The Girl I Reached For In Unfinished Walls

Here’s a poem by David Mason, from his collection Arrivals:

“The Lost House”

A neighbor girl went with me near the creek,
entered the new house they were building there
with studs half-covered. Alone in summer dark,
we sat together on the plywood floor.

Especially Through The Long Heron-Glide To Touchdown And The Yelp Of Huge Tires

Have you ever caught a glimpse of poetic clarity only to have it fade into the ordinary everydayness that conspires to drag us all down? As Walker Percy was always quick to remind us, sometimes a typical afternoon can be one of the hardest things we’ll ever struggle to overcome. From his collection, Making Love to Roget’s Wife, here’s “Flirting with Poetry” by Ron Koertge.

We Are Made Of Newspaper And Smoke And We Dunk Your Roses In Vats Of Blue

Here’s a poem written from the perspective of someone who lives in the city. The city poet shouts derisively toward the country poet, almost demanding his “hostaged” country brethren to respect and perhaps even envy city life. From Nobody’s Hell, here’s Douglas Goetsch with “Smell and Envy”.

So Many Children Born, Filled With Painkillers And Meat

From his new collection The Reinvention of the Human Hand comes “I Am Happy to Live in an Age of Plenty” by Canadian poet Paul Vermeersch:

There are more non-prescription painkillers now
than when most of us had jobs that were strenuous
or fatal. Our muscles tightened and frayed like ropes
that hoist pianos; our knuckles swelled and throbbed in time
with the weather, all against the acetaminophen tide.

Acres Of Crepe Wings Stiff In A Low Breeze, Antennae Against Her Shins

Guernica has a new poem from Sarah Lindsay that follows a woman who visits Angangueo, Mexico during the monarch butterfly migration:

She was in Mexico for some paper chain of reasons,
same way she landed anywhere in her days of plenty—
so many languages to pick up, countries to travel through,

The Flash Illumines The Man’s Flushed Face, His Single-Minded Lust

Here’s a poem from the vanishing world of found objects left in books, where a stray photograph from a possibly regretful night can still give pause to one reader and create a conversation with the next. From his collection, The Blessing: New and Selected Poems, here’s ”And the Word” by Richard Jones:

A Radish Rises In The Waiting Sky

The early fruits of the summer harvest are starting to appear in parts of the U.S. — tomatoes from Florida are making their way up the coast and little potatoes and assorted greens are filling tables at farmers’ markets everywhere. Even radishes, Karla Kuskin’s inspiration for the following poem, have recently made their debut.

There Are Things I’ve Said And Done That Still Belong To Me

Narrative’s poem of the week is “The Internet” by Laura Kasischke from her collection Gardening in the Dark. Rich in imagery, Kasischke writes as a woman tries to reconcile her past and the death of a loved one in a sea of information.

Probability, Like Time, Is Its Own Dimension

From this week’s New Yorker comes “Pimp My Ride” — a new poem by Jennifer L. Knox that plays with time, possibilities, and all the ways our cars connect with our lives:

The ’86 Chevy Suburban laced by rust,
pocked with bird poop, antenna wiggling
in its Bondo-clogged hole is only one way
the story begins. In another, we never

As If You Were Still Writing In That Midnight Room

From The Walrus comes Evelyn Lau’s poem to John Updike a little more than a year after his death, just to let him know that he’s not missed much yet in terms of futuristic innovation, but we do miss him all the same.