Quite soon, I assure you, we will begin to review the poem itself, but before we do, I fear we must acknowledge that the poem, insofar as one tends to think of a poem...
In the summer of 2013, I moved from Wyoming to Houston. My loved ones warned me against it; they were wary of heat and humidity, cockroaches as big as your thumbs, traffic jams, sex trafficking, and …
I’m reading Eula Biss’s On Immunity at the same time I’m hearing about Ferguson. It’s the morning after Darren Wilson has avoided indictment and I’m in the airport, traveling from Houston …
Doing daily shit while waiting / to swing the axe. To sing a lullaby / about doing dishtowels while looking atrocious. To cinch the lariat / around the vocal apparatus / while doing nothing but …
How do you think you yourselves can avoid in twenty years becoming the very establishment that the next generation of innovative writers will need to oppose?
Two thousand miles away from here, my dad / is lying in a strange room, being tended to. / It is always getting later. No matter / if it's morning dampening the earth, / or burnt orange evening …
The house trailers squat opulent as a loaf of bread. / It is 1940, no lines of men, their hands extended. / No chalked outlines on pavement, crumpled / double-breasted suits, pinstriped lapels still …
Now it is time for the brief history / of the day my uncle's turkey shed burned down. / I remember walking through the wet / debris after the fire, corrugated metal and scorched carcasses, and …
Walk down The Hill, away from the university, and you pass beneath the highway into patches of housing projects known as The Bricks. Past that, the empty streets of downtown. Past that, residential …
Let's take a Vespa to the beach; let's / not get killed. Our lives are mirrors, adjust your mirrors, / let's not get / killed. The sun goes over a cliff, / head over heels. We motor away, switch / …
They call it a nuclear missile. / The great equalizer. A man dropped a bomb so big he could never / forget. This is how families begin: one accident leads to the next and suddenly you're / giving …
One night my mother dreamed that she turned into a large, white bird. She was standing naked before a narrow, tall mirror. She still had only one breast, the scar on the left side no longer a zipper …
The death of my grandfather / leaves money / and a company / for the children to scrabble over. There are those who never escape / the molasses. Perhaps it's best he not die. So many things / I want …
I look like you make me shiver. / Your mind is a radio. / If this is paradise, I wish I had / your face. Facts continue to change / your mind. Is a radio / a cigarette, burning / your face? Facts …
I want to tell you about an album I’ve been listening to a lot lately. The Best of: My Younger Thinking. Side A is one long toddler snarl with a fiddle whimpering low in the mix. Side B shows a …
some grainy needle / pokes a woman with a black cat / that becomes permanent / like this is also your body and it is just perfect / that is how i see it / then there are rains that wash the mountain. …
Imagine that some gift has been bestowed upon me, some crisis or illness / The Garden we enter is easy / You lay there and the names of pop lie with you / A race disappears / But save that for later …
Soon after graduating college, my father lost his construction job. The Teton Dam he helped build let loose its foundations and poured downhill, flooding a fifth of Idaho. He began distance running …
Dear Mom, it’s been so long. Since back when / I was a loggerhead shrike, back when I followed / my breath—I the Desire—I’m dry outside / to the nostril, or from it, every / which way. Lip to …
fogged each a distinct cataract blue / beads drape my daughter’s neck when I pull it / down from the shelf the jewel box / smells of very old woman what remains / of great grandmother’s chest …
I’d like to fear the falling, or be feared for falling, or be myself what is feared most: inexhaustible, as clouds, as moisture. Such is/as faith. Such is responsibility and believing in something …
Whistles while he works. Whistles the jetty. Whistles the rip tide. Whistles the sand terrier, sky kite dangerous. Whistles liquor in a bag, on the sly. Whistles for your attention, for your safety, …
Or is it border-patrol duty dawn to dusk / This morning they began like a water-glass choir / Multiplied by ten in the birches along the river / Until a robin on the back lawn shoved another off / A …
A path is carved where nearly sprinting springing forth Turkish slippers or relay doves Venezianella healed emerges from the gondola cabin in crimson flecks and enters St. Mark’s like the essential …
Single tenant / of his emptied city, / coat blown open, / he carries a bucket / of quicklime / to the coast. / The birds make / their derisive whistles, / watching from the woods. / On a sun-bleached …
I wait to come to good. I wait carved from the same war, wait draped by the mechanism between myself and fabric pleasure, how pressed, how shut. The icon I remember is ragged and full of brown …
Every other Wednesday evening, the Northwest District Small Group of the Mendota Heights Church of the Holy Redeemer held a Bible study at one of the attendees’ homes. Starting at six p.m., they …
I am unstrung: ash in an ash-garden. So say an instrument, tuned in clay, strung with ash. Not a music. A means towards an end which picks each ash-strand from the body, the mind’s camber. So say …
I have a fever and its name is God. / The nurses come in shifts / and worship it. / All around me the land suffers from the loss of love’s handkerchief. / Children sing brackish rhymes / in the …
the ides of July those fifty years ago, when / my grandmother split wide, unbroken, unnamed / light pouring out of her: a river into a river. / Svet: luminescence, shine. The child took a while / to …
When Raphael Rubinstein asks me to write an article about Chitra Ganesh for the Art Lies section of Gulf Coast, which he is guest-editing, I reflexively oblige before I’ve even investigated her …
Let’s consider for a minute how time is built / in this green mechanical bird how slippery / as bullets the whirr of its tiny metallic brain / its tinny taloned wings its tinseled / wind-up heart …
Aimee Bender is the author of five books, including The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake . Her most recent, The Color Master , was a New York Times Notable book of …
When the culture passed over: / we bathed in its light in its fear in its / mountain stream. We left mountains / of carts full of junk behind. We bade them / farewell. They bade us weep / and know …
This is no oasis of peace, / Mantegna’s dead Christ, the body / foreshortened, the head enlarged, more like a wounded / dwarf’s, the focus / on the shrouded genitals: behold the man. The ribcage …
They said flames came from my mouth. / They lay me on the couch, / & flames from my mouth, & the world / & all its armor went black. / How does grace hide / the body from itself? Depict me / as a …
As bookstores close in ever larger numbers all over the world and as libraries, great and small, cede more and more of their square footage to computer work stations and touch screens, the former …
...after reading Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, we searched online for copies of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things and found a 1743 two-volume set with broken …
what began as salt, / as blood and need, blue and / winged and laced / with spools of astral milk, / what began a sweet ache, / thunder of swifts, / the softly closed eyes of the air, / vertebrae, a …
The speck of dirt lived on the floor of the apartment, and somehow had, until now, avoided the broom. It was, after all, just one speck, and all its brethren had spilled out ahead of it and been …
But Penelope is waving at something over Janis’s shoulder. Janis turns and sees three people walking out of a clump of bare ash trees towards the house, which squats on top of a rocky hill behind …
they speak of deep resentment / of abandonment / of internal bleeding / they say that everything was a bolt of fire / that god took off running / a shawl thrown over his head / the sea was peeling...
On all the happy mornings, when the trees get covered in oranges, in lilies of fire, between November and December, and in school during the exam festivities, and Mother arranges the honeycombs...
Over the frozen air over the horizon where the morning is / rising and it’s only the infinite whiteness of Antarctica / dawning just like a giant dead planet over the frozen cities / over the …
So I had two lists of names for a girl, so / what. The president’s allowed to / have two speeches, in case the hostage / comes home in a bag. The geese / in the metropark don’t want / for bread …
Black animals fill the face, silhouettes, buildings fill the face, an alphabet fills the face. Inside the face, black animals grow, they animate the data, form a demography of day, stained and soiled …
I started modeling at 32, to keep myself fed while I wrote a novel. I was by that point eight years into what I suppose is called a “spiritual practice.” Initially, there was a clarifying horror …
They are dying out, the grand old ladies of Florida, along with the citrus fortunes long spent and the orange blossoms that crowned their heads when they were beauty queens. Their graves wear flowers …
Libraries and museums, the palaces of books and art, invite us into a conversation capable of interrupting the complicit silence in ourselves: When we have broken that silence on the page, could we …
Tonight I moved between three beds like I was sailing on the Mekong and whispered the beauty of the Tigris and Euphrates under an endless moment looking under the left tit I have a hole …
“Patty,” the man called out. “Patty, I’ve been looking for you.” I stopped what I was doing and said hello. The man leaned on his crutches and smiled. I liked the man because he was a …
when fire rises to the tongue your words were the rain / your servant efendim was the ash / when the secret lies in the open your lies linger / efendim on your servant’s tongue
The inaugural 2014 Prize in Translation Winner features excerpts from The World as Presence by Cuban writer Marcelo Morales Cintero, translated and with an introduction by Kristin Dykstra..
