ON THE ETYMOLOGY OF A PROPHYLACTIC GEMSTONE IN A POEM BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
By Len Krisak
“Booze flows. Sometimes, the verse aborts / Itself; sometimes, she can’t tell if it’s rye or / Gin that’s soaked her in its thwarting mist.”
Poetry
We are so grateful to all of our partner-poets for sharing their work with us—please enjoy their beautiful words in our Featured Poetry catalogue.
Breathwork
By Rex Wilder
“Liquid into a vein like I’m not a patient / But a receptacle, some alien’s urinal.”
The Great Cosmic Hum
“the hum you could never / obliterate, molecules buzzing, hum of 87 floors of refrigerators cooling, / hum that keeps the building in the sky”
Lullaby
“The others are fiction today, / pages I turn leaf by leaf. But not / you. Your heart thrums across / the sharp wire. I hear it sing.”
House of Prayer
“I praise once again, I symmetry / like the wings of a migrating bird, I repeat alhamdulillah / and rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat, like the rokrok / of an egret.”
The Theory of Sinking
By Márton Simon (Translated by Timea Balogh)
“I smear the makeup you left behind / on my face in an effort to love myself. / And I think I’ll eventually drink these two bottles / of perfume that have been here since— / what else could I do with them?”
BRAIN HEMORRHAGE, EARLY FALL
By Madhur Anand
“Found a dead bird on the rented back porch on Rice Lake. / Found it. Not encountered it. More like: glad we did not / not see it.”
Hope
“I collect poets who throw themselves out of hospital windows in Voronezh. / I wheel a teacart in a large house, its clattering spoons / announce my arrival.
Valence
“no country plants innocence / in its daughters we are fertile / for droughts”