A Traveller’s Guide to the East Indies by S. K. Kelen
A Traveller’s Guide to the East Indies by S. K. Kelen 1. To arrive anywhere tonight you travel a road lit only by fireflies to towns whose names really mean ‘tomb of a hundred martyrs’. Invisible birds sing tinkling vowels — words from a time before history invaded. Frogs roar louder and louder kick-starting a […]
A Father’s Hands by Scott Ransopher
A Father’s Hands by Scott Ransopher Men would bet upon her father’s hands. Could he pick up in just one fist A dozen eggs scattered on the table– One by one–cracking none? He’d reach his hand (stretched at five by Pulsing milk from freshened cows) And settle shells beneath knuckle’s crease. Then pressing oh so […]
The Space Heater by Sharon Olds
The Space Heater by Sharon Olds On the then-below-zero day, it was on, near the patients’ chair, the old heater kept by the analyst’s couch, at the end, like the infant’s headstone that was added near the foot of my father’s grave. And it was hot, with the almost laughing satire of a fire’s heat, […]
The Pact by Sharon Olds
The Pact by Sharon Olds We played dolls in that house where Father staggered with the Thanksgiving knife, where Mother wept at noon into her one ounce of cottage cheese, praying for the strength not to kill herself. We kneeled over the rubber bodies, gave them baths carefully, scrubbed their little orange hands, wrapped them […]
The Mortal One by Sharon Olds
The Mortal One by Sharon Olds Three months after he lies dead, that long yellow narrow body, not like Christ but like one of his saints, the naked ones in the paintings whose bodies are done in gilt, all knees and raw ribs, the ones who died of nettles, bile, the one who died roasted […]
The End by Sharon Olds
The End by Sharon Olds We decided to have the abortion, became killers together. The period that came changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple who had been for life. As we talked of it in bed, the crash was not a surprise. We went to the window, looked at the crushed cars and […]
The Borders by Sharon Olds
The Borders by Sharon Olds To say that she came into me, from another world, is not true. Nothing comes into the universe and nothing leaves it. My mother—I mean my daughter did not enter me. She began to exist inside me—she appeared within me. And my mother did not enter me. When she lay […]
Primitive by Sharon Olds
Primitive by Sharon Olds I have heard about the civilized, the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But you and I are savages. You come in with a bag, hold it out to me in silence. I know Moo Shu Pork when I smell it and understand the message: I have pleased you […]
1954 by Sharon Olds
1954 by Sharon Olds Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt he had put on her face. And her training bra scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening, kept saying it, training bra, as if the cups of it had been calling the breasts up—he buried her in it, perhaps he had never bothered to […]
Winter by Shaunna Harper
She does not thaw in summer, her iced skeleton a visceral display of sapphire veins and pulses bolting in shock to the outskirts of her shores, splayed like a victim. She is perpetual frost, crying sharp diamond tears that leave chips across hard flesh like braille, like fallen teeth from a corpse; the sun bores […]
Twilight by Shaunna Harper
A prayer lifts itself from my mouth between tight teeth and soft lips, grows wings, leaves like a moth by the window trying to find the moon, sings, as the moist earth cools below. As always, twilight has come too soon. Lifted by light like a Chinese lantern, I watch the night sink, its star […]
The Other Half by Shaunna Harper
The Other Half by Shaunna Harper Your lips are still on my lipstick. Your eyes are still on my eyeshadow brush. You’re still wearing my favourite shirt; go on, keep it, if you must. The bags you unpacked are under your eyes; see that drawing? It’s tattooed on your skin. All those lies I heard […]
River by Shaunna Harper
River by Shaunna Harper You can’t tell a river which way to run. Trees flank his cerulean depths like soldiers, armed with sticks and leaves, ever-reaching, seizing, only to be swept aside. A river has no place to hide. He is never the same when he comes back; a little older, a little darker, carrying […]
Passing by Shaunna Harper
They’ve strung up your face on canvas carved in glass across the city’s overpass. Your eyes are bulging mole-hills. Your hair is sprouting grass. In the backdrop of a cheap shop’s parking lot, a broken sign curls around your head like a halo; when winter comes you will sparkle with snow. Each fractured letter blinks […]
Book Leaf by Shaunna Harper
They tread between lines, hanging metaphors like rope, veined toes curled around loops like branches. They reach from depths to skies, scatter each other here and there like soft blessings, seeping like ink into paper. They press between pages like insects, intricate, frail, anorexic outbursts in perpetual shock. They dance off-beat like drunkards, ignorant of […]
Year’s End by Weldon Kees
Year’s End by Weldon Kees The state cracked where they left your breath No longer instrument. Along the shore The sand ripped up, and the newer blood Streaked like a vein to every monument. The empty smoke that drifted near the guns Where the stiff motor pounded in the mud Had the smell of a […]
The Upstairs Room by Weldon Kees
The Upstairs Room by Weldon Kees It must have been in March the rug wore through. Now the day passes and I stare At warped pine boards my father’s father nailed, At the twisted grain. Exposed, where emptiness allows, Are the wormholes of eighty years; four generations’ shoes Stumble and scrape and fall To the […]
The Smiles Of The Bathers by Weldon Kees
The Smiles Of The Bathers by Weldon Kees The smiles of the bathers fade as they leave the water, And the lover feels sadness fall as it ends, as he leaves his love. The scholar, closing his book as the midnight clock strikes, is hollow and old: The pilot’s relief on landing is no release. […]
The Furies by Weldon Kees
The Furies by Weldon Kees Not a third that walks beside me, But five or six or more. Whether at dusk or daybreak Or at blinding noon, a retinue Of shadows that no door Excludes.–One like a kind of scrawl, Hands scrawled trembling and blue, A harelipped and hunchbacked dwarf With a smile like a […]
The Doctor Will Return by Weldon Kees
The Doctor Will Return by Weldon Kees The surgical mask, the rubber teat Are singed, give off an evil smell. You seem to weep more now that heat Spreads everywhere we look. It says here none of us is well. The warty spottings on the figurines Are nothing you would care to claim. You seem […]
The Beach by Weldon Kees
The Beach by Weldon Kees Squat, unshaven, full of gas, Joseph Samuels, former clerk in four large cities, out of work, waits in the darkened underpass. In sanctuary, out of reach, he stares at the fading light outside: the rain beginning: hears the tide that drums along the empty beach. When drops first fell at […]
Round by Weldon Kees
Round by Weldon Kees “Wondrous life!” cried Marvell at Appleton House. Renan admired Jesus Christ “wholeheartedly.” But here dried ferns keep falling to the floor, And something inside my head Flaps like a worn-out blind. Royal Cortssoz is dead. A blow to the Herald-Tribune. A closet mouse Rattles the wrapper on the breakfast food. Renan […]
Robinson by Weldon Kees
Robinson by Weldon Kees The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone. His act is over. The world is a gray world, Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano, The nightmare chase well under way. The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall, Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black. Robinson […]
The End Of The Library by Weldon Kees
The End Of The Library by Weldon Kees When the coal Gave out, we began Burning the books, one by one; First the set Of Bulwer-Lytton And then the Walter Scott. They gave a lot of warmth. Toward the end, in February, flames Consumed the Greek Tragedians and Baudelaire, Proust, Robert Burton And the Po-Chu-i. […]
Late Evening Song by Weldon Kees
Late Evening Song by Weldon Kees For a while Let it be enough: The responsive smile, Though effort goes into it. Across the warm room Shared in candlelight, This look beyond shame, Possible now, at night, Goes out to yours. Hidden by day And shaped by fires Grown dead, gone gray, That burned in other […]
La Vita Nuova by Weldon Kees
La Vita Nuova by Weldon Kees Last summer, in the blue heat, Over the beach, in the burning air, A legless beggar lurched on calloused fists To where I waited with the sun-dazed birds. He said, “The summer boils away. My life Joins to another life; this parched skin Dries and dies and flakes away, […]
Interregnum by Weldon Kees
Interregnum by Weldon Kees Butcher the evil millionaire, peasant, And leave him stinking in the square. Torture the chancellor. Leave the ambassador Strung by his thumbs from the pleasant Embassy wall, where the vines were. Then drill your hogs and sons for another war. Fire on the screaming crowd, ambassador, Sick chancellor, brave millionaire, And […]
Covering Two Years by Weldon Kees
Covering Two Years by Weldon Kees This nothingness that feeds upon itself: Pencils that turn to water in the hand, Parts of a sentence, hanging in the air, Thoughts breaking in the mind like glass, Blank sheets of paper that reflect the world Whitened the world that I was silenced by. There were two years […]
Colloquy by Weldon Kees
Colloquy by Weldon Kees In the broken light, in owl weather, Webs on the lawn where the leaves end, I took the thin moon and the sky for cover To pick the cat’s brains and descend A weedy hill. I found him groveling Inside the summerhouse, a shadowed bulge, Furred and somnolent.—”I bring,” I said, […]
A Pastiche For Eve by Weldon Kees
A Pastiche For Eve by Weldon Kees Unmanageable as history: these Followers of Tammuz to the land That offered no return, where dust Grew thick on every bolt and door. And so the world Chilled, and the women wept, tore at their hair. Yet, in the skies, a goddess governed Sirius, the Dog, Who shines […]
A Musician’s Wife by Weldon Kees
A Musician’s Wife by Weldon Kees Between the visits to the shock ward The doctors used to let you play On the old upright Baldwin Donated by a former patient Who is said to be quite stable now. And all day long you played Chopin, Badly and hauntingly, when you weren’t Screaming on the porch […]
1926 by Weldon Kees
1926 by Weldon Kees The porchlight coming on again, Early November, the dead leaves Raked in piles, the wicker swing Creaking. Across the lots A phonograph is playing Ja-Da. An orange moon. I see the lives Of neighbors, mapped and marred Like all the wars ahead, and R. Insane, B. with his throat cut, Fifteen […]