Black, Blue, Purple, Pale: A Book of Poetry on the Evolution of the Mind

The American Poetry Review

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The Epic Of Gilgamesh

Jan 1, 2020

My friends, who can reach heaven? The monster bellows like a river swollen with flood.Many are consumed in his fiery breath. My friends, who can reach heaven? Let us ask the mountain for a sign.Let us cut the spirits from the cedars. My friends, who

The American Poetry Review

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Four Poems

Nov 1, 2022

Day after Thanksgiving. I give thanks for Eveto beat the rush of appreciating hernext year and let her sleep inuntil three hundred o’clock.Thank you light on the mountainfor being my star on cloudy nights.Thank you all the guns I’ve never ownedand ki

The Millions

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Must-Read Poetry: September 2017

Sep 11, 2017

Isn’t that one of the purest goals of poetry—to justify our breaths? To recognize that we matter? The post Must-Read Poetry: September 2017 appeared first on The Millions.

The American Poetry Review

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Two Poems

Sep 1, 2023

This poem is for everyperson who will neverread it either by choiceor circumstance I writeit in silence wherethe most realparts of our liveslive like a shoe lostin an alley or an emptyboat in a black sea butmore like the fallenleaf on the other sideo

The American Poetry Review

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Four Poems

Jan 1, 2022

followed—in front, as horses—into daisy& silver dancing, knowing the jaw who unkeysin the danced earth to drink me down to haints,& will go again. was willed. distrusted happiness, addicted to it.a god needs of a god. here, i don’t want to reachfor g

The American Poetry Review

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from BLACK PASTORAL

Nov 1, 2023

somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly

The American Poetry Review

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Four Poems

Jan 1, 2023

And god created the waves and we the graves beneath, bodies madeparticulate by the force of water against water, water against rock, againsttime. I descend into the deep in a kind of prayer, listen to its centuries.Make me pay, will you, make me hurt

The American Poetry Review

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Four Poems

Nov 1, 2019

for Rouge they do not knowthe joy they walk with their footprints a lessonof faith O faithful companion of lonelinessthe name we gave you was not a name but a cryand you stayedand now they come to hunt in the wildnot for meat not with the ritual for

The American Poetry Review

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Five Poems

Nov 1, 2020

The American linden sways nonplussed by the storm,a bounce here, a shimmy there, just shaking like musicleft over from the night’s end wafting into the avenues before sleep.I remember once walking down Clinton Street, and singingthat line returning,

New Internationalist

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Home

Feb 25, 2019

I once lived in a yellow little house. Each morning, birds convened and sang at my bedroom window. The gate was indigo and inside the garden all kinds of flowers rose to kiss the sunny walls. The yellow nest was filled with cherished books, colourful

The American Poetry Review

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Collins Ferry Landing

Jul 1, 2020

for my father Only rivers bottom out like this.Only rivers bottom out with this kind of conviction.Not humans, or, at least, not humans asindisputably human as you were,trapped in consciousness’s surplus, exilic,animalized absurdity, writhing in its

The American Poetry Review

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AUSTRALOPITHECA1 & STARMAN2

Sep 1, 2019

The countdown to you begyns with me, deere Starman, when I wander, dumbly, deep into a space hospittable to Hunger. Now, all’s desert. No milk in syte. Just pitifull sand, what shushes as it slydes through your hande to rejoin itself. I’d join myself

The American Poetry Review

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Two Poems

Jul 1, 2020

marked sleep for sleep and the drugs marked joy to trudge through grief and the yellow drugs to crack my Vaseline smile, ooze trickling the length of my spine, the hair on my arms electrically charged. The stop-my-legs-from-fidgeting drugs for blood-

The Paris Review

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Armed Cavalier

Jun 5, 2023

The end of autumn lowers its leaves in the wealthy residential neighborhoods. Paintings in galleries and private foundations hold some short-lived way of seeing into misery or love. Those artists believed in power. I should, too. Strangers unman me i

The American Poetry Review

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In Which the World Is Not that Bad

Jul 1, 2024

let me live with no intention; i triumph at the mile-long hair in my shower; even in thunderstorms, more air is dry than not; there is no will that makes water cling to me the way you cling, but there is always the thought of water; i am telling you

The Paris Review

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Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

Dec 15, 2017

The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

The American Poetry Review

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Nine Poems

Jul 1, 2018

I Blazes travel the state roads. Entire fields ingrained in us—firesa house, a forest, essential in land and soil—set a purpose. II At growing season, leave dead matter aboveground. Future burners—side ditches. Dead matter, new plants—shells that nee

The American Poetry Review

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In The Palace Of Forgetting

Jan 1, 2023

In the spring of 2019, poet Matthew Kelsey suffered the loss of his mother. Less than a year later, he would lose his father to COVID-19. The following is a poem-interview between Keith Leonard (questions) and Matthew Kelsey (answers) that began in J

Saturday Star

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Poetic Licence

Nov 21, 2020

THESE human bodies will never seize to fail us. Their fragility can not be stressed enough. Mosquitoes kill more of us than we see them. We are waging too many wars against mother nature. We can never forget the inevitable death, but it will always b

The American Poetry Review

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Three Poems

Mar 1, 2020

All the animals you knowwill die. You set foodout for them anyway,let the oily seeds fallamong the fiddleheadsto be ground downpermanent as bone.The forest fills and unfills,drops itself down roottubes and turns to dark lace.One undoing: leafto sparr

The American Poetry Review

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Three Poems

Sep 1, 2019

before I was one I heard every soundas a sound that had never been heard,before I was one I saw every lightas a light separate from dark, colorhidden in a place I had not been.Before I was one I used feet to wakenin water, to pedal through air,hands

The Paris Review

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Three Poems by Rohan Chhetri

Sep 8, 2020

All summer the half voice lurked behind me & I played deaf for days for to live To not write about it to use my body Part the river’s flesh to operate Machinery is human too to love & for once stay awake through it all. Now it comes like the deer sle

New Philosopher

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Love Letters

Mar 7, 2022

MY BELOVED ANGEL, I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them. I can no longer think of nothing but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you.

The American Poetry Review

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TEN POEMS Translations of Rafael Alberti

May 1, 2024

Throughout the centuries,through the nothingness of the world,I, without sleep, search for you. Behind me, imperceptible,without touching my shoulders,my dead angel keeps watch. Where is Paradise,Shadow, you who have been there?I ask silently. Cities