Explore poetry
from White Butterflies of Night
Jaan Kaplinski
‘I don’t remember whether I believed that I could just / abandon one life to begin another’

The Common Cold
Laura Kasischke
‘But here we are again, you and I, the / two of us, tangled / up and biological.’

The Wife
David Katz
‘Ever notice the change that comes over / your gentle wife the minute she sets / foot in a grocery store?’

Two Poems
Amy Key
‘She is luscious / and plump like marshmallow; part edible baby, / part nosy neighbour.’
In the village of the mothers
Vénus Khoury-Ghata
‘The wells are kept for the use of the dead who splash the / walls with their silence.’
I had wondered about the signs of burning
John Kinsella
‘None of it made sense. The house shows / no signs – the old core of the house as it is now – / of fire, of giving up the ghost.’
The Burning of the Rocks
John Kinsella
‘What locked-away / state of unawareness, other life form, / brings desire to combust / out of rock exposed to flame’
Tether Tennis
John Kinsella
‘Tryptamine skies and the forehand backhand falter / in earth’s revolutions’
Neoterics and the Field
(out of Callimachus)
John Kinsella
‘This oven this earth as dust this water we watch vanish and ancient’
The Sun in a Box
Caleb Klaces
‘When I was younger I drafted a memory. / I drew a rectangle on a piece of card / and called it a computer.’
Two Poems
Jennifer L. Knox
‘The Tanners are like mushrooms: born with every molecule / they’ll ever need.’
Mouse Trails
Noelle Kocot
‘What I am equipped to do is different / Than what I have been called for.’

Two Poems
Noelle Kocot
‘the problematic / Ocean spreads itself out. We take it in stride, / And we do our best.’
The Politics of Feeling
Nick Laird
‘Everything already is fraying at the edges if not completely gone.’

Blueberries
James Lasdun
‘I’m talking to you old man. / Listen to me as you step inside this garden’

Never did amount to anything
Dorothea Lasky
‘Hi there, dear sister, I’m sad / But here to tell you / That you never did amount to anything’
The Price You See Reflects the Poor Quality of the Item and Your Lack of Desire for It
Melissa Lee-Houghton
‘I walk away from you / without glancing back, in case you see in me something I don’t.’

The Heart Compared to a Seed, c.1508 (after Leonardo da Vinci)
Sylvia Legris
‘noce, the heart—the nut that gestates the tree of veins.’

Three Poems
Sylvia Legris
‘By the dog the minced oaths, / the god-wounds, the solemnly / declared chronical maladies.’
Eliphaz
Raven Leilani
‘I sent messages in nine point font / arcing through the Internet, asking him / do you believe in our heavenly Father?’
Dilation
Ben Lerner
‘We need to harness the vaguely erotic disappointment that attends the realization you aren’t being followed.’
I’m more the drunken slut kind of feminist, or A Treatise on Political Philosophy at the Apex of American Empire
Megan Levad
‘Out of the Zeitgeist / and onto the party barge.’