Give Up the Light

The Paris Review

Article

Two Poems by Mary Szybist

Sep 15, 2019

Like an alarm I can’t shut off, the summer.Like air raid sirens stuck onthe world is burning, the world is burning& I can’t stop it. Can’t stop ash from the reddening sky falling dry onto grass, onto cloverlit purple at their tips. Mouth level.My che

New Philosopher

Article

Love Letters

Mar 7, 2022

MY BELOVED ANGEL, I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them. I can no longer think of nothing but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you.

The American Poetry Review

Article

In Which the World Is Not that Bad

Jul 1, 2024

let me live with no intention; i triumph at the mile-long hair in my shower; even in thunderstorms, more air is dry than not; there is no will that makes water cling to me the way you cling, but there is always the thought of water; i am telling you

The Paris Review

Article

Joanna Klink

Mar 3, 2020

Far into fever, attached by cords to the soft-clicking machines, he sleepsin a bed in a room not his own.People enter and pass like ghost-blownfogs. He is a slow walkwith limbs that recently gave way.He is part of the blue snowfall.He is very small,

The American Poetry Review

Article

The Epic Of Gilgamesh

Jan 1, 2020

My friends, who can reach heaven? The monster bellows like a river swollen with flood.Many are consumed in his fiery breath. My friends, who can reach heaven? Let us ask the mountain for a sign.Let us cut the spirits from the cedars. My friends, who

The Marshall Project

Article

On Death Row, There's No Such Thing As Closure

Aug 2, 2019

It is August of the year 2000, and I am cold. I know the sun is shining outside, but there are no windows in the courtroom. The lighting is subdued, darker in the back where spectators sit and lighter in the front where tragedies play out—like a the

The American Poetry Review

Article

Three Poems

Sep 1, 2019

before I was one I heard every soundas a sound that had never been heard,before I was one I saw every lightas a light separate from dark, colorhidden in a place I had not been.Before I was one I used feet to wakenin water, to pedal through air,hands

Choice Magazine

Article

Your Poetry

Apr 29, 2022

Email your poems to: ([email protected]) or post to Your Poetry, Choice, 4 Milnyard Square, Orton Southgate, Peterborough PE2 6GX I see you all, sitting there in rows.Singing hymns, as your tears do flow. But please don’t cry, not for me.For

Chat It's Fate

Article

Explore The Past

Feb 16, 2021

Rod Stewart and Elton John – why did they really fall out so badly in 2018? Because they were once infamous American political rivals Alexander Hamilton (Rod Stewart) and Aaron Burr (Elton John). If you’ve seen the hit hip-hop musical Hamilton, you’l

The American Poetry Review

Article

Five Poems

Nov 1, 2020

The American linden sways nonplussed by the storm,a bounce here, a shimmy there, just shaking like musicleft over from the night’s end wafting into the avenues before sleep.I remember once walking down Clinton Street, and singingthat line returning,

Psychologies

Article

Farewell, My Friend

Mar 24, 2020

Sitting on the floor, I am holding Oscar, my little black spaniel, and he is licking away my tears… Over the years, I’ve become an expert at avoiding my negative feelings – distracting myself with box sets, getting too involved in other people’s dram

The American Poetry Review

Article

Seven Poems

Sep 1, 2021

The dancersIn a terribly brightLight blue gauzeRetained the mystery Skating on a lakeBlue and iceAn illusionary timeWhere poetry feels inevitable The terrific clownWho lies insideEvery blue dressDoes he see me Always a starAlways a rootHorrible auras

High Country News

Article

from Underworlds: An Elegy

Jul 1, 2024

Jay Hopler, 1970-2022 What I didn’t know when you chose to die At home is that your dying would become My compass line, my all of life, that I Would be the only midnight one to whom You’d cry from your body’s commotion and The one who’d haul your baf

The Paris Review

Article

Sigrid Nunez

Sep 15, 2017

During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, they had witnessed the atrocities for which the Khme

The American Poetry Review

Article

Four Poems

Jan 1, 2022

followed—in front, as horses—into daisy& silver dancing, knowing the jaw who unkeysin the danced earth to drink me down to haints,& will go again. was willed. distrusted happiness, addicted to it.a god needs of a god. here, i don’t want to reachfor g

The American Poetry Review

Article

Two Poems

Sep 1, 2023

This poem is for everyperson who will neverread it either by choiceor circumstance I writeit in silence wherethe most realparts of our liveslive like a shoe lostin an alley or an emptyboat in a black sea butmore like the fallenleaf on the other sideo

The American Poetry Review

Article

Five Poems

May 1, 2023

Let’s be GodFor a moment, Shall we?That which invites Composition,That which is suspended From a great height,The presence Of approximationHeavy in the meadows, I’m not afraid,And yet My shroud vanishesIn these lines, I am so weptPast weeping, And wh

Lion's Roar

Article

Lonely Hearts

Sep 24, 2019

In accepting loneliness, says NATALIE GOLDBERG, we learn to reach out—not from fear and the desire to escape, but from an honest ache to connect. LONELINESS HAS FOLLOWED ME all my life. Down long public school corridors lined with lockers, I heard it

Orion Magazine

Article

Fortuitous

Sep 2, 2022

Stop telling me it’s nothing, thisthat has fallen from a tree, a sheddingof old skin. Just stop the wornsaw of your life’s own emptiness.Each morning you wake and breathe,what a miracle, your lungs and heart workingall night long. The blood pulses in

The American Poetry Review

Article

Two Poems

Jul 1, 2020

marked sleep for sleep and the drugs marked joy to trudge through grief and the yellow drugs to crack my Vaseline smile, ooze trickling the length of my spine, the hair on my arms electrically charged. The stop-my-legs-from-fidgeting drugs for blood-

The American Scholar

Article

Five Poems

Mar 4, 2019

for William Gifford, 1928–2015 The river. Always the same, never the same.Poughkeepsie. A place north of where I am.To remember you is to remember Poughkeepsie.To remember Poughkeepsie is to remember the river.I am downriver now & you are a memoryI

The American Poetry Review

Article

Collins Ferry Landing

Jul 1, 2020

for my father Only rivers bottom out like this.Only rivers bottom out with this kind of conviction.Not humans, or, at least, not humans asindisputably human as you were,trapped in consciousness’s surplus, exilic,animalized absurdity, writhing in its