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Four Poems

Peter Robinson

‘I swelter in the dusk / and chase the flies, abstractedly, / until I half forget them.’

Three Poems

Sophie Robinson

‘you can call my price by any name and she will come just the same’

Mars is a Stupid Planet

Matthew Rohrer

‘Even astronauts describe / our air as thick enough to slice / and spread on toast for breakfast.’

The Afterlife of Trees and Their Lovers

Sumana Roy

‘It is difficult to imagine a history of trees / without man in it. Man as tree, Tree as tale.’

Three poems

Mary Ruefle

‘One of the loveliest possibilities / is that the truth is made of glass’

Beyond Sunset

Mary Ruefle

‘Red sadness never appears sad . . . it appears in flashes of passion, anger, fear, inspiration and courage, in dark unsellable visions; it is an upside down penny concealed beneath a tea cosy.’

Observations on the Ground

Mary Ruefle

‘Those flowers belong to the dead.’

Origin Myth

Mary Ruefle

‘Life continually circled in cold inaccessible serenity around unhappy Earth’

The Reckoning

Armand Garnet Ruffo

‘the earth will heal / eventually / magnificently / when our species / is gone’

Wallace Stevens’s Memory

Armand Garnet Ruffo

‘It was / a line that signaled absolute forgetting / and it made me want to weep into my drink’

Crusoe

Salman Rushdie

‘Let me tell you, boyo, bach: I love this place, where green hills shelter me from fear.’

6 March 1989

Salman Rushdie

‘Damn, brother. You saw what they did to my face? / Poked out my eyes. Knocked teeth out of place’.

Nature Study: Spots

Kay Ryan

‘Reminding us / again that live things / can be flat.’

A Description of the Architectural Impact of My Home, Age 7

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

‘my apartment is neither over / nor under the sidewalk, / but both at once’