“Prescribe yourself your favorite medicine, / go home and go to bed for like a week.”
Sonnet
“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”
SCOTT RAY
“We smelled the smoke before we saw the fire”
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”
MICHAEL BROWN
“Like Job, he kneels, hands placed before him on the ground”
ADAM TAVEL
“One horseshoe clangs against an iron spike. / You breathe them in: their glimmered bayonets.”
SALLY THOMAS
“All day the oak came down. The bright air glinted / With fine red sawdust as with locust wings.”
PEDRO POITEVIN
“It springs from mystery like window dew. / It glows in the abrasion of a match.”
CAROL FRITH
“My neighbor’s motion lights ignite, / light up the privet tree, the dying firethorn hedge”
ROB WRIGHT
“I wish that all the hours I’ve spent with bores / in heated arguments were mine again.”
RICHARD WAKEFIELD
“An old man at his kitchen window sees / by winter light”
TONY BARNSTONE
“Descartes installed the eyeball of an ox / in a small hole through which the daylight sprayed / inverted figures of the world’s parade”
JEHANNE DUBROW
“I walk to Safeway where the air stays on / and wander through the frozen foods, the cold / glass coffins”
JUDITH KUNST
“At twelve, she saw so little and so much / in seven stars”
