Letters to the Rest of Me

by Louise Glück

The dead leaves catch fire quickly. And they burn quickly; in no time at all, they change from something to nothing.

Midday, The sky is cold, blue; under the fire, there's gray earth.

How fast it all goes, how fast the smoke clears. And where the pile of leaves was, an emptiness that suddenly seems vast.

what resembles the grave but isn't, by Anne Boyer

Text below the cut:

by Jack Gilbert

Suddenly this defeat. This rain. The blues gone gray and yellow a terrible amber. In the cold streets your warm body. In whatever room your warm body. Among all the people your absence. The people who are always not you.

by Ezra Pound

by Tachibana Hokushi

by Rumi

Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow

by Pablo Neruda trans. Mark Eisner

I don't love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz, or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: I love you as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom but carries the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself, and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose from the earth lives dimly in my body.

by Ryler Dustin

A love poem for Buddy Wakefield By Andrea Gibson

At the end of your ten day meditation retreat you got in your car drove thirty peaceful feet and ran over a bird. Splayed its holy guts on the pavement like God finger-painting “Fuck you” across that deep breath you were holding the way your mother held her first born.

You, thank goodness were torn from the Bible the day before they burned it for the verse about dancing to tambourines. Once you saw the blood of Christ on a knife carving redwood trees into church pews. Now every Sunday morning you hear glaciers melting and you cry easy as a one night stand never ever is when you see the feathers in your rear-view mirror scattering like prayers searching for a safe place to land.

Hold me to my word when I tell you I will leave today, catch a bus ticket west just to stand in the center of your highway blocking traffic ‘til every feather’s answered. I’ve see too many prayers caught in the grills of 18 wheelers and folks like us have shoulder blades that rust in the rain, but they’re still g sharp whenever our spinal chords are tuned to the key of redemption. So go ahead world pick us to make things better.

We’ve been building a bridge through the center of this song since Mother Theresa replaced the walls of her church with the weeping cries of Calcutta’s orphaned ghettos. You wanna know what the right wing never got? We never questioned the existence of God. What we questioned is his bulldozer turning Palestine into a gas chamber. What we questioned is the manger in Macy’s and the sweatshops our children call the North Pole. What we question are the sixty swollen lashes on the back of a girl found guilty of the crime of allowing herself to be brutally raped. What we question is the idea of a heaven having gates. Silly.

Have you never stood on the end of pier watching the moon live up to her name? Have you never looked in the eyes of a thief and seen his children’s hungry bellies? Some days my heart beats so fast my ribcage sounds like a fucking railroad track and my breath is a train I just can’t catch.

So when my friends go filling their lungs with yes. When they’re peeling off their armor and falling like snowflakes on your holy tongue. God collects the feathers. We are thick skin covering nothing, but wish bones. Break in. You’ll find notebooks full of jaw lines we wrote to religion’s clenched fist. Yeah, We bruise easy. But the sound of our bouncing back is a grand canyon full of choir claps. And our five pointed stars have always been open to the answer whatever it is.

I know David argued with the chisle. I know he said make me softer When those tourists come looking for a hero I want the rain to puddle in my pores. Build me holy like that. Build me a kite flown out a bedroom window at midnight the day freedom set its curfew to 9:11.

by T.S. Leonard

by James Crew

by Masaoka Shiki

by Leonard Cohen

by Louise Glück

by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Liz, I think her name was, the woman my mother brought me to. We played

cards in her perfumed office: lavender, tulips, bowl of wax fruit. I was ten

and wanted to die. I don't know why I'm here again. I lived. Obviously.

I lived. When I was older, but still a child, not innocent, but foolish,

I looked up from my solitary suffering. I learned the history

of men. I pointed to a spot on the map they rendered. I said

then, then, built my common life in a room at the end.

If it's true, what they say, that poetry is written with the knowledge of

and against death, that it is a beacon, a bulwark, then Love,

I confess, I have been no poet. Outside, a hawk circles overhead.

Four cops circle a woman dressed all in red. I circle

the apartment as you sleep, happily in the next room. Just this once

by Ezra Pound