By Joshua Seigal
I don’t like similes.Every time I try to think of onemy brain feels like a vast, empty desert;my eyes…
Explore Poems: Simile
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- By Ada LimónIs it okay to begin with the obvious? I am full of stones—
is it okay not to look out this window, but to look out another?
A mentor once said, You can't start a poem... - By Ada LimónI pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later I yell, Mourning dove afterparty! (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground the afterparty.) I am getting so good at watching that...
- By John MurilloFor me, the movie starts with a black man
Leaping into an orbit of badges, tiny moons
Catching the sheen of his perfect black afro.
Arc kicks, karate chops, and thirty cops
On their backs. It starts with the swagger,
The cool lean into the... - By Ama Codjoe1.
He had a caribou's face. Once he let me
lick the sadness there. It tasted of salt
and moss-covered rocks. He grew the beard
of a mountain goat. He scaled the face
of a mountain. Lying beside him, I stared
into the face of faceless... - By Lynn EmanuelLove is boring and passé, all that old baggage,
the bloody bric-a-brac, the bad, the gothic,
retrograde, obscurantist hum and drum of it
needs to be swept away. So, night after night,
we sit in the dark of the Roxy beside grandmothers
with their shanks... - By Justin Phillip ReedThere it goes, thin thing,
cheshiring between trees
whose reaper-robes trail
... - By H.D.Over and back,
the long waves crawl
and track the sand with foam;
night darkens and the sea
takes on that desperate tone
of dark that wives put on
when all their love is done.
Over and back,
the tangled thread falls slack,
over and up and on;
over and... - By Aria AberOver Skype, I try to document my mother’s
bald-shaved youth—she has a surplus in truths,
and science has proven what it had to prove:
every helicopter-screech I dreamed of was my mother’s first.
Rippling my dumb hand, I wake up in childhood’s crypt,
where prayer... - By Reginald Dwayne Betts[An Outline for a Film]
A woman leans against a man who leans
against a brick wall watching cars stop like dead men
on this one-way street. Some dude glares
like O-Dog from Menace, his face towards some street
we'll never remember where a man... - By Tom Andrews1.
Day brings a steady
hand, a sure breath every other day ...
My brother again on the edge of his bed,
sitting up with his eyes closed,
his palms pressed, a brief prayer.
... - By Natalie ShaperoGod come on stop cutting me
out of your photos God stop dragging
the mouse around my shopworn
body like a chalk outline then clicking fill
with background God I know
that times are tight I know you only
made one death per person I’m sorry
to... - By Richard SikenSomeone wheeled me to the curb. A different friend helped me into a car. We got to the condo and managed to get me down the stairs, into the living room, where I fell asleep on a mattress we put...
- By Kara KrewerUnder which she pruned
the peach trees and a tiny gateway
opened in her spine. That pain
distilled there like a drop
of molten glass. And was the first of many
chambers to form.
There was her bedroom,
where she bloomed
in the white fog of sleep
and so... - By Genevieve ArlieThe geometer wishes he were David
cut from stone by lightning, his mind
gyring wide into figures of space
out of time, ever gauging the shock
of the word for the pathos, ever
slinging the rock of his wound
at the sugared glass of me.
I'd rather... - By Sean MahoneyI may take offense, may still your tongue
And your fickle ax willowing spastically
During unpredictable weather events.
As sure as the influence of big Cat.4’s
Can be felt in hair, almost like a weighted
Scent sinks itself deep into your lungs.
I believe your brain... - By John ClareAnd what is Life?—An hour-glass on the run,
A Mist retreating from the morning sun,
A busy, bustling, still repeated dream;
Its length?—A minute's pause, a moment's thought;
And happiness?—A bubble on the stream,
That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought.
What... - By Jane HuffmanI’m sure as wetness
follows steam.
I’m sure as cold
that follows
wetness
follows steam.
I’m sure as sweat
that follows heat.
The bead
of sweat that
follows steam.
I’m sure as heat,
as surety.
The bleed
and heave of surety.
____
I’m in the midst
of sureness,
sure as bricks.
I’m sure as cold
that follows
wetness follows
mist. The blood
and... - By Denis JohnsonThe world will burst like an intestine in the sun,
the dark turn to granite and the granite to a name,
but there will always be somebody riding the bus
through these intersections strewn with broken glass
among speechless women beating their little ones,
always... - By Denis JohnsonHere in the electric dusk your naked lover
tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.
It's beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,
Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,
streaming with hatred in the heat
as the...