right now, facing each other. We are on the ice touching lips, we are squinting out at sails that move as if on a track.” :“I only know that we have not fallen through.” :“What are you dreaming of?” :“The ice.” :“But you just dreamt of ice.” :“That was a different ice. This time we are indoors. The light is blue in that underwater way. The sadness is dimmed, and at the end of the day, you are fetching.” “What are we looking for?” :“I can’t remember.” :“What are you dreaming of?” :“The ice.” :“But we are indoors. Blue light, et cetera.” :“No, we are standing at the edge where the ice breaks against the sand, triumphant.” :“Breaks what?” [...]

AND THEN WE SAW THE DAUGHTER OF THE MINOTAUR Poet, comma. It is thus the delay, which is also a beginning. That we can link eyes across her time-space continuum is another hyena. The female elongates, bares fangs, and a trash compactor recycles. Hyena gives in the recycling fashion. Phoenix, no more false flight from holes; now balloons eat at decay. Hunger denuded us, too. But will you give up your death for me? With surgery, I outright hollow the monster to breathe across windows. I don her hollow whole. She writes back in the pauses of haze. Her and her tragic magic. We are all cross-dressing in tiny wings with the machines of bones to go on. ___________________________________________ Of her most recent book from Litmus Press, I Want to Make You Safe, John Ashbery described Amy King‘s poems as bringing “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than [...]

To the Night Shark Past dusk I dived Fled without flashlight Went against the current I knew Would bring me to you Tooth-skinned from nose to fin Mortal and counter Clockwise across you Skin I gave up to touch Streamed against the current One moment still mortal I was without struggle without air instinct speech Skin dissolving between each Snaggle-toothed stroke Touch babbling bled Only then With the current Immortal ___________________________________________________ Rosebud Ben-Oni is a playwright at New Perspective Theater, where she is currently at work on a new play. Educated at New York University, the University of Michigan and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ms. Ben-Oni was a Rackham Merit Fellow and a Horace Goldsmith Fellow. She is also co-editor for “HER KIND,” the official blog of “VIDA: Women in Literary Arts”. Her works have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, Arts & Letters, and The Texas Poetry Review. Her [...]

Mother puts on my lipstick standing behind me, dragging the lipstick across my lips as if they were her own. Her free hand steadies my face. It is the red of her nails I want on my mouth, the nails so lacquered they catch the flash of my camera and hold it. Mother puts on my lipstick and I stare into the mirror, my lower lip glowing beneath her hands. Her hands which are all of her, and which hold me this way, as she wants me. ________________-after by ________________________________________________ Matthew Siegel is a poet and essay writer living in San Francisco. His work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, TheRumpus.net, and elsewhere. He is a former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford and currently teaches writing and literature at San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He can be found online at http://matthewsiegel.us/. He tweets at @MatthewSiegel_. Related [...]

Exile: an invitation to a struggle (from My Rice tastes like the lake. Berkeley, CA: Apogee Press, 2011) Mother tells me to eat well. Mother who knows best, asks, how are you? She has asked this all of my life. There are only two answers to this question. Two answers keep us mother and son, mother and daughter. The distance is a question. The question is also a statement of a struggle. If the word is a struggle, you understand. We cannot continue as we are. We cannot forget we are guests who have overstayed. I invite you to living against (as we do.) It is not enough to have one tongue. It cannot point to everything and in every direction. We do not use our mother tongue for our lovers. Beloved, we speak your words. What do we want? Freedom. When do we want it? Now. Protest in the [...]

The Age A jar of broken pens and some thoughts on some obscene rhetoric. Something eclectic and historical. My grandmother knit me a scarf, and she couldn’t stop knitting. It extends to my ankles. The air outside is so dark, that the eye cannot gauge the distance of its vision. I imagine a season, when the harvest is the fullest, most lush and subsisting. A busy street in the rain: the flux of radio static. Something rising, emerging, something early and unmarred. Nothing imposes itself upon it. Tap dancing, as art, as sport, as metaphor. A neighborhood, or a philosophy: vastly inconsistent. Reactive impulse: a fetus, its little foot twisting. The dark ages in a dream: something like a trend from 1983. A home. A sudden hovering of deep blue in the sky. Yesterday is today is tomorrow is today. The difference: a deception, what the mind wills. There was [...]

from on . ______________________________________________ Grace Miceli is the author of American Girl Doll, ok cool, Feminist Art Coloring Book, and Teen Angel Sticker Bitch, among others. She holds a B.A. in studio art from Smith College. Her visual art has been widely acclaimed online and IRL, and featured in each just as thoroughly. Please visit www.gracemiceli.com to visit her world. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Brittany Perham TRACKING THE MARVELOUS Poem of the Week: Yahia Lababidi Possibility and Grace Poem of the Week: Joseph Fasano

MY SOLIDARITY We meet in a reflective trench and you are skeptical but then you begin to feel my solidarity like a short-haired snake between your legs. The snake starts to hustle, overweening the lip of pants. Let’s you and I never be cops to each other. Because we study elephant lore, and in all the annals of elephant adventures, there was only one cop. And he was shit. Elephant stories are like pop songs, one of the earliest forms of experiential autonomy. Yes their appearance is in the form of money, but they go into our mouths and we sing them beautifully and when our lives are ruined we sing them again at karaoke. And karaoke is one of the world’s greatest displays of total solidarity. Almond waves come out of my phone. Marzipan insurrection not just televised but broadcast. If you want to know the status of my [...]

Elegy for a Forty-Three Pound Woman with Mental Retardation Autumn and you are in your mother’s house. __________Plants no longer turn _____but fail down to the soil _______________from which they sprung. To be sure I can’t speak properly to you until Winter _____when the kindly rescuer appeared to find you alive and moving, resuscitating a growing need on a soiled mattress __________—whisper body— one chain away from death in a room you’ve never escaped. _____Thus you, my joyless seed, sprout. ____________________Could you often hear _____the butchers’ feast being torn into by mouths in the outer rooms? Partitioned again the body that is end-stopped. This world __________did not fall from my head. _____An ornate impotence arose with the descent of you, and instead of the too much to say to tell a truth, I’m burdened by a phlegm-thick mouth, my sounds _______________throat bound and the entire vocal __________apparatus breaks at the [...]

______________________________________________________________ Bradley Harrison grew up in small town Iowa and is a graduate of Truman State University. Currently a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin, his work can be found in Gulf Coast, CutBank, The Los Angeles Review, Hunger Mountain, New Orleans Review and other journals. His chapbook Diorama of a People, Burning is forthcoming from Ricochet Editions (Fall 2012). Related Posts Poem of the Week: Frank Montesonti Poem of the Week: Sarah V. Schweig Poem of the Week: Stacy Gnall Poem of the Week: Phoebe Giannisi Poem of the Week: Laura Eve Engel

The People of Distress Going through a box of old ephemerae I found a tiny notebook called The People of Distress. The day I found the notebook was the day I started reading up on the gnostic gospels late at night in Vermont, stoned, the laundry rinsed by the thunderstorm, its slow musk behind our ears and inside our wrists. I’m not sure, but I suspect we have all been given the secret kingdom of God. Taking VHS into the shadowy back bedroom; Gesturing to blackflies and moths banging at the windows that we are mighty and merciless— this is how I sit, a box of old papers between my knees, a warrior beyond death. Nothing comes to us. We work with what is already here. We live at the garrison tinfoiling over half-eaten peaches while out in the world there are those who believe Jesus never kissed Mary Magdalene [...]

It’s Fair Our life is boring. The fat caterpillar makes a ring on your walking stick. I want to be consumed by wind, the smell of oyster mushrooms and red horses. When folded, things become unrecognizable like hotdog paste. Thank god for the unresolved. The corner of your mouth a heron holding lavender in its beak, headed east and west where the unripe pumpkins jump in the oven by themselves, covered in paint chips. The old house they uprooted from the stinging nettle garden in Brooklyn delivered itself like a baby, like a block of ice sure of itself. Its roof was sleeping swans laying eggs to feed the ghosts trapped there from the era of edible roses. They press the chickens when they pluck them and break the wishbone. __________________________________________________________ Margarita Delcheva is a graduate of the NYU Creative Writing Program. Her recent poems have appeared in Sixth Finch, [...]

Federal Bureau of Investigation you give great masthead take it from me I have a microphone where my soul is supposed to go if you put your ear up to it you can hear the future ten thousand girls going crazy at a chess match and we’re not coming out of this closet for any amount of Klondike Bars a bird with a broken song is still a threat wind can commit murder and will if left unchecked my big black car breathes or bleeds a huge floating lung above the parking lot dripping privilege and something yellow what would you write in the wet cement is a test question that blanks me like snow arrested for conspiracy I need an air-craft carrier of coffee right now skin is our biggest enemy untaxable & international like the sky freeloading crowd pleasing changing at will without a pill or talk-show host [...]

Author’s statement: In the summer of 2012, M.A, Vizsolyi visited Ronnie Yates in Houston, Texas, where it was hot as a mofo. They took walks beneath the live oaks, sweated their asses off, and at night, on the roof of Nick Flynn’s apartment (Nick was away in Paris), they began a collaboration tentatively titled, “It’d be a little cooler not to Rock This,” from which this poem is taken. Houston Poem 26 this moment she’s flowering there were boys around her that does suck i agree with that talk about that grief i would have been like ‘whoa’ morality is a bitch but dude morality will grind your ass it will fucking stripe your ass it’s a cat of nine tails rightous indignation that’s a legion of decency oh my shit that’s like scarlet letter styles that’s like dragging that girl by the hair terrible humiliation nah! i don’t think [...]