"Eyes like a drawknife" 
"As Heartless as birdsong"
"As unmeant as elm leaves"

GERTRUDE STEIN

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

    Susie Asado.

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

And fare thee weel awhile!"

OCEAN VUONG

There’s a joke that ends with — huh?

It’s the bomb saying here is your father.

 

old hope goes to ground
My life is a fault at last

Audacity my roof. When I had

No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.

When I had no ears I thought.

When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made

Care my father. When I had

No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made

Quiet my friend. When I had no

Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made

My voice my temple. I have

No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune

Is my means. When I have

Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment

Is my strategy. When I had

No lover I courted my sleep.

EMILY DICKINSON

And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard —A 

And sore must be the storm —B

That could abash the little Bird-A

That kept so many warm —B

 

I’ve heard it in the chillest land — C

And on the strangest Sea —D

Yet — never — in Extremity,-E

It asked a crumb — of Me.-D

lilacs like turf stars.

The late fawn

standing in his syrups;

bucks down the swale

chewing sedge.

We move south

to slopes of sleeping poppy,

past the white alder,

bending heads to scent

of calx—in natural dark

a man tries his hand

at belonging. He

with greave of hide, a born

hood, lay with three

spikes in the clay, green

peak in the breeze.

He whose breathing

wrongs the still.

You stir now to mend,

to redress?

To be one of us, after all this?

as a quarter century!

wildflowers flecking the lawn, I walked out

to the shed and pulled open the door

with a woody squeak, and there, rising from the dirt floor,

surrounded by a dusty clutter of tools

You used to be so

and now you’re all

like, you’ve transformed

BY HA JIN

I saw how they lived with restrictions.

Hardly past thirty they began to decline.

Like fish trapped in an invisible net,

they swam in all directions

but couldn't get anywhere. 

GEORGE MURRAY

The books sit on the shelf, a row of coma patients

in a ward, a series of selves no longer able to learn

and trapped at the point of injury: the last page.

HOA NGUY

"arms out like wings on either side"

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

 

or press an ear against its hive.

and in the dimness see the light.''

KAREN SOLIE

More than a storey high and twice that long,

it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360,

possessed of the ecology of some hellacious

minor island on which options

are now standard.

SUSAN MUSGRAVE

"They see garbage, blood, feces."

STEVIE SMITH

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.