Watercourse ~ Ruth Padel Our window is a drifting smoke of rainlight, a cage of lichened thorn. Pale grass, moor walls outside. Inside there’s Schubert song and coffee. Marooned in Plato’s geometric logic, you sit by the fire, looking like a nineteenth-century charcoal sketch. Our daughter is due in three months. You are sealed and […]
The Star-Spangled Turban ~ Amit Majmudar Hot pink frosting on my chocolate- cupcake noggin, switched-on lightbulb- yellow, tulip- bulb top-heavy orange, sky-blue, bruise-blue, navy thought cloud, darkening: Any towel, any shawl will serve as well to bind this open wound atop me, mark me off as not quite level- headed, tops on any watchlist. It’s […]
Read This Poem from the Bottom Up ~ Ruth Porritt (You can read this poem from the first line to the last line, or the last line to the first line) This simple cathedral of praise How you made, from the bottom up, Is for you to remember Of Andromeda. What remains Until you meet […]
He Tells of a Valley Full of Lovers ~ William Butler Yeats I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs, For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood; And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes: I cried in […]
The Word that Is a Prayer ~ Ellery Akers One thing you know when you say it: all over the earth people are saying it with you; a child blurting it out as the seizures take her, a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital. What if you take a cab through the […]
