Month: August 2021
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Fear not my Touch
By Kuma Raj Subedi Vibrant and creepy Fragile, sleepy Antidepressant-coyness smeared Colour often bright But dark when touched Mesmerising beauty Lures soul longing for a hug Welcoming patterns like a rug Mimosa, Fear not my touch! Swollen and robust Body be yours With touch that quenches thirst Majestic music be heardWhen swift breeze passes your waySweeping […]
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Kin
By Maya Angelou FOR BAILEYWe were entwined in red rings Of blood and loneliness before The first snows fellBefore muddy rivers seeded clouds Above a virgin forest, and Men ran naked, blue and black Skinned into the warm embraces Of Sheba, Eve and Lilith.I was your sister. You left me to force strangers Into brother molds, exacting Taxations they neverOwed or could ever […]
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The Children of The Poor
By Gwendolyn Brooks People who have no children can be hard:Attain a mail of ice and insolence:Need not pause in the fire, and in no senseHesitate in the hurricane to guard.And when wide world is bitten and bewarredThey perish purely, waving their spirits henceWithout a trace of grace or of offenseTo laugh or fail, diffident, […]
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Retired Ballerinas, Central Park West
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti Retired ballerinas on winter afternoons walking their dogs in Central Park West (or their cats on leashes— the cats themselves old highwire artists) The ballerinas leap and pirouette through Columbus Circle while winos on park benches (laid back like drunken Goudonovs) hear the taxis trumpet together like horsemen of the apocalypse in […]
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Not Everything is Sex
By Lauren Whitehead OkayTell that to the palm of this Black man’s handever so slightly cupped and carrying in its bendthe finger tips of another Black man, both of themarms stretching upward toward the sky, measuringtheir reach against one another on a basketball courtin Brooklyn, in spring OkaySpring And when I say springI mean bee-buzzing-near-a-pink-bud- […]
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Sad Boy’s Sad Boy
By Charles Bernstein I ruin my hats and all the mat slides glad I hop my girls and all is skip again I jump I run you up inside my truck The car goes looping out in dark and light And yellow hat slides in I run my mats and all the girl slides glad I hoped […]
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Miami
By Ted Greenwald For Ed. Baynard buildings blendinto the sky the workgoes onfrom where we left offand consciousness, by rights,is doors and windowsa spritz of colorin this lifeis what we can expectif we can expect anythingand a breeze or twoa quiet day a little sunthat 5-letter word “money”relying on no onefor pleasurethan the weather and […]
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Believe, Believe
By Bob Kaufman Believe in this. Young apple seeds,In blue skies, radiating young breast,Not in blue-suited insects,Infesting society’s garments. Believe in the swinging sounds of jazz,Tearing the night into intricate shreds,Putting it back together again,In cool logical patterns,Not in the sick controllers,Who created only the Bomb. Let the voices of dead poetsRing louder in your […]
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A Boat
By Richard Brautigan O beautiful was the werewolf in his evil forest. We took him to the carnival and he started crying when he saw the Ferris wheel. Electric green and red tears flowed down his furry cheeks. He looked like a boat out on the dark water.
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I Sing the Body Electric
By Walt Whitman I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal […]
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The Giver (for Berdis)
By James Baldwin If the hope of givingis to love the living,the giver risks madnessin the act of giving. Some such lesson I seemed to seein the faces that surrounded me. Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted,what gift would give them the gift to be gifted? The giver is no less adrift […]
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Love I’m done with you
By Ross Gay You ever wake up with your footie PJs warmingyour neck like a noose? Ever upchuckafter a home-cooked meal? Or noticehow the blood on the bottoms of your feetjust won’t seem to go away? Love, it used to beyou could retire your toothbrush for like two or three days and stillI’d push my […]
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Exhumation of the Heart
By Christian Garduno I’ve been gone so longsomeone else lives there, it’s someone else’s homeeven though I do think about that tiny house sometimesit might have been the only place I could have had it allbut I listened to too many songs about Boxcar Samnow, half a lifetime later, I’ve officially become Boxcar Sambut missing […]
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A Glimpse
By Walt Whitman A glimpse through an interstice caught, Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a corner, Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me […]
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Sweet Daddy
By Patricia Smith 62. You would have been 62.I would have given you a Rooselvelt Roadkinda time, an all-night jam in atwine time joint, where you could havetaken over the mikeand crooned a couple. The place be all blue lightand JB airand big-legged womengiggling at the wayyou spit tobacco into the sound system, showing up some […]
POETISHES 