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Compost
All humus & ions elbows at angles Bacteria, springtails heating peels into soil— That’s where everything goes: shibboleth, bibleot, trapeze, swizzlestick, disciple, subterfuge Granite mannequins pretending to be dirt in a forever pile. About the poem: Compost is about understanding death, but it’s also [...]
IT FEELS A SHAME TO BE ALIVE
444 It feels a shame to be Alive— When Men so brave—are dead— One envies the Distinguished Dust— Permitted—such a Head— The Stone—that tells defending Whom This Spartan put away What little of Him we—possessed In Pawn for Liberty— The price is great—Sublimely paid— Do [...]
After Seeing a Bumper Sticker that Read: I Never Leave Rhode Island
I am lonely. On days it hurts the most, I go to T.F. Green Airport and spend hours at Arrivals, watching loved ones reunite. Sometimes I even bring balloons and make clever welcome signs, as if I’m waiting for someone I know. Seeing a stranger [...]
When She Sang (Legend Has It)
when janet jackson sang, ‘when I was seventeen I did what people told me—that was long ago,’ she was nineteen. legend has it, ‘saving all my love’ wasn’t going to radio, but when whitney sang it, her long- limbed voice bending gently around sax [...]
After the Election
All morning, I read Kafka. During the inauguration, we do not watch the news, knowing the new orders and acts will harm our daughter. We swallow bread with friends under lights strung from their ceiling. Candles burn as the rescue dog hovers by [...]
Sound and Vision – 09.26
This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience [...]
A Note from Tina Cane
For this inaugural installment of a new weekly poetry feature, I have chosen an excerpt from the preface of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, first published on July 4, 1855. While Whitman is known today as an important poetry forefather, when his collection appeared, it [...]
