the opening of a cut grape
the butterfly
if it were to lightly rest upon the extremity of the grape
and pretend to drink
if it wasn’t drinking
what was to be done then?
I would have to
improve how well I see, with these eyes
improve how well I hear sounds
and so, employing my hands
I noticed
the smallest of movements
(translations)
Can violence be made into beauty? Can beauty be used to dignify the stain of violence? Sloan seems to suggest so, perhaps, by conceiving of Ophelia’s body as part of nature—indistinguishable from it.
(reviews)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
we’d just torn out not the eyes but the reflection in the eyes
while culture hanging on the media’s fangs was dying there
no more tongue-in-cheek now and above the vulgarity of
doing cartwheels thinking thus to prove its legitimacy
doesn’t the assassin push forward by brandishing his knife
(poetry/translations)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
And they continued with more world history examples
where a victim lived happily ever after next to her executioner,
having forgiven and forgotten.
(poetry/translations)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
I’d tell you to be careful, that everything here is lousy with history, from the first megafaunal
extinctions to those buffalo carcasses rotting in heaps after the last of our Transcontinental
massacres.
(poetry)
Shiki wrote haiku—tens of thousands of haiku—elevating himself to the immortal ranks of Bashō, Issa, and his personal hero, Buson. However, Shiki did not want to go back to the past and its masters; he wanted to reinvent what he believed was a dying art.
(reviews)
The book, at its core, follows the speaker’s daily journeys along a rugged mountain road over the course of a year, with the gravel thoroughfare and its environs serving much the way Thoreau’s Walden Pond once did— fueling reflections on humanity in general, and the present moment more specifically.
(reviews)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
even baby’s breath is weary and stale
in their nostrils falls the hail
the country’s black men sent to jail
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
You are forced to think very formally, very
philosophically, Someday a siren will come for you,
and you hold your breath, rub your eyes, roll
with a groan to flick on the late Late Late Show.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
One guy said I looked like Queen Elizabeth in it,
so I wore it everywhere, led entrances
with hip swishes and a smirk,
blasted “Flagpole Sitta” in my headphones
because it was my baddie girl-esque era.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
Despite what you may think,
I am comfortably phallic.
I wonder if your punchline
can live for two hundred years,
burrowing through human muck
and blood and flushed tissues.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday. This is the first.
through my brother’s bedroom door, the expectations of manhood
complete: apology, sincerity, apology—take it and move on.
In my bedroom alone, shaking, I have prayed the old prayers too.
(poetry)
And mirrored in the dilated,
upturned eyes, can you, she asks, see a room’s
bright window, panes of light. And can you see
how the selfsame light pours into us,
the shine of attention, of tenderness.
(poetry)
I have missed the predictable angles
of houses & the swollen arms
of buff dads. & these buff dads’
sullen children, their sullen faces
frowning across the road.
(poetry)
“Each day we wake up to multiple worlds of domesticity, work, society, creativity, and absurdity that inhabit our consciousness as the dream world fades like a new moon,” he tells Karen Corinne Herceg.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
as if it matters / that you drowned in freshwater, tap water, or first / in yourself.
(poetry)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“For once, I don’t want to call love a feral cat; / I want to forgive myself the way water / forgives everything.”
where were you // when you heard it / who were you with / what did it make you feel
All that’s left of the baby is the rattle. / All that’s left of the granny is her knitting.
The synagogue of my youth wandered throughout the city, from the basement of the Methodist church on the Manayunk hills to the East Falls nursing home…
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“In the end when they ask would I do it again // I’ll shake my head: where does one draft / end and another begin?”
When someone’s chasing you with a knife, / you just run, as someone said ages ago in a statement, / actually a manifesto demanding a person be face to face / with the words or they won’t count.
I might have lived a life or two / instead of counting steps in the parking lot, / between the rust-colored cars, / missing you.
I blossomed into violet / flames while my / Self, in silent flight / within my soul, / drank and sang / until dawn.
I’m paranoid, I’m chronically fatigued. / Neither Freud nor Jung can help. / Lord, grind us with your palette knife down into / the dark, into the soil.
(poetry)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“an archipelago: / a chain of islands / and also, / what contains them”
(poetry)
Now all I want is to / hear what Paul Thomas Anderson whispered into Fiona / Apple’s ear to make her cry in public.
Another Chicago Magazine 