Category: Poetry
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grasshopper jacket
Put the fries in the bag.Collapse all memories.Recall the grasshopperson the windbreaker.How they scuttledfor first attention.Einstein’s not on the beach anymore.He finally gave up on swimming.Before that he went to Rippers.Had ten beers, ten burgers, and wept. Windswept, the grasshopper operator’snew collision. A dusk of form and function.You spend long hours at the rack,eyeing an…
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Two Poems by Jeffrey Hecker
Ode to the Desert Warthog Vaporwave music mixes on YouTube number in tens of thousands. I am listening to one titled “you wake up, it’s summer 2006 and life is good again.” You are cocoa brown and look ochre in sunshine. You inhabit Horn of Africa in sex-separated groups called sounders. You can…
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Three Prose Poems by Dalton Day
The Hawk I was watering our tomato plants when I noticed a hawk in the sky. It was directly above me, as if we were attached by a long, invisible string or cord. It seemed to float, like it had no part in its being there. I thought of those fake mustaches, torn to reveal…
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Birthday Poem
That Scene in Mulholland Drivewith Rita on the bed sobbing,“I don’t know who I am.” Every breath is a death. A convenient rhymebut that’s not what this isbecause what this isis nothing. Automatically assumingloud neighborsare bad people. Cow tailslike ropedanglingside to side. Spencer Eckart lives on a creek in the Smokies. His debut, BLUE HERON INN,…
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Three Poems by Simon Ravenscroft
Leafy afternoons Nothing to please the gizzard, so let itrest. I saw your flesh coming & I hid.Fates conspire, no mercy. Steel eagle, lightas a cloud; everyone mixed up & spreadaround. Nicked by the briar, nursed wound, in-finite space, a chestnut. Singularityriven on a wire. When I want to chipaway at you the heaviness of…
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Two Poems by Brandon Shane
Tapering Off I was one of the travelersdrinking wine mixed with water,piling herbs on hot stonesinhaling until I heard sirens—how a failed prophet climbsa mountain, tells the scattering birdsthat God speaks through him, before walkingall the way back down. Another Wasteland I went from ditch to ditchtrying to convert the dirty writers, the half-bentneedles of…
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Two Poems by Stephen Mead
Pearl this opalescence: moon in mussel shell sky,the brown trees green-rimmed, a lichen-limein the dream my lover’s dream catcher sendsme the enchantments of high as the girdersarching their cathedral window wing-shapesfor the silhouette our favorite bridge is –golden-gated as a large harpthrough the fog-gleaming dawn. We’re Grieving the dying youth, the “ex” who was the…
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Two Poems by Michael Borth
The Residential Condominium Community We threw frisbees into the gravesUnder the high rainbowcolored anomalyKiteshaped and ephemeral against cloudsPortending the very green commons theyPut shadows to for the worship of the sun When we kissed in the dusk of the plagueYou would later say that you felt nothingAfter beer at a leaning table beside onionfieldsWe studied…
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Loneliness
Because I am trying to understandhuman loneliness, scientifically, I mean.I’m aiming to measure it in a beaker,study it on a graph. I want to look it upin the Encyclopedia Brittanica, under “L.”Search for the bio of the guy who conceivedof fog horns—to have found the pitchperfect sound of our dread.He must have lived in a…
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just like your father
if you throw a baseball up high enough to where you lose it in the sun, you can pretend that gravity is your daddy instead of the deadbeat who abandoned you and your mother four years ago.you can pretend that gravity is the type of daddy who doesn’t call you a worthless little pussy when…