Not Your Parents’ Poems: A 2012 Poetry Preview
by Craig Morgan Teicher
I can’t tell you how the 2012 presidential election is going to turn out, nor can I say for certain whether The Office will outlast …
you’re so beautiful, even the people you disrespect love you anyway.
by Meghan Tennison
oh dear
my jaw is acting up, it’s so excited to
speak with you
i love burrowing to the heart of your matter
you’re sanctifying, like a holy statue
burning through space
it must be 30 degrees
bird couplets tweeting across the mud
a nightmare of geese attacking a child
my teeth glow with yours, knowing
everything that happened was
well worth our time
let’s strip away our values and fears until
all that’s left are dreams
forgetting everything we’ve ever said
demolishing borders,
the sun screams
brighter
walls grow eyes and
stomp out our shadows
so let’s be as open as the sky
sticky syrup secrets smothering our flat tires
collecting dust like
thirsty troublemakers
peanut gallery ghosts
spying from shy corners
spilling ink all over our plans
solve it:
burn everything
quarrels degenerate into tunnel-vision and
there’s too much to think about so
i give up
nothing can upset me
i’m dreaming, undisturbed
in the warm cottage of your heart
your love confounds me, slowly
eating away my skin. maybe
resistance is a symptom of the
worry-disease. i might go nuts and
want you so bad that,
if i can’t yet inhale the layers of your stardust,
purpose-broken,
i’ll starve
feelin’ like a flea in lamb’s wool
livin’ the crazy life
and maybe your breath leaks into my skin and that’s why
my insides are storming
So Much Glass to So Much Steel
by Nathaniel S. Rounds
Behind a clear, glass veil
Facing a snarling, spitting sea
And the dim shadow of Georges Island
I spent nine dollars
From Mother’s retirement cheque
On gelato down at the bay
Birra …
HOW TO GO ABOUT UNDERSTANDING WITHOUT STEPPING ON IT DIRECTLY
by Cheryl Hicks
I remember developing breasts,
(it was the same year the Russians launched Sputnik)
and going with my aunt to buy my first fully-trained bra,
and learning from …
Song To Cantaloupe Head
(derived from postcards)
by Nathan Ventura
O Cantaloupe Head,
forever fickle, yet unrelenting,
always tickling the doorknob
of abysmal death,
you have once again
happened into my skull,
seeping through my mind
like the tires
that ever so slowly
move along the river’s …
The Hunter
(An excerpt from “Valencia: Fresh Squeezed & Uncut”)
by Gideon Carlisle
I am twelve years old
hunting with my father
walking in footprints of
enormous boots; The Remington
heavy on my shoulder, sways
back and fourth
awkward in youthful hands.
We do not …
Living Unitarian Universalist
by Beth Cortez-Neavel
This is how it begins, every time: whether I am at a potluck, a club, a bar, or with extended family. Someone ultimately asks me “So, what do you do?” I …
Movie
by Pat A Physics
When you have gone to the movie almost every day for a year, and the concessions girl
knows your first name, that’s when it’s time to consider your career. Ask her on a …
Metaphysics 101/Open Book Test
by Le Hinton
1. Do you always abbreviate et cetera? Why or y not?
2. If you owned a race horse, what would you name it? (Extra credit, 2 points) What about its twin …
WHORE
by David Gawlik
—–
we are sitting
on the edge of the bed
DAMN IT! she spits,
taking off her boots,
I’VE GOT A HOLE
IN MY STOCKING!
SHIT, I laugh,
sprawling out across the mattress,
THAT’S NOTHING,
I’VE GOT HOLES IN
ALMOST EVERYTHING I OWN
IT’S EMBARASSING, …
Coryphaeus
by Jim Benz
I. A fiery wheel or a dove
I was puzzling. Heroic.
And a barstool.
I was not a throne.
You were both tide and landfall.
A splash of brine.
We were an olive
swallowed, inarticulate
wildly mundane
and not too laconic.
You were …
Rental Tux
by Bill Trowbridge
It chafed like some new skin we’d grown,
or feathers, the cummerbund and starched collar
pinching us to show how real this transformation
into princes was, how powerful we’d grown
by getting drivers’ licenses, how tall …
Don’t Hang Up
by Louie Crew
Don’t hang up,
I’m not a heckler.
I NEED your help
but I can’t tell you my name.
I’m in a phone booth
while mom buys groceries,
so I won’t take long.
I heard your talk show
and I’m …
![Don’t Let Them [Bite]](http://www.haggardandhalloo.com/wp-content/themes/arthemia-premium/scripts/timthumb.php?src=http://www.haggardandhalloo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/mattress.gif&w=60&h=60&zc=1&q=100)
Don’t Let Them [Bite]
by Paden Fallis
…you understand, you’d be remiss if you actually thought you had this thing licked, right? Hubris before the fall, they say. Well it stands to reason here, sitting amongst piles …
THE ANT
by D George Gawlik
i want to
be the ant
that lives
in the hole
in the mortar
of the brick
of the broken
wall that
surrounds
the house
down the hill
abandoned
at the bottom
of a dead end
road
unnoticed
unknown
unmolested
and be
alone
FURNITURE
by Amanda V. Wagner
Empty
Echoes traveled through the rooms bouncing off white marble tile, whistling through chandeliers, swinging off of banisters and circling columns. Glass tapped the granite counter his bottle was empty like the house, …
Shoulders
by Naomi Shihab Nye
A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.
This …
By Rubbing 2 Stars Together
by Dan Raphael
stars cant say
or have said
as the frequencies aspiral
as if toothed persistent unexpectedly beneficial
every roof must have a hole
you start with a …
Spiritual Hush
by Gene Defcon
Jealousy congeals within the stable
Swifter, surer-footed, and more worthy
Specimens paw the brittle earth
Pointed huffs and neighs zing
Like daggers towards the favorite
Donner menaces
Leers in his direction
Cowed
Rudolph unsuccessfully strains
To conceal the ridiculous glow
Blitzen rears …
Sometimes, When the Light
by Lisel Mueller
Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles
and pulls you back into childhood
and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows
or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant …
Cramped Uptown
by Amy Temple Harper
34 ppg, Hard Cover, bound by Spork Press
Review by Travis Catsull
Cramped Uptown is the first book from Amy Temple Harper and it’s a thing of beauty and imagination. A very strange …
Visiting with Oliver Stone
by John Bennett
Oliver Stone pulled up to the curb in front of my house at three in the morning in a limo facing the wrong way into traffic. He wasn’t driving, a …
Robert Bly was born in western Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian stock. He enlisted in the Navy in 1944 and spent two years there. After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, …
A Tantrum for Charles Potts (AKA Baba Hard Ass)
by Joshua Lew McDermott
I read Yellow Christ “Tantrum”
to two girls in a brown kitchen
from an apartment building
my parents happened
to live in thirty years ago
because the poem
spoke truths …
Mota
By Matthew Dexter
Parked the car beside the beach
Kept the motor running
Flat bed truck full of camouflaged
marina soldiers
Machine guns in hand, they jump from the back.
I turn off the ignition, they head toward the beach
Wearing bulletproof …
Drugstore
by Carl Dennis
Don’t be ashamed that your parents
Didn’t happen to meet at an art exhibit
Or at a protest against a foreign policy
Based on fear of negotiation,
But in an aisle of a discount drugstore,
Near the antihistamine …
we got a mystical funk
by Gena Begley
And the groove
of your hip
was made for a palm
like mine
to place
to hold
and to submerge my prints
beneath your skin
right in
to your very
bone.
The grooves of
your bones
carved out like
notches on
a bedpost
but I …
Wicker Tables
by Noah Gordon
one day,
there won’t be a reckoning.
not even a peep of dismay
will force open the skies,
and there won’t be a lesson
to be learned.
henceforth,
i will only say true words.
henceforth,
etc.
‘don’t speak ill of the dead.’
right.
while …
Taking Apart a Pixie
by KJ Hannah Greenberg
What did you mummer, as the snow,
Confectionary sugar tumbling down, down, down,
Glistened, giving us angels’ wings?
What did you suggest, as the flowers,
Marbled blossoms growing high, higher, highest,
Wafted, stuffing our …
Ode to an Ex-Me
by Madeline Levine
You got my email yesterday
I know cause Big Brother told me so.
I practiced that message over and over
Till I could take that Draft (1) no more—
You know they color that …
Burning the New Year
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.
So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame …
Push Kick Dreaming
by Liam Ferney
From Old St. to doorway
in a fug of hip hop and
hacked morning smoke
the two goons fumbled
with a pane of glass
the shape of the top
of a billiard table. Their
half furnished office
as empty …
Cramped Uptown
by Amy Temple Harper
34 ppg, Hard Cover, bound by Spork Press
Review by Travis Catsull
Cramped Uptown is the first book from Amy Temple Harper and it’s a thing of beauty and imagination. A very strange …
Film Review – Piranha 3D
by Ben MacNair
Bodies and Blood. Girls and Gore. Readers of the Daily Mail really should look away now. With a look back at the B Movies from the 1970’s, this 3D …
Lydia Loveless – Indestructible Machine (2011)
Blessed with a commanding, blast-it-to-the-back-of-the-room voice, the 21-year-old Lydia Loveless was raised on a family farm in Coshocton, Ohio, a small weird town with nothing to do but make music. …
Living Unitarian Universalist
by Beth Cortez-Neavel
This is how it begins, every time: whether I am at a potluck, a club, a bar, or with extended family. Someone ultimately asks me “So, what do you do?” I …
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