Joseph Mills

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From Love and Other Collisions

Francesco Marciuliano

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From I Could Chew on This

Mark Nepo

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From Reduced to Joy

Al Zolynas

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From The New Physics

B.J. Best

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From But Our Princess Is in Another Castle

Bill Knott

Hair Poem

Hair is heaven's water flowing eerily over us

Often a woman drifts off down her long hair and is lost.

From In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet's Portable Workshop

Richard Jackson

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From The Georgia Review, Fall 2013

Charlotte Adelsperger

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From Mid-America Poetry Review, Volume VI Number 2

Tony Hoagland

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From The Sun, November 2013

Stephen Dobyns

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From Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides

Karl Shapiro

The Fly

O hideous little bat, the size of snot,

With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes,

To populate the stinking cat you walk

The promontory of the dead man’s nose,

Climb with the fine leg of a Duncan-Phyfe

   The smoking mountains of my food

      And in a comic mood

   In mid-air take to bed a wife.

Riding and riding with your filth of hair

On gluey foot or wing, forever coy,

Hot from the compost and green sweet decay,

Sounding your buzzer like an urchin toy—

You dot all whiteness with diminutive stool,

   In the tight belly of the dead

      Burrow with hungry head

   And inlay maggots like a jewel.

At your approach the great horse stomps and paws

Bringing the hurricane of his heavy tail;

Shod in disease you dare to kiss my hand

Which sweeps against you like an angry flail;

Still you return, return, trusting your wing

   To draw you from the hunter’s reach

      That learns to kill to teach

   Disorder to the tinier thing.

My peace is your disaster. For your death

Children like spiders cup their pretty hands

And wives resort to chemistry of war.

In fens of sticky paper and quicksands

You glue yourself to death. Where you are stuck

   You struggle hideously and beg,

      You amputate your leg

   Imbedded in the amber muck.

But I, a man, must swat you with my hate,

Slap you across the air and crush your flight,

Must mangle with my shoe and smear your blood,

Expose your little guts pasty and white,

Knock your head sidewise like a drunkard’s hat,

   Pin your wings under like a crow’s,

      Tear off your flimsy clothes

   And beat you as one beats a rat.

Then like Gargantua I stride among

The corpses strewn like raisins in the dust,

The broken bodies of the narrow dead

That catch the throat with fingers of disgust.

I sweep. One gyrates like a top and falls

   And stunned, stone blind, and deaf

      Buzzes its frightful F

   And dies between three cannibals.

From The Poets Laureate Anthology

Sarah Pemberton Strong

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From The Sun, November 2013

Al Zolynas

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From The New Physics

B.J. Best

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From But Our Princess Is in Another Castle

Maxine Kumin

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From Where I Live

Richard Jackson

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From The Georgia Review, Fall 2013

Paige M. Blair

From The Coal City Review, # 30

Jeffrey Harrison

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From The Common, Issue No. 06

Billy Collins

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From In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet's Portable Workshop

Al Zolynas

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From In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet's Portable Workshop

David Ignatow

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From In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet's Portable Workshop

B.J. Best

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From But Our Princess Is in Another Castle

Stanley Kunitz

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From In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet's Portable Workshop

Jane Kenyon

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From In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet's Portable Workshop

Gregory Orr

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From In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet's Portable Workshop

Richard Jackson

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From The Georgia Review, Fall 2013

Ronald Koertge

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From In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet's Portable Workshop

Jeffrey Harrison

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From The Common, Issue No. 06