Sample Poems
Accident
Todd Davis
Originally published in Indiana Review
They tell the son, who tells his friends
at school, that the father's death was
an accident, that the rifle went off
while he was cleaning it. I'm not sure
why he couldn't wait. We understand
the ones who decide to leave us in February,
even as late as March. Snows swell.
Sun disappears. Hunting season ends.
With two deer in the freezer any family
can survive. I know sometimes
it feels like you've come to the end
of something. Sometimes you just want
to sit down beneath a hemlock and never go
back. But this late in the year, when plum
trees have opened their blossoms?
Yesterday it was so warm we slept
with the windows open. Smell of forsythia
right there in the room. I swear
you could hear the last few open,
silk petals come undone, a soft sound
like a pad sliding through a gun's barrel,
white cloth soaked in bore cleaner,
removing the lead, the copper, the carbon
that fouls everything. My son knows
you don't die cleaning your rifle:
the chamber's always open.
I told him to nod his head anyway
when his friend tells the story,
to say yes as many times as it takes,
to never forget the smell of smoke
and concrete, the little bit of light
one bulb gives off in a basement
with no windows.
That Death
K. A. Hays
That death I remember
as I remember the brush wolf
at dusk along the woods road. It loped,
a line no longer than a hyphen,
and skimmed the scrub a half mile off,
then sat, to make a silhouette
of dog (but not quite dog). I sensed
what it was, but did not want to come
to the fact (to touch the rib, to rub
the raked fur at the crown). It stood, all legs,
low tail trailing after, then thralled off
into the laurel. I remember how the gum trees
looked that day, blushing
in unison. It was August. The air
was not yet cold. There was, and is,
a privacy about the thing
that suspends one until it trots off.
To the mind. Or wherever the dead go.
"Draft"
James Hoch
This poem was originally published in Slate
Some things, I knew,
were beyond choosing-
father leaving, the endless
caring for mother, that love
is a salving: what medics and nurses do.
Fodder,
I was too small to object,
the conscription too severe.
So when you said
you felt drafted
into marriage, the shutter
screwing up my face, you
quickly followed, just a metaphor,
putting me at ease.
Try another,
I said, closing the window,
drawing a breath between each
sentence, trailing closely every word.
Like a Tree
Philip Miller
From Branches Snapping, Helicon Nine Editions
The body owns us, lets us, inside it, live
and breathe through branchy sponges it provides:
the head covered with hairs like leaves,
the trunk's limbs sprouted
with fingers and toes like twigs,
and within, the heartwood's dark thuds
are the ax man's steps, which will bring it down,
this body with a head like a bloom,
and with inner petals, too, delicately tissued
purses and pods of sap and seed,
and the Adam's apple, the vocal chords and tongue
give us a voice, which is the body's voice,
full-throated, words of the flesh,
unwrapped and uttered by way of bone and blood.
Only by the always-bodily thing are we
brought to what our brains conceive
before the body falls like a tree.
At The Poetry Reading
Ed Ochester
In the library I am very decorous and read
what I think are my quietest poems, and
my least nasty, except for the two
about Pocahontas being a sexually active
twelve year old and the one about Jesus
as a parasitic insect, and all-in-all
I am a good deal less shocking than
a Quentin Tarentino movie or, for that matter,
Men in Black, and a few younger students yawn
as if to underline the fact, but I see Ann,
my student from the "College for the Over Sixty"
and what seems to be an elderly friend of hers
and afterward they come up to me holding
hands: Ann is nervous and May
be blushing, though she says it's so good
to hear my new poems, but her friend appears
to be in a state of shock, and mutters:
"it's another world, another world,"
and I almost lie "it's not my fault! I don't
want to make you unhappy! I just write
what I see!" as they backpedal and say
"goodbye, goodbye nice to meet you" and
totter off to the real world: Ronald McDonald,
The Phantom of the Opera, Christmas clubs,
Princess Diana, Oprah on a diet, the statue
of the Virgin Mary weeping in the North Hills...
Undid in the Land of Undone
Lee Upton
All the things I wanted to do and didn't
took so long.
It was years of not doing.
You can make an allusion here to Penelope,
if you want.
See her up there in her high room undoing her art?
But enough about what she didn't do-
not doing
was what she did. Plucking out
the thread of intimacy in the frame.
If I got to
know you that would be
-something. So let's make a toast to the long art
of lingering.
We say the cake is done,
but what exactly did the cake do?
The things undid
in the land of undone call us
in the flames. What I didn't do took
an eternity-
and it wasn't for lack of trying.
Jacob To Rachel
Joe Weil
Bleak, all this sky without orange,
and the teal taint
of the starling's wing,
and all the words that conjure
nothing I can love.
The phone calls are gone,
and the deep love cries at three am,
You were a lie I told myself,
but the lie was great
and it trumps the truth
of these loveless hands.
First Snow
Gabriel Welsch
How it all comes around, the whirl
of flakes, the wood smoke, the wet sheen
of driveways over a ground not yet frozen.
And this morning, the radio again
with news of a general, martial law,
the suspension of a constitution, stories
of women beaten by police. And we slalom
the blown-over garbage cans, drum fingers
on the steering wheel behind a school bus.
And the news anchor digs more concern
from the vault of his voice, and the crusty
voice on the phone from continents away
retells a story as reliable as a cold front
this November, in the northeast, in mountains
we think too easily are permanent, forgetting
the repeated drama of their formation.
Frederick Douglass Learns to Read
Jerry Wemple
My father was born into a hold, called Baltimore.
Being neither south nor north, but rather west and east,
He ceased to be a man, some say ceased to be, and furthermore
To depend; captured, quantified, thus chained like a beast.
My mother was a literate soul, sold on this bargain,
This deal between gods and God, the promise of the serpent
United rather than fallen, that became the legacy of this land.
And when the break came, it lingered, still splitting every fragment.
The land that is mine was built upon those brains and backs,
Its history a paradox, both unified and opposed, distorted.
Less than paper, only words, hints among the artifacts,
Glimpses, just shadows of shadows, all that has been reported.
And here am I, a grotesquerie too, leaning back in wonder.
And here I am, a curious curiosity, hoping to not go under.