Claire Keane
Cosmic Funnies

ellievsbear
tumblr dot com
Sade Olutola
Xuebing Du
i don't do bad sauce passes
Sweet Seals For You, Always
styofa doing anything
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
wallacepolsom
Mike Driver
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

roma★

titsay

oozey mess
NASA
Misplaced Lens Cap
Jules of Nature
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@lunchboxpoems

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SUNDAY
So that’s life, then: things as they are?
—Wallace Stevens
Once there was music that could tear
your heart open and heal it
before you took another breath.
That was what art could do.
Kings and princes, bishops and popes
all knew this, as they knew
how to get what they wanted and keep
what they had. Mostly what happens
to people doesn’t happen by chance.
You spend your life in the mud,
you eat the same thin soup each night,
and then on Sunday a thousand angels
start to sing. The walls are ablaze
with suffering and forgiveness.
And you think this is what you’ll see
when you die. When you yearn,
this is what you yearn for. Or something
like it, the version you’ve been told
you can afford. They were smart to keep
belief and understanding at a distance,
go for the big effects, everything you get
when you’re through with this world,
the one you got stuck with—potatoes and soup,
the morning and the afternoon,
the afternoon and the evening,
things as they are.
LAWRENCE RAAB
ALICE WHITE
THE NIGHT WHERE YOU NO LONGER LIVE
Was it like lifting a veil
And was the grass treacherous, the green grass
Did you think of your own mother
Was it like a virus Did the software flicker
And was this the beginning
Was it like that
Was there gas station food
and was it a long trip
And is the sun there
or drones
or punishment
or growth
Was it a blackout
And did you still create me
And what was I like on the first day of my life
Were we two from the start
And was our time an entrance
or an ending
Did we stand in the heated room Did we look at the painting
Did the snow appear cold Were our feet red with it, with the wet snow
And then what were our names Did you love me or did I misunderstand
Is it terrible
Do you intend to come back
Do you hear the world’s keening
Will you stay the night
MEGHAN O'ROURKE

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NOVEMBER 1, 1975
My mother is white bones in a weed field on her birthday. She who would be sixty has been sixteen years absent at celebrations. For sixteen years of minutes she has been what is missing. This is just to note the arrogance of days continuing to happen as if she were here.
LUCILLE CLIFTON
ANNIVERSARY
Kneeling to carve back the grass encroaching
like cuticles on a fingernail, I noticed how close
her flat headstone was to the others around hers.
Watering the flowers at his wife’s grave,
an old man told me they’re placed above
the abdomens, not the heads, as you’d expect.
I think he meant to explain they were less crowded
underground than it appeared, but I didn’t follow.
I pictured a pair of rotten feet standing on my mother’s
head, her green feet standing on another’s head,
and so on in a horizontal grid, gaudy totem poles.
I wasn’t sure what part of her body I stood over,
but I stepped aside as if she could feel my weight,
like when I was a child and she’d lie on the carpet
and tell me to walk all over her back. I’d laugh
at the funny feeling underfoot, the squishy,
bony, fleshy ground I massaged by walking,
losing my wobbly balance turning around
after each short lap from shoulders to butt. Yet
standing off to the side of her grave felt wrong.
Every year, every visit, like the bashing of a gong.
EDWARD SALEM
POEM ABOUT EVERYTHING EXCEPT—
“To write these days is to avoid telling people how
angry I am.”
—Daniel Nester
Behold the Rottweiler in its cage, behold homemade cornhusk
ornaments, behold the photo of a Jaymar miniature piano,
behold the galaxy of knees at noon, facing the maestro’s
fragrance. Behold, behold, I stand at the door and knock-
knock-knock
Answer the call, be real now, be here & calculate
cost vs. bennies, don’t be that person who waits
until the last chorus to join in. Makes you look careless.
Care less. Rejection is a state, like catalepsy, to move through.
Behold the scroll, the wretched bankroll, the double tongue
summoning his minions to court, calculate the chorus
and ford the spring, a small thing, mysterious as amaryllis—
a little water, a little sun. Behold my process of (pre)tending.
Sweetpea, the voice will always call, a murmur or hum,
a spring burbling or a dammed-up flood. Locally sourced,
unforced, double-spaced & tortured into shape. Copyright
the Year of Our Lord blank blankety-blank, Amen.
Behold the ample galaxy, a naked miracle through the blinds.
Clean your damn windows and the bulb will bloom.
AMY LEMMON
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

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DEAD STARS
Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.
I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.
We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.
It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.
And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.
But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—
to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.
Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.
Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?
What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain
for the safety of others, for earth,
if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,
if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,
rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?
ADA LIMÓN
JANE HIRSHFIELD
THERE’S SOMETHING HERE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE
HANIF ABDURRAQIB
GLORIA MUNDI
Come to my funeral dressed as you
would for an autumn walk in the woods.
Arrive on your schedule; I give you permission
to be late, even without good cause.
If my day arrives when you had other plans, please
proceed with them instead. Celebrate me
there–keep dancing. Tend your gardens. Live
well. Don’t stop. Think of me forever assigned
to a period, a place, a people. Remember me
in stories–not the first time we met, not the last,
a time in between. Our moment here is small.
I am too–a worldly thing among worldly things–
one part per seven billion. Make me smaller still.
Repurpose my body. Mix me with soil and seed,
compost for a sapling. Make my remains useful,
wondrous. Let me bloom and recede, grow
and decay, let me be lovely yet
temporal, like memories, like mahogany.
MICHAEL KLEBER-DIGGS

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WHITE HOT STAR
The knife my father kept in his car was gone
by the time I got to his house—nothing
but proof of insurance and the gas tank
half-empty. I claimed a different knife I found
in his desk because every boy should inherit
his father’s knife—I tell my son this
when he looks at the old black-handled
blade I have hidden in the utility drawer
at our house. This morning he told me
how a black hole is born when a star dies,
life collapsing and leaving a blank space
that swallows the light, the comets,
the street, the station wagon—everything
extinguished, lost. Neither of us understands
the science of gravity, but I know how it feels
to live without a knife: tear what you can
with your hands, rip everything with your teeth,
and when the lights go out, feel nothing
and imagine someone else’s fingers
tracing the glint of your father’s knife,
its keen edge against their thumb.
When my son and I talk about courage,
he claims the dark is the only thing
he fears and I want to tell him, one day
the darkness will swallow everything
and someone who loves you will leave you
something bright to keep you safe.
W. TODD KANEKO