Pantoum by Charles Mingus
“Music, look at your history. Man / sounds sharp to me. Sounds like / someone has been escaping reality / on his hands and knees.”
Poetry
We are so grateful to all of our partner-poets for sharing their work with us—please enjoy their beautiful words in our Featured Poetry catalogue.
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“I grind my teeth. / I bite my nails. / As of this morning / I’ve accrued / thirteen hundred / american weeks.”
An Excommunicated Nun Gave Me The Sand Dollar She Kept With Her Worry Dolls
“These chambers are filled with salt / stalactites—all yours. I would give this back / to you on your tongue. If that / would heal you.”
LOVE, COMMITMENT, ETC.
By Sam Zafris
“Someday, the horn of the train / will cease. Our bodies, / like bodies, will drown / in a great rain.”
Poetry We Admire: Labor
By Kim Harvey
In the vein of Levine celebrating his blue-collar roots, for September we rounded up some terrific new poems honoring workers — bringing attention to labor of all kinds, including often forgotten or unsung labor done with little or no pay – like mothers, cider-pressers, trench-diggers, coal miners, Taco Bell drive-through workers, and poets.
Paco & Mary
“He’s not Catholic. / God, / No. / But since he’s been inside, he’s found / His / Divinity.”
In a Puddle I Saw
“Once, I was hipless. Boyhood / swung out in front of me glazed / with permission to do & not be stopped.”
Trust Like the Color in the Special Collections Room
“(how much sense it made, how unending then) / the always unencumbered light”
In/Continent
“I used to be an unlit match, ready / to burn for any man, ready / for any hand to reach inside / and get my body back / to holy”