Here are my favorite poems from recent issues of Poetry magazine. The imagination of their writers never fails to amaze me. Always pushing on what they see, pushing on what they feel, pushing on meaning in the everyday or cornerstones of the era. And then to reduce all of the thoughts into a relative brevity– I often find myself as impressed with the editorial honesty as the philosophical.
“Ampersands.” Punctuation-inspired beauty.
… and we shared thick and hearty laughs, and continued into the very
dense jungle. And thick. Preceding us on the trailsides were ruins
overgrown, boots stuck in mud, and heads of sunken ampersands.
Which made sense to us, for….
“The Poem You’ve Been Waiting For.” Anxiety and peace.
I drove so long to find I forgot I had
been looking for them, for the you
I once knew and the you that was born
waiting for me to find you. I have been
twisting and turning across these lifetimes
“From ‘Anagrams’.” Too hard to explain, too hard to quote.
“Forget-Me-Not.” Rhymes you have to say aloud to believe.
From the get-go I have always sought
to know (what, what?) if this is all I’ve got,
to show up in a vestibule, all bothered and hot,
like silver-fingered Iscariot,
like the smiling highwayman, tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot,
while all about me are consigned to slather and rot.
“Darkness of the Subjunctive.” Grammatical beauty.
Then we would thrive inside the subjunctive,
where nothing happens but dreams of being,
as paradise dreams of its inferno,
the inferno of cotton candy.
“A one-ended boomerang.” What an image! What heartbreak.
How I can hear the sand slip downward in my body clock? I need to be here, could be there, and not long ago the only place you wanted me to be was by your side … maybe?
“My Darling Turns to Poetry at Night.” Lover known and unknown.
When rain inspires the night birds to create
Rhyme and formal verse, stanzas can be made
Between abstract expression and first light.
“Carousel.” How quiet night feels.
You were lured
in a luminous canoe
said to have once ruled
a lunar ocean.
“Painted Turtle.” Tough, sad and questioning.
Summer road the ring around the lake, we drove mostly in silence.
Why aren’t I your wife?
You swerved around a turtle sunning itself.
