GOLDEN eagle and a gooey pink pen
Are just the thing on a cracker.
Every salt crystal has the potential
To grip like Michelin tire tread.

Helluva dancer, that gila monster.
Looks great in a cotton bodystocking.
But talking shop with the audience, she’s as
Uptight as a scolding nannygoat.

A nanomoment’s not nearly enough
To throw a tarp on a terrapin.
In therapy, you can come to terms
With the millipede’s indifference.

The millipede looked at his watch:
Mickey says hello. He has an
It, and you have an it, and the two its’
Names are Lefty and Chick Pea.

Chick Pea wrote a dialogue:
On the Nature of the Raj.
But Butter Rabbit and Camelopard
Are flying out from O’Hare.

The airport has many hazards: impassable
Rivers and starvey wolves.
Their hunting patterns exactly match
Those of the stranded octopus.

And who is as the suckblob?
And who knoweth the interpretation of the suck?
Daddy Longlegs looked it up
In the Lithuanian textbook.

But you’re the Delphic oracle, so say
What’s shorter than nothing at all? Goat o’ God
Sawed off a shotgun, gave
The stupid part to her kid.

I know, I know, I know.
Interrupted a hundred times,
The psyche goes into crisis.
And so: ineligible is the bat.





FOX CALLED AND SANK A SHOT

FOX called and sank a shot
Into the corner pocket
Of a diamond-eyed kangaroo, who
Looked better naked.

Turkeypig wrote a rockin’ review.
You’re welcome to click on the link.
But the comment stream is fulla trolls
And trotting out o’ credentials.

Here is something new:
I’ma answer it all with silence.
With silence, exile, cunning, I
Skillfully cut up cucumbers.

And as I crouch to pet this coil
Of orange extension cord, I think
Its mile-long flexible backbone
Is liquid metallic hydrogen.

And, oh, you know me all,
A plain blunt man that love my friend. I’m
Trying to put a nail in the wall
By hitting it with a mattress.





Anthony Madrid lives in Chicago. His first book, I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say, will be published by Canarium Books this spring.

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If an expatriate is, as I believe, someone
who never forgets for an instant
being one,
then, no.

But, if knowing that you always
tote your country around
with you, your roots,
a lump

like a soul that will never leave you
stranded in alien subsets of
yourself, or your wild
entire;

that being elsewhere packs a vertigo,
a tightrope side you cannot
pass up, another way
to show

how not to break your pretty neck
falling on skylights:
reward-laden
mirages;

then, yes. All homes are home; mirages
everywhere. Aside from
gravity, there are no
limits,

never were, nor will there ever be,
no here and there to foil
your lotus-dreaming
legend.

Stay on the planet, if you can. It isn't
all that chilly and what's more,
grows warmer by the
minute.

Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) was a painter, sculptor, and writer.

This poem was published in Tanning’s first book, A Table of Content (2004), and in LIT. It is reprinted here by kind permission of Graywolf Press.

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            "'So, it’s come to that,' she said. 'You’re jealous of policemen.'"
                —Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

The girl detective does not date
She sits at home       eating a piece of devil’s food cake
with red frosting       She sits at home
with a pregnancy test
       Icebox light       slats the kitchenette

The girl detective rolls seamed stockings down
one at a time, slips       off her crepe de chine
and navy pumps           In dotted swiss pajamas
       she yanks out the lousy Murphy bed
flips on her hot-bulb Hawaiian lamp
       the hula dancer’s       pampas skirt sways
       hips like lava             skin like kola nut

The girl detective       sets her honey hair
in frozen orange         juice cans
                               She double-checks
her clutch purse for Sweetheart tweezers, compact, blush
then badge               and gun

       Foundation caramelizes       in her vanity mirror
                   a bullet lipstick               ricochets
across the room       The girl detective dreams
of handcuffs                             slanted grillework
lost keys and prison                 movies where the girls
        are Lana Turner blond

       All her exes broke
the law       or moved to Hollywood
in search of starlets         sunglass swimming pools
palm trees                       and palisades
       green velvet theatres sinking               into mossy film noir

The girl detective                            keeps a corkscrew handy
things always do go south              it’s best to be prepared

Sideshow Banner: The Engagement of the Fat Lady and the Pocket Man

Jacques played my love-struck contract dwarf in tents
from Brou to San-Maur-des-Fossés.
He brought me saucisson, champagne,
and Gerber daisies wrapped in cellophane;

he stroked the triple strand of pearls that ringed
my clotted custard double chin
so tenderly, I almost thought
his sawdust-kneed proposal was sincere.

The banner painter captured our romance
on canvas. There I sit, enthroned
on gilt aluminum, my teeth
bared in a fox-trap grin, my dimpled bulk

blown up to fill a wincey sideshow wall,
forever fat, just twenty-two.
The joke was that a gentleman
that small could fall for someone oversized

and listing, like an alpine île flottante,
our false long looks some mastodon mistake.
I fed him tarte tatin, marceled my hair,
and kissed his biscuit porcelain brow,

but when the tour closed, he pocketed
my Carbanado diamond ring
and caravanned to Bruges with Snake Charm Elle.
These days, although the cook-tent steams

with boudin blanc, I find it hard to put
on weight. Bereft, I slouch beneath
our faded courtship scene, my heart
a punched-in bladder on a birch-bark stick.

Hilary S. Jacqmin is an MFA student at the University of Florida. Her poem "Wedding Album” was published in Best New Poets 2011: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers, edited by D. A. Powell.

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Once in the dark cold and water-table bliss
or blue of the fractioned and visible land
Figure this
for the tiny halves of most lives
where the country and the city and the pantry all converge

For a time the slice had misshapen
the drive
                  the way it melts in the
                         tiring sun of the day the stitches
whose low deep voice made a
just entangle of the whole rotting fruit.

Goats and the milk which comes and lies
and numbering and circle sorts.
I can't receive my petition my
hesitancy because one knows
the path
is a slimy and cheap oak clock

Spanish is the reemergent fine-time and the
tight rope slither and link
The vagrancy or relevancy but
mostly it’s the dream of mothering
I make a perfect and terrible woman
when fire's in the soaring lifesuit of the pace

and like insert of an eagle is much the way
I met the man named Americo Ferrari which
surprised me sounding so much
the space and the luxe in both parts

Rebecca Kosick writes and translates in Ithaca, NY.

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Outside they’re yelling about the secret weapon.
But I can still judge the season
by the unhidden dandelions all over the front yard.

Also the tricycles, which is to say
that I face the future ludicrous & unafraid.
Once I occupied a picnic table for a whole afternoon

& people came by, asked if it was okay to sit down.
My responses varied with the color of their eyes,
which is different than yesterday at the coffee shop

where I spent all my energy trying to convince you to sit
anywhere else. Not right next to me. Not
putting your adult espionage thriller on the table

where my drink goes. Outside, they’re always yelling
about the secret weapon.
I folded my old tattersall shirt & put it in a box.

The sleeves were fraying & I was embarrassed
to part with it. We give up on worn out things
when instead we should celebrate & covet their injuries.

I shoved sadness deep into my ears to drown out
the sizzling of dinner. I spent forty minutes
stacking books on the new bookshelf & each volume

generated such an impressive floral infused gust,
I had to wonder about the previous owner. I had to wonder
about the Nate Pritts from fifteen years ago,

the one who bought a bottle of his ex-girlfriend’s perfume
just to have it in case all beauty suddenly ceased.
It did. Then it started again




Nate Pritts is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Sweet Nothing. He is the founder & principal editor of H_NGM_N, an online journal & small press.

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             for John and David

What is it about the certainty of snow

that makes us feel human and mortal—
the warmth and care of being inside

while winter goes about her usual business,
flakes swirling in the wind
just outside the restaurant door?

But here inside, conversation is warm,
a glowing fire, there can never be too much pleasure,
or if there were, it is already beyond our human capacity

to wonder, which is so great in itself, alone,
without our pushing it along the evening route
to far beyond us, within you, and then

here before you or beyond you too—
oh that crazy guy, that insane woman,
that saint or sinner of old—that’s all, folks.





Eugene Richie’s most recent book of poems is Psyche and Amor (Factory Hollow Press), with Rosanne Wasserman. He is the Director of Writing at Pace University in New York City.

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Red wine, the cure for common sobriety—
dizzy tea, sweet like molten meat—is just as Jewish
as any rite, any tight briar of Hebrew letter, any fetter
of Israelite slave or Yid-friar. No one should build a pyramid
with a hangover, I think it’s written, but still that Jew-gang,
tendons stretched like strings of sitars, Seder-clenched their livers
at the green pea Nile, slurped purpled red wine,
clacked bricks, and acted Exodus, the awe, optic, the carafe,
Coptic; Pharaoh punch-drunk, Hieroglyphic-fistic.
Six thousand years later, my Semitic clan unfurls,
cousin to cousin, to swat about a dozen pecks of Exodus lexis.
No taupe grape, either, for my smashed stock,
for my drunken kin who swirl the swill, fawn over Passover for
eight days, eight of their about-twenty-six thousand; six thousand
years later, the latent Seder just as filled with Jews, just as catered.
We live the Passover miracle of the ladled vine, the Passover
miracle of the fourth glass, and the greater miracle of the fifth.
My cup gripped in my Jew-paw like a bulb, ruddy filament fluming,
I truly believe Egypt was Elysian. I can hold my religion. Next to me,
unlike Aaron, Uncle Jacob, sloshed like Moses,
parts the Red Sea over and over again in his glass.





Abraham Lincoln Decides Against “Count Lincula”

        That’s just perfect, I thought, the ingredients
In order and the sketch of Lincoln for the box with one thumb up
And the other hand signing the word “Illinois” and a neon American flag bow tie.
Ready to print. The verdant bubble writing, occidental, turbo curve.
A house divided. There, the sparkling cinnamon, in the divided house.

The moments of emergency and the novelty of the name
Lincoln O’s gave him egregious heartburn for a month.
This was not the Abraham I knew. Where was the moral giant
Swaying like a uvula? The glitzy example of disease? Equipped

With mangy aphasia, Abe had bent over his apolitical writing desk
For weeks with slates of oats and four types of humours. His recipe deadline
Was in February and strict and clammy as seashell, the Cereal Bosses called
On him nightly until one died of a blood disease. Where that one fell

Four more filled the puckering void, and I could count the days since
The ample hydraulics of Abraham Lincoln had clenched
To orate. Isomer Lincoln arranged the wheat from most puce to least.
From yaw to pitch to punch.




Megan Amram is a recent graduate of Harvard University and comedy writer living in Los Angeles.

O, poems, poems, poems/we made them out of clay/and if you want more poems/The Poetry Section's vast archive is this way.

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At the microphone, suddenly—oh no—
is Sandra the Available,

in her endless yellow dress
and award-winning earrings,

about to sing Rose Dickey’s unrecorded
cakewreck of a hybrid poemsong,

“Sheep Child o’ Mine.”
Now watch her win the night

before it’s all over. She’s no loser,
with a fever but no lover.

Not like me. I live in a hotel
with no rooms, just a lobby and lifts

leading to experiences.
Time to ask another person,

someone who’s been outside
the fishbowl long enough

to wonder if there will ever again
be enough water. Rat race,

hamster wheel, dog run.
(OK, dog run’s different.

It’s not for people.)
I’m not a real people-person.

Just like reality is not really realness,
people. Just try and point out to me

what’s not fake or paste or false?
Or trick or replica

or denial or dream or drama
or simulation or re-enactment

or knockoff or artificial, a ruse,
a work of art, illusion,

a lie, a mistake, fantasy,
a misconception, missed-connection,

delusion, hallucination,
insincere, invalid or invented,

a rehearsal with no performance?
A viable world with no excuse to exist?

In my hotel the sleep is free.
In any hotel. Why shouldn’t it be?

And that old girl Sandra?
Turns out she can really sing.




The World’s Arm

A strong, pale wind on the thighs,
it was no seaspray, no A.C.,

but cold mnemotic, a breath
of spotless decision,

a kind of bulk, a true surface
thickened by foreign pears

as if winter brought its fruit
first to me for approval

before it let December
fill its basket to capacity.

I spoke too calmly for one
who didn’t believe in anything.

Mouth full of pears,
full of promises I’d no way

to speak, much less keep, I tended
to gesture toward a Universal

Field of Grass, hoping to break
as many blades as my wide self

could in one pass. One pass—
but we’re wasted with feeling,

breathing funny and stuck rough
like an IV into a paralyzed arm.

And that’s the World’s Arm
that can’t write anymore,

or sign its name, or pick
the thickness from the trees.

My fingerprints transform
into proboscis, by degrees.




Brenda Shaughnessy is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers-Newark. Her third collection, Our Andromeda, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2012.

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Skoble started teaching poetry at Brooklyn's Saint Ann's in the 1980s. More than 30 years later, the balding, bearded gentleman who speaks with the thoughtful cadence of a lifelong educator is an institution, meeting with every lower school student once a week and 400 children in total. In his beautifully cluttered office, Skoble talked about a life filled with poetry, children, and the occasional modern dance while his 18-month-old English springer spaniel, Slim, snacked on a bone her owner brought for the occasion.

How did you get here?

It's half my life. I've been here 35 or 40 years. I started out as a college teacher. I was 23 when I started teaching at Brooklyn College. I grew facial hair so I could be separated from the majority of my students who were probably at least as old as I was. After a couple of years I was hired full-time at Queensborough College where I worked for 25 years. During that time, I was writing a lot of poetry and publishing a bit. I had a family. At some point, my life changed. I was living on my own and seeing the kids part time. I started teaching poetry workshops for adults. When my youngest son was in first grade here at Saint Ann's, I invited his teacher to come to a workshop. Her response was, "Come and do one in my class." I said I don't teach kids. But she persisted, so I tried one. And it was so much fun. I went back the following year and did one a week, and it was even more fun.

The following year, she was leaving but the head of the lower school said he would ask if any other teacher wanted me. Gabrielle Howard said, "I'll have him." She is now the head of the lower school. I worked in her class. She is an amazing teacher. I took a sabbatical to spend full time in her classroom. I went back to college, but my time at Saint Ann's grew. As Howard's kids went into second grade, I started doing some second-grade workshops and then third grade. I started doing middle-school workshops and following those kids, and then suddenly I was doing high-school workshops. The number of hours I was spending here increased. I forced myself to keep working at Queensborough, but I was liking it less and less. Simultaneously with that was what I have to describe as a serious decline in public education in New York in the '70s and '80s. I had more and more students in my English classes at the college—I was teaching writing and literature—who couldn't read. I couldn't help them because I didn't have the skills to teach reading or really the desire to teach it. So I took early retirement from Queensborough.

When was that?

1991. Before that, I was teaching four-fifths time at Saint Ann's, but I didn't have medical insurance. When I took early retirement, I needed that because the benefits didn't kick in for a while. I teach 400 of the 1,000 kids at Saint Ann's. I teach every kid in the lower school once a week. I have four middle-school workshops, and I have one large high-school seminar that's split into two halves because there is no classroom that accommodates 40 kids. We just have a lot of fun and do a lot of great stuff.

You only teach poetry?

I only teach poetry. It is the writing of poetry that is my focus. Kids ask me all the time, "Are you the only poetry teacher?" And my answer is, "No, everybody at Saint Ann's is teaching poetry." And it's true. You get poetry in English classes. You get poetry in history classes. You get poetry in what we call "language arts" here. Kids are reading poetry in Latin classes. But I'm teaching composition; writing the poetry as a special focus. That's a little different. In middle school and high school, I do introduce model poems, and we talk about them, but the focus is on the tools those men and women are using.

You must be one of the only full-time poetry teachers.

I suspect there are a couple more, but I've only heard of one other at Milton Academy in Massachusetts. Without any official information and on the basis of rumor, I've heard that if you do poetry at Milton Academy, you can't do other specialties. You have to dedicate to it. Here, I'm competing. Kids are doing theater and poetry, puppetry and poetry, art and poetry. They are doing all these other things, and all the sports.

I always wanted to be a writer. I think I knew that from infancy. I have a very distinct memory of drawing squiggly lines on a piece of paper, folding it, putting it in an envelope, putting squiggly lines on the envelope, sealing it, and dropping it in the mailbox on the corner. I'm not sure to whom I was mailing it, but I was sending out work before I could write. That's a very clear memory. I remember doing this. So I think the answer is yes, I always wanted to be a writer. And I'm a very good writer, but I'm not a great writer. I have published work, but not a huge volume of it. I discovered that I loved teaching, and it became something that I really relished and cherished. I find the success of my students really rewarding. I've always been interested in the way people teach.

It was not something I ever thought of myself as doing. When I graduated college, I thought I was going to be a writer. I went to Europe, and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. When I was done writing, it wasn't so wonderful. It wasn't anything I was going to be able to sell. So I went to work in insurance. Because I was an English major and a philosophy minor, I found a job drafting language for group annuity contracts for the Equitable Life Assurance Society. They wanted someone to figure out how to say things so no one could select adversely. The actuaries would figure out what the odds were—what they were willing to insure—and then we would have to write it out in language. The legal department would see if that would fly with the state insurance department. I was the liaison between actuaries and lawyers. It was really stupid work. I discovered I would do a week's work in two days. So I started doing a week's work in two days, and then taking the other three days and reading. I was going to go to graduate school, so I was also studying. I would be sitting in my office reading, and the boss would come by and say, "You can't do that." I would say, "Why? I've done my work. It's on your desk." He told me I had to look busy, and I told him he had to pay me more money to look busy because it was hard work. I may be the only person who got fired from an insurance company.

Saint Ann's is a special place. There are no grades. It's the type of school that could support a full-time poetry teacher. Is that a fair assessment?

Totally. Stanley Bosworth, who founded Saint Ann's, adored poetry. He thought of it as a kind of bulwark of the civilization, one of the ways you transmit the culture. He was a very strong supporter of the arts, and he gave me carte blanche to go ahead and do this. Poetry is on the walls. It's everywhere in the buildings. Everyone reads the poetry.

Our goal really isn't to make everybody a poet—although Stanley once jokingly said he wanted to produce 20 percent of the American poets and he may have done it—but my goal is to create an environment where everybody is poetry literate. I taught poetry in college, but when I would introduce the poetry unit to my introductory English class, everybody would groan. Their response was, "I don't get poetry." We have kid's parents here who say, "I don't get poetry, but my kid does and I really appreciate that." That's what I'm about. I'm about creating an environment where you could write a poem if you wanted to, but you're too busy doing organic chemistry. That's fine.

I think that makes a lot of sense to expose kids to poetry.

Yes. And they write poems. I have a little pad on my door, and I find notes from kids. The other day a student left me a note that read, "Waves look like white horses." Some kid came by, dropped off a simile, and left. [Laughs]

There is a poem of the day on Saint Ann's website. I imagine that is your doing?

In the middle school and high school, all the poems are on the computer. I type the middle schoolers' poems and bring them in so we can read them. In the high school, they send me their poems, and it creates a packet that we discuss each week. There's this proliferation of poetry. I send them off to Mike Roam, who is the head of our computer sector. He set up a program where the computer loads them in and assigns them days. Each day, there is one poem of the day and three bonus poems, so there are technically four poems every day. On December 3rd, we will have reached 10,000 poems. We've only started putting them up in 2004, but I've been here since the '70s. There is a huge amount of poetry being produced.

How many student poems do you read every year?

Oh God, I wouldn't have any way to calculate that. Thousands, just thousands.

In a list of 25 things she wanted to do before she died, Caroline Hagood, a poet and writer living in New York, wrote "Build a shrine to Marty Skoble, the man who just knew that 5th graders could get poetry." That's a wonderful sentiment.

It's a lovely thing Caroline wrote. I ran across that, too.

How did you know that kids would get it?

Accidentally. One day I went to Fran Greenbaum's first grade class, and we did this little workshop. These kids could write these poems. It was a revelation. If first graders could do this, if kindergarteners could do this, then I could do it all the way through. I had been teaching about four or five years when Kenneth Koch's book about teaching children got published, and he was doing exactly what I was doing. It was such an overt confirmation.

It has to do with teaching. I was not a dancer. I was not really interested in dance, but I had a friend who was studying dance. One night he wanted to go to a dance performance of a group called Grand Union. This was in the '70s. It was in a storefront art gallery. Everybody stood around and these four women danced contact improvisation. Something just happened. One of these women just mesmerized me. It's hard for me to explain exactly what I felt, but my feeling was clear that this woman had something to teach me. It wasn't sexual. It wasn't desire, although she was very beautiful. Our eyes met and I knew that she had something to teach me. Steve knew her. I told him this, and he said, "Let's go meet her tomorrow." He trucked me off to her apartment. I was in over my head in this. I didn't know what was happening or what this was about but I went with it. We sat in Barbara Dilley's apartment, and I said, "I don't know, but I know that you have something to teach me." She said, "Okay. I'm going to be in Naropa this summer. Why don't you come on out?" So, I went to Naropa. I lived in her house.

And she was totally cool with that?

She was fantastic. Suddenly, I was in the midst of Douglas Dunn, Meredith Monk and these great dancers, watching Barbara's classes. I couldn't really take them; I didn't have any skill, any background, but I could hang out with them. I started photographing them. They started making a piece, and I started photographing them while they were dancing. I had to be on the dance floor to do it. I started walking around them while they were dancing and improvising. More and more of my movements became dance movements of a sort, inadvertently. When it became time for the performance near the end of the summer, they said I had to be onstage with the camera during the performance because I was part of the piece. So I became a dancer.

But what I was really there for was watching Barbara teach. I learned a huge amount from Barbara about improvisation and going with your instincts. A lot of what I do when I'm working with little kids is instinctive. When I approach a child to dictate a poem or to create poem, I know what to say. Or I don't know what to say, but I say something anyway and it's often unlocking the door. One of the things she taught me was that in dance there is no such thing as a misstep, there is only the next step. I took this stuff to heart. Between Gabe Howard and Barbara Dilley, I learned a lot about teaching. Although I was teaching before I met either one of them, I think I became a really good teacher — I'm afraid to say great teacher. Something happened during the course of those things that made me a much better teacher, a much more powerful teacher.

Did you do any of your own dancing?

When Naropa was over and when I came back to New York, I had become friends with some of the dancers in Barbara's group. We started working together to make a dance ourselves. I began to take myself a little more seriously as a dancer. We worked with contact improvisation. We worked up a vocabulary of movements and a set of texts, all of which were my poems. Everybody learned all the poems in the set, and everybody had a vocabulary of movement, the way we related to each other: rolling off each other, rolling into each other, moving each other around. At any point, anyone could start a poem. Anyone could follow with a line or go backward or forwards in the poem. It was all just part of the vocabulary.

We worked on it for two years until we could all think like each other. We knew exactly where the other was going to be and say. It felt completely integrated. And then we performed it at St. Clement's Church. We performed it at the Neill Gallery on Greene St. David Taylor and I also danced on the bar at the Ear Inn with all the beer mugs around. We started on opposite ends. We met in the middle, and we rolled around each other while we were reciting poems. That's one of my claims to fame: I danced on the bar of the Ear Inn.

Are you still dancing?

No. After we danced, David went to medical school, and Ann went off to do her own thing because it was really too constricting. I didn't have anybody else to dance with. I didn't feel like I could go anywhere else with it. And I was happy. I had done what I wanted to do with dance. It affected me. It changed my life.

And I dance all the time. I dance at home a lot. In fact, I got married a year ago October. We celebrated it in April, and we danced on the table.

That's great. It came full circle in a way.
Yes.

Okay, so who's next?
Bill Walsh. He's a chiropractor and a kinesthesiologist. He runs a place called the Plaza Center for the Healing Arts.

Previously: Author Robert Sullivan

Noah Davis is frequently lost.

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Here in Paris the wind is dragging
us through the nervousness of what
money means. Women’s clothing,
manic repositories of seasons,
Satan, expatriate Manhattan,
art!, a sculptural exile into which
The Great Bras fall. We’re coming
on & as cosmos; each phone call
gothic & frock-coated — it’s
becoming so the metaphors
are more on the mark than
we’d prefer. (A brief sub-poem
about American Ex-Boyfriends:
Can anything be done / To stop
them? / Were their apologies /
Not honestly the best in the
world? / Owen’s Oxford opens /
Like an alternate entrance. /
Sixty years from now / Even
our chests will be long gone.)
Threat of rain, see-through-shirt
Test Ban Treaty, hierarchy
of bangs since the one
in the books. Art means saying
“here we go!” a lot; money means
not carrying an umbrella
sometimes. These are the things
that will deliver us from zero.
Texture of midnight, day of
rest, pageant for the change
you wish to see in these
clothes. Paris: “I have
done something terrible” —
this weather is the last art
lesson we may ever need.
Evidence suggests beauty
looks guilty even from the moon.




Bridesmaids

Our proposals cling their
paradise to the sides of
themselves nearest Mars.
Pickup line, dive bar, the
emperor’s new, comma,
charm: “I love you like a
math solution to an
insurance problem.” We
get divorced every time.
Men are from accuracy;
women, precision — none
of those poems actually
turn out to be true.
Elliptical motion,
smattering of unfinished
children, 8-Ball-Shaking
Fellowship at the School
of Brass Rings: the newer
tenses tend to play by less
than phonological rules.
Sake-of-sleep anomaly;
drunken groped analytic:
If there’s a will there’s
a nostalgia for it. If one
must say “Marry me”
in one’s twenties
one must prepare
to hear “We’re born
not knowing language”
in return. Non-terminal
symbols, string
of dispossessed beers:
the hours that are the
answers between the
minutes & me. One must
have a stake in one’s
standards’ traits
beyond their perfection.
“I love you like a good
semantic tailspin.”
We speak now &
mostly hold our peace.




Sam Donsky is a graduate student living in Philadelphia. The poems come from his nearly finished first manuscript, Poems vs. The Volcano, a collection of 100 poems for 100 films.

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