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Two Poems

John Balaban

‘Her mother planted a garden in Manhattan. / In that garden is a tree. Some look on it and feel restored. / Others, when the wind lifts its leaves, want to scream.’

Opening Invocation

Jean-Paul de Dadelsen

‘Or otherwise, leaving the shore of the intermediate sea, / has it been a while since they’ve gone ahead / into the interior of lands of the spirit?’

Self-Portrait as Amnesiac

John Burnside

‘Shoeboxes lined with eggs and empty / pomegranates drying in a bowl, / mousebones and wicker, chess pieces, muddled coats.’

The Mountain

Christopher DeWeese

‘When the oxygen thins, / the world gets less reciprocal.’

What the Doctor Said

Raymond Carver

‘He said are you a religious man do you kneel down / in forest groves and let yourself ask for help.’

A Numbered Graph That Shows How Each Part of the Body Would Fit Into A Chair

Mary Jo Bang

‘It’s a simple truth that one can occupy two / places at one time while sitting in a chair—the same way a / poseable doll can be divided from her dress.’

The Day Etta Died

John Burnside

‘I was marking a stack of essays / on Frank O’Hara / and each had a Wiki- / paragraph to say / who Genet was.’

Picnic

Emily Berry

‘Watching the sea is like watching something in pieces continually striving to be whole / Imagine trying to pick up a piece of the sea and show it to a person / I tried to do that.’

On Jupiter Place

Nicholas Christopher

‘I didn’t know who she was anymore / maybe I never did or could –’

The Lady and the Skull

Angela Carter

‘I believed I had defined the problem. / With which the picked skull had presented me.’

Solitude

Huang Canran

‘Two friends, who hadn’t met in a year / sat chatting in a house.’

The More We Think About It

Michael Earl Craig

‘Yeah, something has slapped us. / We have definitely seen something.’

Coronation

Gillian Allnutt

‘We waited quietly for the Queen who wasn’t there’

Two Poems

Niall Campbell

‘And so, last night, so cold, I listened to / the floorboards warp in the unwelcome heat.’