Poetry in a Pennsylvania Classroom

by Nicole Santalucia

Chandler’s poem about a gold chain
is a sinker on a fishing line
in the classroom where fluorescent
lights suck smoke out of my lungs.
Smoke that I inhaled 20 …

Obeisance

By Kalicia Pivirotto

Then you were alone with your moth’s
Tears, wisp of a body darting
Against the screen’s unrelenting wire, surely a
Sun awaits, blurred by the mesh

Veil. How light would insist …

Medical Examiner’s Office / Miami Dade County / June 2005

by Tingyu Liu

(lights florescent, gurneys silver, linoleum slick)

enter: bodies
faces slack
on back
possessions bagged
click
case: male, biker, legs torn, tattoos
paled, muscles gleaming
click
strip body
click
case: …

In My Father’s House

by Johanna Evenson

Several crucifixes
a jug of oil
and one small silver jar
containing flat, tasteless bread.
White plastic collars
lying around like abandoned haloes
and a typewriter
that spitted out sermons.

The Melancholy of Moving Back to the Desert

by Stephen Linsteadt

A grown man shouldn’t need to return
to the land of his childhood

tummy-showing and barefoot.

You should live where mountains and water
compliment your dual ascendant, the one

reaching for high mountain …

Transport (after “When Ecstasy is Inconvenient”)

by Chris Campanioni

see something
say something

take any major city
take every square

foot, every footstep
traced back on the map

of a screen
walking while writing

almost all at once
this type of transfer

takes practice

The Problem with Joy

by Diane K. Martin

It’s not negotiable. It flits through cedar, smacking
plate glass, leaving a small gray blotch. Winter, early dark

—no glittery snow to pretty things broken,
and lost. Yes, the …

Evening Song

by Sherwood Anderson

My song will rest while I rest. I struggle along. I’ll get back to the corn and
the open fields. Don’t fret, love, I’ll come out all …

To My Dear and Loving Husband

by Anne Bradstreet

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women …

62

by Don Yorty

Bird in the tree you are singing to me
as if you know and care that I am here
each note intended to put in my ear
a song. What …

A Noiseless Patient Spider

by Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of …

92

by Don Yorty

To be understood words are objective
yet we understand them subjectively.
When Willa Cather writes, “The long main street
began at the church, the town seemed to flow
from it …