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Bianca Burning

C.K. Williams

‘The sexual terror lions are roaring into my ears as I make my way between their cages’

Don’t Flinch

Adrienne Rich

‘Lichen-green lines of shingle pulsate and waver / when you lift your eyes. It’s the glare.’

A poem by Adrienne Rich.

In the Village

Derek Walcott

‘I came up out of the subway and there were / people standing on the steps as if they knew / something I didn’t.’

Coming Night

James Schuyler

‘what did you think of, / how long did you wait’

Midnight on Lake Michigan

Diego Báez

‘But really, your disappearance / has never been a question of whether.’

Two-Part Inventions

Anne Winters

‘The same way Bach’s motive splays out to the right, / swoons flatly, swans it, footnotes, follows up, / talks to itself, purls, mutters, dawdles, resumes. . .’

Trick

Sam Willetts

‘The unexceptional mystery takes place: / around eleven, love turns to matter’

Three Poems

Katha Pollitt

‘Nobody wanted to hear / about the rain or its father / or leviathan slicing the deeps / at the black edge of the world / under the cold blue light of the Pleiades.’

Seen

Fanny Howe

‘Every cupboard is old, / every glass and cup / wiped clean.’

Teenager

Wislawa Szymborska

‘I know much more — / but nothing for sure.’

Two Poems

Jack Gilbert

‘Loneliness is the mother’s milk of America. / The heart is a foreign country whose language none / of us is good at. ’

Cyan

Paul Farley

‘I’m holding out. / I’m blue in the face.’

The Woman in the Moon

Carol Ann Duffy

‘Darlings, I write to you from the moon’

Elegy

Sean O’Brien

‘It seems there's no such thing as history. / We must have dreamed the world you've vanished from.’