“Prescribe yourself your favorite medicine, / go home and go to bed for like a week.”
Pentameter
“We plod in numb, arthritic steps—uphill / at first to make returning easier.”
“You’ll think yourself a marble bust. You’re slate, / And every creep and critic is a sponge”
“High-cheeked, dark-haired, toned like prehistory / put him to work”
“How came I to this place of burning stars?”
“Prescribe yourself your favorite medicine, / go home and go to bed for like a week.”
“Somebody built a god near seventh street / beside the freeway in a vacant lot”
“My Baba rokus through her TV apps, / calls up the Royal Shakespeare Company”
“The harlequins should tumble, for your death / will not defy the odds”
E. M. KOMISAR
“She found her faith in static broadcast stations, / The grainiest and blurriest were best”
AMIT MAJMUDAR
“How does he square his fiddling with rhymes / with such unbearably precarious times”
AMIT MAJMUDAR
“Caterpillars build their bunkers out / of terror.”
SCOTT RAY
“We smelled the smoke before we saw the fire”
JOHN POCH
“Don’t touch it yet. The gun is not a toy. / This isn’t home, or church, or work, or school”
QUINCY R. LEHR
“That was one more year of America, / a smoking fuselage that never crashes”
PEDRO POITEVIN
“I will remain here on the sidelines where / each Saturday I witness my son glide / over slide tackles with a cocky stride .”
DAVID ROSENTHAL
“You’ll come across it in some database– / an arcane list, an ancient family tree– / a ghost town on the edge of cyberspace”
JOHN PHILIP DRURY
“‘Ever the best of friends,’ your letters ended, / great expectations for a wave of years / that promised more reunions, correspondence. / But all that’s over.”
