1.18.2018

One More Heinous Crime

Until they look around
to the wide world and all her fading sweets,
there is your book, just as you laid it down,
the sun crawling inside the sheets
behind the wall thin as a wren’s bone:
a heap of broken images where the sun beats.
So at the edge of my home town
I drive around the streets
with neither name nor face.
A bottle of red wine each night moved her along
(and this gray spirit yearning in desire).
Each moment is a place.
Huge pangs, and strong,
until the lengthening wings break into fire.

Emily Dickinson | Facts by Our Side Are Never Sudden
William Shakespeare | Sonnet 19
Edna St. Vincent Millay | Interim
Anne Sexton | The Break Away
Dylan Thomas | Vision and Prayer (I)
T. S. Eliot | The Waste Land
William Stafford | Boom Town
Charles Bukowski | I Made a Mistake
Ogden Nash | A Tale of the Thirteenth Floor
Nick Flynn | You Asked How
Alfred, Lord Tennyson | Ulysses
Mark Strand | Black Maps
John Milton | Upon the Circumcision
Elizabeth Barrett Browning | Sonnet 22

1.05.2018

Tanka after Titles from The Devil's Tour, by Mary Karr

Etching of the plague
years. Winter in the city
of friendship. Rounds, sad
rite, soft mask. Grace. The legion
bayou. The unweepables.