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Poems

As the Dead Prey Upon Us

✒️ Charles Olson
As the dead prey upon us,

they are the dead in ourselves,

awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you,

disentangle the nets of being!



I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused.

…
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Poems

The Kingfishers

✒️ Charles Olson
1



What does not change / is the will to change



He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He

remembered only one thing, the birds, how

when he came in, he had gone around the rooms

and got…
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Poems

The Thrift Shop Dresses

✒️ Frannie Lindsay
I slid the white louvers shut so I could stand in your closet a little while among the throng of flowered dresses you hadn’t worn in years, and touch the creases on each of their sleeves that smelled…
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Poems

Making a Fist

✒️ Naomi Shihab Nye
We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

—
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Poems

Globus Hystericus

✒️ Timothy Donnelly
1



A pity the selfsame vehicle that spirits me away from

factories of tedium should likewise serve to drag

me backwards into panic, or that panic should erect



massive factories of its …
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Poems

To His Own Device

✒️ Timothy Donnelly
That figure in the cellarage you hear upsetting boxes

is an antic of the mind, a baroque imp cobbled

up under bulbs whose flickering perplexes night’s



impecunious craftsman, making what he …
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Poems

The Cloud Corporation

✒️ Timothy Donnelly
1



The clouds part revealing a mythology of clouds

assembled in light of earliest birds, an originary

text over water over time, and that without which



the clouds part revealing an apo…
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Poems

The New Intelligence

✒️ Timothy Donnelly
After knowledge extinguished the last of the beautiful

fires our worship had failed to prolong, we walked

back home through pedestrian daylight, to a residence



humbler than the one left beh…
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Poems

Meeting at an Airport

✒️ Taha Muhammad Ali
You asked me once,

on our way back

from the midmorning

trip to the spring:

“What do you hate,

and who do you love?”



And I answered,

from behind the eyelashes

of my surprise,

my …
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Poems

Exodus

✒️ Taha Muhammad Ali
The street is empty

as a monk’s memory,

and faces explode in the flames

like acorns—

and the dead crowd the horizon

and doorways.

No vein can bleed

more than it already has,

no scream…
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Poems

Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower

✒️ Taha Muhammad Ali
In his life

he neither wrote nor read.

In his life he

didn’t cut down a single tree,

didn’t slit the throat

of a single calf.

In his life he did not speak

of the New York Times

behind…
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Poems

April Snow

✒️ Matthew Zapruder
Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway. The world

is in a delay. All the political consultants drinking whiskey keep

their heads down, lifting them only to look at the beautiful…
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Poems

As I Cross the Heliopause at Midnight, I Think of My Mission

✒️ Matthew Zapruder
Drunker than Voyager I

but not as Voyager 2 I rode my blue

bike back through the darkness

to my lonely geode cave of light

awaiting nothing under the punctured

dome. I had achieved escape

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Poems

Schwinn

✒️ Matthew Zapruder
I hate the phrase “inner life.” My attic hurts,

and I’d like to quit the committee

for naming tornadoes. Do you remember

how easy and sad it was to be young

and defined by our bicycles? My fi…
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Poems

Erstwhile Harbinger Auspices

✒️ Matthew Zapruder
Erstwhile means long time gone.

A harbinger is sent before to help,

and also a sign of things

to come. Like this blue

stapler I bought at Staples.

Did you know in ancient Rome

priests cal…
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Poems

Jerusalem

✒️ Naomi Shihab Nye
“Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed.


Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy


is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.”


—Tommy Olofsson, Swe…
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Poems

Wildpeace

✒️ Yehuda Amichai
Not the peace of a cease-fire,not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,but ratheras in the heart when the excitement is overand you can talk only about a great weariness.I know that I know how to…
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Poems

Monday, September 25, 2006

✒️ Susan M. Schultz
--The former President lost his temper. Loss of content in our public life. Only forms remain, intonation, affect. Why did you yell in my mom’s house? Radhika asks our neighbor.


--She sounded lik…
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Poems

Watch Your Step

✒️ Leslie Bulion
It's a bug's world of intrigue and mystery,

with humans a blip in their history.

So when insects flitter and scurry past us

Take note, because they may outlast us!
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Poems

For My Wife Cutting My Hair

✒️ Bruce Guernsey
You move around me expertly like the good, round Italian barber I went to in Florence, years before we met, his scissors a razor he sharpened on a belt.But at first when you were learning, I feared f…
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Poems

Anatomy Class

✒️ Betsy Franco
The chair has

arms.

The clock,

a face.

The kites have

long and twirly tails.

The tacks have

heads.

The books have

spines.

The toolbox has

a set of nails.

Our shoes have

tong…
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Poems

The Rooster

✒️ David Elliott
Crows and struts.

He’s got feathers!

He’s got guts!

Oh, the rooster

struts and crows.

What’s he thinking?

No one knows.
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Poems

Tomato Pies, 25 Cents

✒️ Grace Cavalieri
Tomato pies are what we called them, those days,before Pizza came in, at my Grandmother’s restaurant, in Trenton New Jersey.My grandfather is rolling meatballs in the back. He studied to be a priest …
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Poems

The Pampering of Leora

✒️ Thylias Moss
Therefore, no more recounting of dreams, a routine thing

that bores with expectations of invention, unfiltered

non sequiturs, unusual embraces

only from the practiced

young woman who everyday…
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