from The Sea Ranch
Jared Stanley: One thing I can say about The Sea Ranch is this: despite everything, a poem can be an earthly paradise – and...
April 2020
The low-slung sun
spreads first-light shadows
on a deserted road
as it slips between
dark doors
of locked-down stillness
towards this fragile
frontier-line in human closeness
We doff and don and change...
Ni Pena Ni Miedo
Some people must wonder why we want bones.
I want them so much! I want them so much!
--Violeta Berrios in “Nostalgia for the Light”
In Chacabuco...
Grateful Criss Cross
Listen to the poem read by the author:
Image: by Lesly Juarez, licensed under CC 2.0.
Chime Lama:
“Grateful Criss Cross” began as a poetry prompt by...
Capacitance
Coronary sinus that fills and releases. Cascading
breath falls to basin. Small branches stretched
exhaling temperamental at best. Thumbprints
on frosted glass. Windows outlooking lots. Full
of forgotten...
Spiders on the Hancock
Steady at their webs on the brilliant edge, Chicago
spiders range outside the windows
across the 94th floor, at every vantage
their dedicated tensile silks arrayed
upon the...
Istvan
To feel fully engulfed in the magical, raw nature of place, of strange polyphonic songs, of pigs and cows and chickens and giant puppets in the barns
SALIVA TERRACADE
Your tongue is lightweight
Like ceramic tiles
While you lick
Your lover in order to
Build a saliva-based
Terracade
You may be Shane
Henrik, Australian,
Architect, building
Your cubistic blocks
But Picasso beats
You to...
Intensive Care
No figures here but pulse, breath and pressure;
no metonymy of fate but a real hand
cold upon a real sheet.
What could any actor speak more...
We Have Permission
We can swim here—
only fish and shells
to glide with, a full
alternate below-world.
A single language
where breath and tears
are invisible, muted darkness
making us all blind.
There is...
The New Math
March 2020
My daughter pots plants in the desert.
In the desert, pandemic is elsewhere.
Or that’s the theorem.
If the proof is in percentages,
I tell her to...
HOW TO COME BACK TO EARTH
On the 30th anniversary of the Challenger explosion, NPR interviews one of the scientists who failed to persuade NASA officials that launching the space...