As If
The massive, grimy river shouldered its waytoward the harbor. I stood under the ruckus of sky.The wind plucked awnings, plastic bags, newspapersand sent the news twirling over corduroy waters.I’d meant to see art, but the plan miscarried.A guitarist stationed in a doorway bent his headto rasp his ballad into the wind’ssore throat. Rainlight glossed the guitar stringsand played its own tune, this city such a storm of wants.“You have a right to your actions, READ MORE >>
July
Under the cliff walls of apartment blocks, on a narrow patch of grass as tough and discolored as old carpet, they have parked their motorbikes and distributed themselves, a tribe, a colony, girls and boys, some lounged on the sward, some on cement paving in a strip of shade, some on two facing wrought-iron benches planted in concrete. Out of range of grownups, they play cards, they scuffle, a girl places her head on a boy’s lap to practice kissing, they smoke, they pass lit cigarettes back and forth, a smaller boy READ MORE >>
The Joy That Snuck Up
Silver Roses is Rachel Wetzsteon’s last book of poems in several senses: it is both her most recent, and, sadly, her final collection, as she died by her own hand in 2009. READ MORE >>
Making a Soul
D Minor
Thirst drove them as if within each kiss something escaped, something salty touched their tongues, as if the kiss within remained unquaffed, as if the melody in Kreisleriana fled each felt-wrapped wooden hammer-knock and floated only in the ghostly hands reflected in the keyboard cover’s up-tilted night As if spring appeared not in petals by day but in the stun of white knock-out lilac scent at midnight, white not seen but suffered and suffused So they tasted and missed As in READ MORE >>
