Poem of The Day
By Maggie Smith
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every…
Poem of The Day
By Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands…
Poem of The Day
By Jayne Cortez
Why do people always choose saturdays
to wig out
I mean the ones who scream leave me alone
i hate your guts
why do they always choose 2:05 pm saturdays
to say get the hell outa here
I mean the ones kicking walls
slamming doors
crushing skulls
why do they always have to choose saturdays for
me to lift my window and yell
shut the fuck up…

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Glossary Terms
A figurative compound word that takes the place of an ordinary noun. Many kennings rely on myths or legends to make meaning and are found in Old Germanic, Norse, and English poetry, including The Seafarer, in which the ocean is called a “whale-path.” (See Ezra Pound’s translation). “The Oven Bird” by Robert Frost also includes examples such as “mid-wood” and “petal-fall.” The speaker in Frank Bidart’s poem, “The Third Hour of the Night,” mentions a creature referred to as the “wound-dresser.”  See…

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From the Poetry Magazine Archive

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    Without the sun filtered through closed eyelids,
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    without Grandpa’s ginger-colored hair,
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    firecrackers, a monkey’s ass, a cherry, Rei’s lost elephant,
    without communist or past tense,

    or a character seeing her own chopped-off feet dancing...
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    it’s the being alone, i think, the emails but not voices. dominicans be funny, the way we love to touch — every greeting a cheek kiss, a shoulder clap, a loud.

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    By way of my mother, the deacon with the slick gray hair and money
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