Paige Lewis - Because the Color Is Half the Taste
it’s a shame to eat blackberries in the dark,
but that’s exactly what I’m up to when a man
startles down the street screaming, The fourth
dimension is not time! He makes me feel stupid
and it’s hard to sleep knowing so little
about everything, so I enroll in a night class
where I learn the universe is an arrow
without end and it asks only one question:
How dare you? I recite it in bed, How dare
you? How dare you? But still I can’t find sleep.
So I go out where winter is and roll
around in the snow until a sharp rock
meets the vulnerable plush of my belly.
A little blood. Hunched over, I must look
like I’m hiding something I don’t want to share.
And I suppose that’s true—the sharp,
the warm wet. The color is half the pain. Why
would anyone else want to see? How dare they?
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Discord has introduced microtransactions to make only specific users hear sound effects. Skype is back as a livestreaming platform. X is now marketing “twitter” as a paid-only private area to post in on X. There are clouds gathering above the field now. There’s an ache in your tooth when you eat something sweet, sharp and stabbing, but you put it off. The wind makes the puddles in the mud ripple after it rains. When you look out, you like to pretend they are deeper, deep enough to drown in. You wonder if you’d still be able to see just how big the cloud-heavy sky is as you fall beneath the surface. You wonder if you’d hear the first drops of rain. You wonder how the wind always seems to find you out there. The field is large, and it is cold outside. Come inside now. It’s getting late.
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David Whyte - Everything is Waiting for You
After Derek Mahon
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
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Alex Dimitrov - Once
Would you even believe
when it finally happens
how easy it is to feel
without any proof
that love may be, could be, actually is
longer than time.
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Robert Wood Lynn - Bringing a Gun to Chekhov’s House
It’s a party everyone’s real happy to see you and
you’re not stupid you don’t show them the gun nobody
is happy to see a gun and after all it’s his house and
you know how he gets so you’re gonna leave it
with the coats and there’s gonna be someone real
cute there at the party someone you’ve got real good at
looking away from it’ll be a real rager real scribble
yourselves on the walls kind of night and there’s gonna be
the part of it where you both end up in the bathroom line
away from whoever you came with or will go home with
and there will be this tremendous opportunity to say
something even though it’s all very loud and you’ll think
of the cleverest way to sum up the immense distance
between people and make believe the being alive part
of being alive and so the moment you open your mouth
to say it you will know this is gonna work that you’re both
gonna wreck everything about yourselves in the purest
way you will be asking each other to whisper forgotten
names and take turns napping with each other’s whole
body weight on top of you and this is honestly the most
gorgeous you have ever been absolutely finally and now
the moment you open your mouth there is this tremendous
noise coming from coming from coming from coming from
oh the room with the coats at which point everything
remembers quiet that angry kind of quiet
and you’re not sure if you should still try and say it
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Kyo Lee - Why I Have Decided to Live
Spoonfuls of moonlight. Cold air. Her knit blanket
tugging at my body to stay.
The fog resting on my shoulders, hugging me.
Summer rain through an open window.
Thunderstorms & how they change the world momentarily
unafraid, or even better, unaware of humans.
Because I left my country broken.
Because I saw the first reflection of myself in a candlelight vigil.
Because I was flickering.
Because we made promises.
Because I can keep trying & no one can stop me.
Peaches.
Stars.
Willow trees.
Acoustic music with a trembling voice.
The kinds of poems that give me shivers.
Trains to nowhere in particular.
Our sweat sweet bodies colliding on wet grass.
Her hands & the way they cradle my heart
as if holding something precious.
August night drives.
Singing along to “Riptide” & eating cherries out of buckets.
Because we promised to return.
To mend a broken thing.
How laughter colonizes the lungs.
To think of myself as something larger than myself.
Because I can love every small thing.
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Aseem Kaul - Ghalib
Tonight, you recite Ghalib from memory;
because poetry, like blood, must come from the heart.
Taking a sip from your glass after every couplet,
the scotch rhyming perfectly the melancholy on your tongue.
You cling to nostalgia like an empty mirror,
to the scent of this language that withers like flowers.
You gather pain the way the sky gathers,
pinprick by slow pinprick, the stars.
Somewhere between question and answer
the feeling dissolves. The need to sing becomes
the struggle not to fall. And you arrange
your ruins into one last gesture,
knowing the Beloved will not heed your call,
knowing she will prove false, like God, or the Moon.
***
You write to me from Delhi,
speak of summer blackouts,
of how, disconnected from the machines,
you thought of Ghalib –
the bomb blast of his grief
leaving the city in ruins –
and how the history of loss
could be written on a feather.
When the power returned
you turned the lights off,
lit a candle to see
the darkness a little better,
and still the shadows
were not the same.
***
“Madness”, Ghalib writes, “is never without its reasons;
surely there is something that the veil is meant to protect”
And I think of all the years we have spent
listening to these ghazals, the verses
falling from our lips like pieces of exquisite glass
from broken window frames;
shaping our mouths to his sadness,
unbuttoning our collars to let his words stain
the rubbed language of our songs.
What have we been hiding from,
my friend? What longing is this inside us
that we disguise in a dead man’s clothes?
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Richard Brautigan - We Stopped at Perfect Days
We stopped at perfect days
and got out of the car.
The wind glanced at her hair.
It was as simple as that.
I turned to say something—
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Noah Mazer - Liberal Poem for Palestine
the guerrilla moves among the people
as a fish swims through water
i sit by the river
i condemn the fish.
i condemn the water.
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Victoria Chang - The Sound of the Light
I can’t overhear
light, can’t stroke it or scratch it,
can’t turn it over.
It’s a lot like grief, which has
ringlets of light streaked through it.
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Anna Kamieńska - Difference
Tell me what's the difference
between hope and waiting
because my heart doesn't know
It constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting
It constantly gets lost in the fog of hope
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Sandra Lim - Endings
The story has two endings.
It has one ending
and then another.
Do you hear me?
I do not have the heart
to edit the other out.
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Alex Dimitrov - Sunday
The streets before sunrise.
The first memory. The daybreak.
That place where runners
make paths into spring
and the park is eternally true.
The glint of the buildings.
The fog of our past lives.
The first yes. The last no.
The cabs flooding highways
with people again.
The clear sky. The Hudson.
The gold light of Sunday.
All this time I thought I knew.
All this time I thought we would change.
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Federico García Lorca - Variation
That still pool of the air
under the branch of an echo.
That still pool of the water
under a frond of bright stars.
That still pool of your mouth
under a thicket of kisses.
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Dean Young - Ash Ode
When I saw you ahead I ran two blocks
shouting your name then realizing it wasn’t
you but some alarmed pretender, I went on
running, shouting now into the sky,
continuing your fame and luster. Since I've
been incinerated, I've oft returned to this thought,
that all things loved are pursued and never caught,
even as you slept beside me you were flying off.
At least what's never had can’t be lost, the sieve
of self stuck with just some larger chunks, jawbone,
wedding ring, a single repeated dream,
a lullaby in every elegy, descriptions
of the sea written in the desert, your broken
umbrella, me claiming I could fix it.
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Todd Dillard - Happy Men
There are happy men in the world
I have seen them dance badly
at weddings in grocery aisles thronged at sports stadiums
Sometimes you find them at the bottoms of pools
If you dive in they give you a thumbs up
I don't know why some people hate them
I don't know how happy men stitch quilts from laughter
Once I touched a happy man's belly
and his skin began to glow
It was snowing he put me in his sidecar
and drove until the mountains gave up on us
Once I saw a happy man slip out of his happiness
A dozen other happy men gathered around him
They made for him a hairy palanquin out of their arms
Us onlookers vibrated from falling so swiftly in love
Even the sky toppled into a shade of pink
The happy men marched to the ocean pier
Light papered their shoulders like it does with bells
Sometimes to watch, to listen is a religion
My favorite hymn is the way happy men sing
until you cannot tell them apart
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Philip Larkin - Home is so Sad
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
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