From Sharkforum

TROUBLE

The girls you love make beautiful suicides,
breaking off heels and losing orchid
corsages beneath the backseats of Buicks.

This one speaks through the curtain
of her hair— the sweet blonde number,
soft machine of her ribs humming

like an engine block full of bees.
The dark has too much rigging. The moon
projected on a screen with tinfoil stars

is full of holes. Bankrupt gas stations
and the backs of women's calves.
Your flares set fire to the homecoming float,

set fire to the gym and all its paper
carnations. All the mouths gone metallic pink,
harboring tire irons and rhinestone tiaras.

© Kristy Bowen 2007

From Dusie

SYSTEMS

On Thursday, I wear a red ribbon around my throat and am capable of the most serious damage. Wash my hair with beer and make paperclip chains while he fucks someone else. A Katherine, whose name means torture. Who hangs out in wine bars and yoga studios and calls at 3am. Her syllables clicking like a bicycle tire, a pack of cards.

Arielle, whose name means lion of god, says to write messy poems. You know you’re there when the poem really makes you worry. I worry over car wrecks and falling in the shower. Crying on buses and wearing bad shoes. I try to write a poem I wouldn’t want to sleep with. Would kick to the curb, wrap my thumbs around her slender neck and snap. This one’s still babied, blinking, wondering if it wants to be a skirt or a tire iron. Licking the perimeter of opened envelopes for a tiny bit of sweet.

My nouns go awry every time I stop paying attention. Fall pretty like dimes on the sidewalk. My friend Melissa, whose name means bee-like, has a theory about systems. For every change in variable, the outcome shifts toward constant decay.

© Kristy Bowen 2007

From Great Works

PROGRESS POEM #1803: THE LADS

super kings, disco-lighted
black-bilious cud-boys
of inhouse take-aways
under ceiling rashed,
random shifted
rainbow rays.
doof doof — lager
glass dinked joke —
mushroom swollen
in through the thumbs
up door: boy on crutches
to the round of applause bar.
check shirt kisses,
pink shirt too close to the lips
all slows, pre-fight:

complete 3-sixty of the mobile
in the palm, shot downed in the thumb-thimble,
message in lipstick smeared across glass,
awake in the is it still yesterday

© Chris McCabe 2005

Adam Fieled (Logan Square, Philadelphia, USA): "Twisted Limbs"

Apocalypse out there. Here, endless wheels,
sparks; pockets of restrained & segmented
light. Lovely ways you defy me. Best moments,
always, you on top, when the world ends a little
bit. Warmth between lovers can never be
unnatural. Nor can hostage-taking, or a healthy
regard for oblivion. It's all that's left in common
between us & them: twisted limbs. Our mouths
move like theirs: flips, bites. Our movements
prefigure the same ends: consummated peace,
mediated silence, "deliberate hebetude." We're
w/ them as a necessary antithesis. They can't
see us. They never could. It's left to us to make
a balance, if we can. We'll need nothing less than luck.

© Adam Fieled 2006-2025

Earlier versions of this piece appeared in Big Bridge and Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks

From X-Peri

ANTON CHEKHOV SHORT STORY POEM

A car runs on desire. Don’t
let them tell you otherwise. When
you have the slightest memory, which
fits into your head like an oyster in
its shell, don’t expect much more.
And the people you meet fit
neatly into two categories. Some are
ripe and some are green as June.

© Larry Sawyer 2016

From Pirene's Fountain

EMILY BRONTE

these windy slopes are shorn
of the things which make life comfortable:
broad trees, broken bread, the swell

and supple curve of a lover’s back.
I sit here by my window, catch
the rough, sweet scent of heather in my nostrils

and write of death and love entwined
like adders together. The poetry
lies wild in my veins, the poetry

of granite skies stabbed by rocky outcrops,
the giving spring of turf, the taste
of solitude like aloes on my tongue,

the bare, unchanging moors, which take
my sisters and myself with mute indifference
and conquer under soil all our passion.

© Alison Croggon 1991

From Sawbuck Poetry

DEAR EVIL

Landlady: when you fixed my roof, it leaked two weeks later. January was warm this year. I don’t care what you say, I only had one “beer party.” It was the goddamned Fourth of July. No, you can’t have my goldfish tumblers. No, you cannot buy them. When I was mugged outside the building, you charged me to change the locks—

© Brandi Homan 2007

From Coconut

SENTENCE

I close my eyes and in one senseless jump
embrace my new found love, the zero ground
of unprotected feet, sumptuous
singular, lonely, flight. The very last sound
I hear is a hum, or ringing, calling me back
from this strange pre-conscious state. I awake
to be gripped by a cardiac
terror, breathless and sweating I try to wake
you, you heavy with your own dark trouble
and regardless, yet not uncaring, of me
here beside you, the cunning double
of a lover who wishes to be free.

But as the trap-door in the scaffold floor
needs the feet of the condemned to swindle,
so too do you need me, before
argument and after excess, all unhinged
at the threat that you might withdraw
and leave me, who forsook my liberty
that I might smell your hair, hanging withal.
Answered by silence I refused to be,
though I’m the condemned you’ll answer me—
in verse at least, as my pen, if not my heart,
knows you, and knows that you will say to me:
you’re the door, dear, the condemned is my part.

© Jennifer Moxley 2006

More from Wicked Alice

SAINT MONICA OF THE GAUZE

The room is red with iodine. Her ears stop
and her thighs slacken against
the bed. The owls would like to unwrap

her, as owls do, always looking
for the next loose shutter, the goldfinch
bathing in a pile of spilled parmesan

in the convenience store parking lot.
She explains a few things. Static
wracks the telephone line, a dry tornado

on the helipad after a freeway crash.
The linoleum has seen years of other feet
and beds rolling in and out, how

they hauled her from the gurney as if
she weighed something other
than what was left. They ask: but what

about your Cleveland flowering pear
trees, or the creeping vinca, the clematis
your husband promised to burn if it

came back? They say that she will get out.
There will be time and muscle
enough for hanging wet towels on a line.

© Mary Biddinger 2007