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.

Pantoum by Charles Mingus

“Music, look at your history. Man / sounds sharp to me. Sounds like / someone has been escaping reality / on his hands and knees.”

“I grind my teeth. / I bite my nails. / As of this morning / I’ve accrued / thirteen hundred / american weeks.”

“These chambers are filled with salt / stalactites—all yours. I would give this back / to you on your tongue. If that / would heal you.”

“Someday, the horn of the train / will cease. Our bodies, / like bodies, will drown / in a great rain.”

“He’s not Catholic. / God, / No. / But since he’s been inside, he’s found / His / Divinity.”

“Once, I was hipless. Boyhood / swung out in front of me glazed / with permission to do & not be stopped.”

“(how much sense it made, how unending then) / the always unencumbered light”

“I used to be an unlit match, ready / to burn for any man, ready / for any hand to reach inside / and get my body back / to holy”

“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.”