Explore Poems: Reading & Books

A Russian citizen
took to the streets
with a sign that read war.

The Russian police
shoved him into…

Один російський громадянин
вийшов на вулицю
з плакатом война
російські міліціонери
запакували його в автозак

Інші росіяни
уважно спостерігали за цим
і знімали все на телефони

Одна російська громадянка
вийшла на вулицю
з плакатом мир
російські міліціонери
запакували її в автозак

Інші росіяни
почали ставати в чергу до автозака
з плакатами й без

Один російський солдат
почав читати роман
одного російського бороданя
далі обкладинки не пішов
бо й так усе ясно
читати між рядків
його навчили ще в школі

Apparently, we are all lying here beside one
another in a darkened room around 2:00 am,

giddy as if…

No answer but stance,
no solving but moving
sideways, and
showing.
Not finishing
ministering.
Maintenance…

I pass between lions
guarding what's inside:
bound gems to open,
endless words that sparkle.
I read till…

Again, an ousted child or orphan happens onto a den.
It happens then. Invitation by faun or badger to…

We land in the aisles of British fiction
to soak in the air conditioning. Your fingers
play the spines…

I was thinking of some of the messages Rilke will never receive: — dentist called abt your appt tomorrow…

1
Sunday      vellum tongues with words of prayer
Monday    messages from the unknown
Tuesday     how to…

The shipwrecked man creates a monarchy of one.

When he sees a footprint, he panics.

He has to keep…

The young man says, “Alan can 
do anything he wants”

“Not fly,” I say

The young man returns 
a puzzled look…

immacula immigrant entrepreneur good with numbers my grandmother down comforter vendor five flights of stairs off flatbush illiterate well into her sixties can you believe it was a patient preacher taught her how to read the king james thickness newly...

I realized I was Nel and wept
for the robins rotting inside me. I had not bore snakes
or roses made of cinders. I rose from bed
bored, snaking my way beneath
ashen men child-hungry
and respectful to thieves. I refused to fuck
because I was...

I never owned a serval.
I never kept a thing
so dangerous
it had to be housed
in a lair. Let me be clear…

Some bequeath poetry.
Some bequeath hats.
Tomes of my sorry
hats can destroy
libraries.

you know I ain’t mess w/you ’cause of yo’ friends
wouldn’t have you caught slummin’
know you hood 'cause you said

I look the same
and I said
you look the same

and I said “it don’t crack, doit?
and you said “Uh, OKAY?”

that’s that thing right...

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,...

        The heart, it hoards—
how I know this—

The small, strangled
        shining room Keats lost
his life in—and to—

beyond the window sunlight
        arranging itself
on the Spanish Steps

while the poet watches.
        Outside, snapshots
of the tourists

& teenagers tired
        of what they don’t
know yet. What will

become of us? Ash.
        Unasking. The...

I slip into my insolence, sleek as an eel.
I have walked so many ways around God I can tell you
Holiness is a roundabout
With a thousand exit points labeled doubt;
Like the boy who unzipped my pants
In my sleep, who broke the...

A lover undresses, with permission.
Picture the body becoming real.

                      I picture becoming real intimate.
It is strange to think of legs as closed.

                        I open my legs for strangers. I widen,
stretch. What belongs here? Don’t say a door.

Instead of belonging, I eat the...