Explore Poems: Ars Poetica

A pound of
Bruised mangoes
Cleaved into halves, chilied and salted like the heads of
Dead fish, which…

Which way to the monster cage? I am in my god body now—

in my sandy foxhole
sat backwards in a chair…

Your friends tell you the writing
is good but you’re not actually buying it—
so much idle conversation…

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...

Iambic lines drafted in silt
are revised when glaciers melt
so verses ending in heroic couplet
are more epigram than sonnet.

Revised when glaciers melt,
continents submit to a warning.
The land is more epigram than sonnet
—no—more erasure than given form.

As continents admit the warming,
the coasts...

After not showing in a poem how I once was boring, I spend weeks collecting proof  from my past for readers who wanted to know. I have difficulty deciding the best prop for my poem:

    A) from the outside,...

I keep rifles in the front closet.
                 Trespassing can be a glance.

A good shot,
                 I practice with bottles, bull's eyes.

I cross the line where the fence...

Migration is derived from the word “migrate,” which is a verb defined by Merriam-Webster as “to move from one country, place, or locality to another.” Plot twist: migration never ends. My parents moved from Jalisco, México to Chicago in 1987....

Give me the night, you beasts hissing over the face of this dead
woman, I climb into your eyes, looking. To those who would sleep
through the wounds they inflict on others, I offer pain to help them
awaken, Ju-Ju, Tom-Toms & the...

Do not allow me to sink, I said
To a top floating ribbon of kelp.
As I was lifted on each wave
And made to slide into the vale
I wanted not to drown. I wanted
To make it all right with my dear,
To tell...

The best-known German goldsmith of the sixteenth century, Wenzel Jamnitzer, is also remembered for his study of the five platonic solids, Perspectives of Regular Bodies, in which he proposed that out of the same five bodies one can go on...

Because the butterfly’s yellow wing
flickering in black mud
was a word
stranded by its language.
Because no one else
was coming — & I ran
out of reasons.
So I gathered fistfuls
of  ash, dark as ink,
hammered them
into marrow, into
a skull thick
enough to keep
the gentle curse
of  dreams. Yes, I...

Wherever we go, needs feed and I find it harder and harder to
believe benevolence is the thing Thousands of Yazidi girls

missing and plastic fills the ocean’s mouth and the cursive of
yr name still occupies the canopy of my throat Fuel,...

Tiny bit of humanity,
Blessed with your mother’s face,   
And cursed with your father’s mind.

I say cursed with your father’s mind,
Because you can lie so long and so quietly on your back,   
Playing with the dimpled big toe of your left foot,   
And looking...

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”),
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on...

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper....

When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me. . . .

I...

I placed a jar in Tennessee,   
And round it was, upon a hill.   
It made the slovenly wilderness   
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.   
The jar was round upon the ground   
And tall and of a port in...

                                                                  not self
 
of                                                                                     violence
 
                                                       against                   will  not  be  gainsaid
                                                                                         will  brook  no  argument
                                                                                         won't  suffer  the  fools
 
                                                                                                                                 …

Between my finger and my thumb   
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   
Bends low, comes up twenty...

I'm feeling by ear.

Consider them gods and not cruel but ecstatic.
They have trick tongues and can't talk straight but use us as waves to curve words.
In this moment we are here for their ride. Climb on under.
Transport poetics in the...