Shelley Wong – Invitation with Dirty Hands

as Frida

In the blue house, my table examines
her hands and sets them on the floor.
Do the trees remember falling,
their branches snapping one by one
with their attendant flowers? I hear

–

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Richard Allen Taylor – The Next Generation of Mourning

–

I have begun, like my mother before me,
to cross out names. She lived to read the obituaries
of all her friends. In my generation, the first girl
I ever kissed is dead, complications of pneumonia.

–

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Sharon Wang – Radial Scent

My body tauter, poised to carry.

When I pitch forward

I tumble inside.

–

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Michael S. Harper – Blues Alabama

She’s blacker

than the night which holds

us in our communion

against the white picket fences.

–

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Jacqueline Osherow -Autobiography with Joseph

*
Sometimes there are
only stars, waiting
to bow down. Sometimes
there are only fat oxen.
But then, with no warning,
they’ve thrown you
in a pit, sold you, bound
you in Egyptian jail.
It’s dark there, you don’t
speak the language.

–

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~TRIBRACH~

Poetry Diary: Daylight Saving is over, and it’s altogether November.

Frederick Seidel – What Next

–

So the sun is shining blindingly but I can sort of see.

It’s like looking at Mandela’s moral beauty.

The dying leaves are sizzling on the trees

In a shirtsleeves summer breeze.

–

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Jeffrey Harrison – Eft

Tiny flicker
hiding
in wet leaves,
infant flame
cool to my
monstrous fingers,

–

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Ryan Wilson – After the Sonogram

Within you, now, a shadow feeds
On everything you are, and do.
Now every action scatters seeds
Across the future’s fields, where you

–

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quote-write-beautifully-what-people-don-t-want-to-hear-frederick-seidel-89-37-34

Sally Van Doren – Defiance

–

We were drawn that way at a young age on the main line
west from St. Louis to the Columbia spur north to Moberly
where our grandparents picked us up at the station

–

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Geoffrey G. O’Brien – May

This is a love poem. It has no business.

It happens in that anyway world

Where the bodies are by now decided

To get all the way up, accompanied

–

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~TRIBRACH~

Poetry Diary:

Bill Berkson – October

It’s odd to have a separate month. It

escapes the year, it is not only cold, it is warm

and loving like a death grip on a willing knee. The

Indians have a name for it, they call it:

“Summer!” The tepees shake in the blast like roosters

–

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February 30th

Frederick Seidel

–

The speckled pigeon standing on the ledge

Outside the window is Jack Kennedy—

Standing on one leg and looking jerkily around

And staring straight into the room at me.

–

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–

(poetry diary 191 -2/28/17)

(poetry diary 173 – 2/9/17)

Tag: Frederick Seidel