7.05 / May 2012

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Bradford.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Mom talks to us through a tape-recorder during the final summer before, which she believes, the world will end. I lie awake most mornings and wait for my sister to wake up so we can listen to it together.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Demeester.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] When we met, you whispered in my ear, your breath hot, wet, and heavy with whiskey, that you wanted to know the feeling of my skin under your fingernails.

Warning Silo [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Dop1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I’m from the future, not 20 years from now when I’m a general commanding the new continental army, overseeing the government’s time travel stuff-No, I’m from later tonight.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Inguanta.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] It’s End of the World Karaoke at Big Daddy’s and Lara takes a photo of herself for Facebook before she goes on stage. She’s holding a basket of nachos in one hand and her phone in the other.

Nation [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Kitterlin1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Walking down the street feels clogged with embarrassed millionaires. Holes in the shirts, holes in the soles in various silver plated denominations. Assured of arrivals, shipping magnate inventories, most favored nations. Melancholy picture settings set afloat in obsolete instruction manuals, sliced delicatessen.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Sharp.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Three brothers are blind men groping an elephant. The first says the elephant’s skin is their father’s ashy elbows. The second says the elephant has ingénue eyelashes, like their mother, while the third feels that the elephant’s substance lies in its heavy middle.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Yee.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] You’ve been one-legged since the lasso trap.  Your personal ad says “Kids: undecided” even though you desperately want two. When the maître d’ shows you to your blind date’s table, you are pleased with her prominent forehead and symmetric face.   She has potential.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Holderness.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Allen Wonkin was an emotional man, but he didn’t know how to express it.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Bellas.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Starter Smoked meats, nitrate free. Local cheeses: Peppered goat cheese from Colrain, Franklin County Camembert. Good bread. Pinot noir from southern France, Languedoc region, in 50-cent Goodwill glasses etched with wild geese.

We are a band of girls, and we run the sidewalks.  Like the boys who used to run the sidewalks across town, we use guns.  But unlike the boys, when we need to make an example of someone, we do so personally.  We’re skilled with knives and wire.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Walker.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] I knew you’d be angry when I climbed up the colossal statue of Paul Bunyan. We were on our honeymoon. I don’t know why I did it. We were driving up the narrow highway, and the morning was just coming.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Tripney.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] It feels as if they have been in here for hours. Outside, it’s hot, an aggressive midday heat, but the stone is cool, the respite welcome, even if these corridors, these shaded cloisters, seem to wind on endlessly. They pass by one murky shuttered chapel after another.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Smeltz.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Tonight I’m too stupid to write a poem. Who knows what poetry is. I know: My voice is too pronounced. My pronoun I is a needless gnome. I fall asleep in the spelling quiz and sink to the shipwrecks in fathoms below. On the Titanic mosses grow.

The Curse [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Richardson.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I pray this thorn pushes through me into you. I ask poison to press upon your palms and knees. I hope for your permanent brown. Let the universe feed you stones until your garden grows sick with weeds. The Cursed [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Richardson2.

Circle of Salt – October 28 [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Kochman1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] If you are my bright protector. If water can ever meet wood. If a coastal forest. If I lived there. If I made a trail of salt to follow. If it did not dead-end.

Joshua’s dead girlfriend has been sending him postcards. He puts them up on the wall above his bed, even though his mother asked him not to tape up posters because they would strip paint off the wall. Boyfriend, she wrote on the first one, I wish you were here. All my love, Alice.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Folk.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Laura was not released from Ray Leopold’s basement the next day, or the one after that. She and Andy staggered their sleeping schedules so they would have a few hours alone each day. While awake, Laura and Andy talked, argued, picked each other apart.

A woman crying full of pleasure through the wall Hands plastered on the plasterboard I know that sound She herself often leads me to the kitchen and then Props me up, groaning, while I kiss her neck.

DAY 30 Any routine is always the same but in between you could cut the space for my breastbone with a sword & fail to make contact with * When we walked together in the suburbs, in May, a single sparrow resonated in twenty-two different garages.

[A Letter Written to You While I Am Away] each year the river sinks lower and I have been nowhere new save for clinics and their board game rooms that rattle in my head like dice flashes of only men with overgrown beards they have forgotten their beards like dead farmer’s crops but I remember

Fort-Da [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_5/Bendorf1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I would fog up your glasses tonight if I still had lips, David said to me on New Years Eve. It was beside the point that he did have lips, beautiful ones: this was a third date and we were beginning to make a world.