More from P.F.S. Post

GENIUS LOCI

West Philly swung, night by night, around all of us.
I couldn’t not notice— Diana was delicately gorgeous.
She spent lots of time in the room next door.
One night, deep into the wee hours, & as
the entire house tripped (taken off, it
seemed, into distant universes, sucked into
black holes, or even flipped the switch into
primordial ooze & chaos), I swung dumbly
into Kevin’s open door, found Diana tripping
on the bed, in tee & panties. As I sat down
on the bed, all that occurred to me was to
follow my instincts. The genius loci of that
place & time was all about nothing else, &
the sense that Diana, whose elegant lashes

& sculpted cheekbones belied her wildness,
existed as an archetype I came to worship
at the shrine of, even as music roared from
down the wood-floored hall, Mary & Abby
slept on the other side. I ascertained, later,
Diana, who I hadn’t known before, had changed
her name, to stake a claim, against missing other ladies’
fun. She would become an arriviste for me, later,
also, once the two stalwarts were out of the way.
Hopefully, foggy memories would make me hesitant
to claim knowledge, more than stunted, of her
bellicose, venom-bordered insides, of a stunted child,
Lolita as painted by Goya. Lolita painted by Goya,
however, is still Lolita. Nothing child-like in that wildness.

© Adam Fieled 2025

From Caffeine Destiny

THE PAPER HOUSE

At the edge of the field, we see the angriest bodies.

The spell is in the wrists, in the shampoo. Girls with long throats and a penchant for divining rods. In the end, the house burns beneath the moon opening like a mouth torn out of a book. All our rooms have wants, our wants, broken doors. We smolder beneath dresses, our buttons, our brocade dark. Even now, the mice shred newspapers in attics filled with cages ripped from hooks in parlor walls, in parlors ripped from a woman's skin, all eyelets and hooks.

At the edge of the field, we watched with matches in our skirts.

© Kristy Bowen 2006

From P.F.S. Post

ON THE BANKS OF THE RIVER IN WINTER

So many Marys grieving by the river
that I have to cover my ears
to shut out the sobbing and hear,

as if for the first time, 
the long low sound of the water
and the train just beginning

to round the bend and blow
its way through the dark tunnel.
How many times I've sat

in summer: considered the chicory,
drawn the blue bridge flung
from bank to bank, or wondered

the names of the red flowers,
their throats like trumpets.
How many times I've not

given in to the weeping:
I can almost see her— the one
who lifts the Potomac mud

to her face and smears,
as if it were a balm and not
the original problem,

or the one with the bucket of fish:
she should return them but that would mean
letting them slip, silver and whole,

finally cast out. I'd rather
let them wander in the maples,
cold and insistent and crying.

I should swim somehow— wait
for spring; I've been waving
to that other a long time,

the one who wears the red
and not the blue scarf.

© Mary Walker Graham 2008

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