Explore Poems: Poetry & Poets

I’m here
             to tell you 
                             an old story. 
                             This
Appears to be
                 my work.
                                I live
                                in the world,
Walk
         the streets…

Reading a kind of  laborious
poem about rural things
and a horse is shot
for breaking its leg.
I still don’t get it.
Surely there’s a way
to heal a horse.
I text my friend
who is a farrier
(you know—
someone who shoes horses)
I say surely there’s a way
to...

Dear ferocious dreamer. Dear maven of song and surveyor of every flung star. Dear meandering romantic, audacious witness, dear listener with the whole of your covetous heart. Dear listener to the air’s brutal and gorgeous music, soft dancer to ballads...

If I could, I would put on a facemask and walk into the desert to meet with fairies and angels.

I put on a facemask to resist sandstorms, put on a facemask to resist smog, put on a facemask to make...

say i ‘well
particular in one no to
backed ive time first the isnt this
disaster a of out us

He and I sought together,
over the spattered table,
rhymes and flowers,
gifts for a name.

He said, among others,
I will bring
(and the phrase was just and good,
but not as good as mine,)
"the narcissus that loves the rain."

We strove for a name,
while the light of...

I know not what to do—
My mind is reft.
Is song's gift best?
Is love's gift loveliest?
I know not what to do,
Now sleep has pressed
Weight on your eyelids.

Shall I break your rest,
Devouring, eager?
Is love's gift best?—
Nay, song's the loveliest.
Yet, were you lost,
What...

There is a bat
In Chile named
Micronyteris giovanniae
Dr. Robert Baker named it
After me. He discovered it
While studying bats
And thought the big ears
Were just like me
Maybe if the bat wrote
She would be
A poet

There is a plaque
In Lincoln Heights
Where I went
To school
And a...

                                                            Hunger like her mama
                                                            Most strong in White gaze as in
                                                            a Cowbird’s flirtation
                                                            Sprouted in eyes to tongues
                                                            to bellies pregnant with stolen milk
                                                            to restless hands
                                                            These fingernails filled with Black body,

Everywhere we went, I went
in pigtails
no one could see—

ribbon curled
by a scissor’s sharp edge,
the bumping our cars

undertook when hitting
those strips
along the interstate

meant to shake us
awake. Everywhere we went
horses bucking

their riders off,
holstered pistols
or two Frenchies

dancing in black and white
in a torn-apart
living...

        “He is bitter
        A bitter bitter
        Cynic”
        They said
        “And his wine
        He brews from wormwood”

I was black and black I always was

From the ebony house of me I watched days swing into weeks to months to years

I hunted golden orchids where “All Men are...

it’s late now, it’s early, no way
to know which season it is
of the total years of my life,
weren’t we only just nineteen,
tonya & i, wasn’t she only just
alive, long-limbed & cross-legged
on my dorm room floor,
wasn’t it springtime of a year
so...

I wanted to be a poet. I hustled my way
into the literary scene much like I had at the piers.
They watched me dare to speak my truth. They said,
“Good for you! Talking openly about your
experiences as a queer poet of...

i.
 
Dog. The time you take home, the time you take away from home.
The insistence, the instance worried at with your thick tongue.
 
Stink. Because of what you found on the ground and put in your gut.
Harry. As in beset, or beast....

I cannot consider scent without you, I cannot
think that color so gay, so Japanese, so vernal 
without you; not assassination or any death in any spring. I think of you
and I am man-and-woman, flawed as a Lincoln,
welcoming as a window-box, and...

i.I am in the middle of “The Fourteen Poems" by Sun Bu-er (“Clear and Calm Free Human”), Taoist and one of the Seven Immortal Sisters who took up the Tao after she turned fifty-one, after her three children grew up,...

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?

Some women make a pilgrimage to visit it
in the Indiana library charged to keep it safe.

I didn’t drive to it; I dreamed it, the thick braid
roped over my hands, heavier than lead.

My own hair was long for years.
Then I became...

Upon my return to the US, he
asks my occupation. Teacher.

What do you teach?
Poetry.

I hate poetry, the officer says,
I only like writing
where you can make an argument.

Anything he asks, I must answer.
This, too, he likes.

I don't tell him
he will be in...

I'm reading John Wieners chapbook, Pressed Wafer, at one of the giant tables upstairs in the archives where I work, when a visiting scholar asks for help with research. And that's how I learn that, in 1882, landscape architects at...