min words | max heart
Poetry of the Non-Prose Kind
Matthew Johnstone
There is a wall I lean
at when
the ice breaks apart the house.
Heaving
knives of wood rum
and milk. I bite hands.
Clean in planes intimate
with hooks pounded
falling air. Sun went badly hail
slapped up asps. There just
are no straight lines left. It
loved the earth but could not say.
Pianist
could not type. Or axe
shut from peeling bark.
Bobbi Lurie
The arms of the trees open wide
We are here for such a short time
Do not imagine this dream is yours
Susan Kay Anderson
My sad farm was never funny
just tons of work. Work we finished
too early and too late. In the summer
we were cowboys loading white-faced calves
at cow camp up in the mountains. In winter
we shoveled and chewed all over again.
Our inventions actually worked. Well.
One poem didn’t let go of another.
Each tractor parked next to the next.
I thought it might have something to do
with wild ponies just like in a song
about them. But that spoke of nothing.
The stuff about all those wild ponies
and their mannerisms. Their behavior
needing taming and how. Tina said
I should spray her wicker furniture under their
credenza. The last time she spoke to me.
How it was important to have a clean driveway.
Get to it. The neighbors are waiting. They never called.
Only to find out when we died. And how.
David Graham
Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Across the street roofers swarm over hot shingles
chattering in Spanish as they hammer or yank out nails.
I understand the details of their work as little
as I follow their words. It’s all tone, like praise
or chastisement to a dog. It’s a sort of song, lovely as flame,
and yes, I’m the dog. We’re all scurrying in the fire.
Peter Munro
A woman glides her body by,
a body built to sate her lover.
The weight of eyes rides her shoulders.
She’s dressed as if she lives skin tight
and likes it where the light hovers.
Lord, your light hovers me over.
Deliver into my palm the left
breast of her who longs for my palm.
We shall heft such weight as shimmers
between one skin and another.
I like my rum dark and sweet.
I have no taste for bitter beer.
The woman sways her body by,
her beat quicker than I can hear. Lord,
her tempo jiggers through my liquor.
Jack Darrow
two soft plums
stain the eggshell bowl
beside our bed
a sight for sore eyes
baby’s got her pain
dress on
Mary Harpin
After Quinn Latimer
Leaves accept an early fate and privacies come bare.
There she is, in the naked broadleaf:
the hawks’ nest, the mother hawk, slender
eye, slender beak. We didn’t know
she was here all along, gone tomorrow.
What do you name the sacred
privacies of snow? Sorrow?
Sabrina Amaya Hoke
The crystal shard, the door,
where you rest your hand.
The alternate dimension. Universe.
A slightly uglier version of
yourself.
T.M. De Vos
The brightest learned
to make chains, cliques of similars
who loomed heavy in that first atmosphere
where one amino acid began to mean another.
This is how higher animals began, and with them,
further metaphor, bad pastorals.
I was not one of those
who could make my chest swell with organelles
or corset myself into a fringy slipper.
I was a minimum, a single chamber:
I asked only waste, not the bright maki
of new cells. I kept matter only shortly
and released it, barely changed.
This is the model of your Annelids, those blunt bores
who pass through dirt like ether.
They are still going: simple orifices
and what is pushed through.
Rachel Nix
By the bovine’s repose
I know soon the scent of petrichor
will grace the grassland;
and more, the verdure
will not be proof the season has tipped
in favor of cooler spells.
