Category

Summer

Showing 1-20 of 255 results
  • Poem
    By Amy M. Alvarez
    Naturally, broken glass, throbbing bass, a roll of bills and a paper bag passed between the hands of hustlers. Just as true: the rows of corn planted by the family at the end of the street. Even in this leaded...
  • Poem
    By Reginald Dwayne Betts
    [An Outline for a Film]

    A woman leans against a man who leans
    against a brick wall watching cars stop like dead men
    on this one-way street. Some dude glares
    like O-Dog from Menace, his face towards some street
    we'll never remember where a man...
  • Poem
    By Alvin Feinman
    This this will it always be, and why
    To ever argue for: here walking
    In its life, or sprawled, or loitering
    Down shallow valleys of the lawn:
    The trees that are there
    The pigeon bobbing through
    Its fallowgray ellipse of ground—
    The comfort of this ground
    Is physical:...
  • Poem
    By Rachel Tzvia Back
    1
    The cyclamens have a hard time
    breathing in July.

    The sun ravages them and earth
    is too dry.

    Still, try remembering March light
    and the tight

    deep-buried bulbs that somehow
    do not die.


    2
    The children are scattered
    like weeds.

    The children are scattered dust-colored
    dirt-covered

    like weeds. Mid-summer grey reigns,
    and rain

    exists not...
  • Poem
    By Rachel Tzvia Back
    In the capital the women are fasting.
    50 days for the 50 day war

    in a white tent on burning pavement
    outside the prime minister’s residence.

    Mid-afternoon heat seals them in
    its unforgiving. Crouching beside them

    all the while, the broad-backed presence
    of absent sons, until they...
  • Poem
    By Rachel Tzvia Back
    In the south we are busy now
    slaughtering each other, there's no time
    for flowers––

    Slowly summer will
    scalding pass, autumn will
    arrive unnoticed.

    If only rain would come to
    send us all indoors––
    There to stand

    at ruined thresholds and
    watch the yellow sky
    weep and weep

    for all our dead.
  • Poem
    By Linda Rodriguez
    that I smile too widely,
    grinning really, and laugh
    too loud and often; that I walk
    with spring and sensual sway;
    that I stretch myself and twist
    like a cat
    baking in the backyard
    brightness; that my brain is sun-bleached,
    all rule and thought boiled away, leaving
    only sensory...
  • Poem
    By Nikki Giovanni
    I always like summer
    best
    you can eat fresh corn
    from daddy's garden
    and okra
    and greens
    and cabbage
    and lots of
    barbecue
    and buttermilk
    and homemade ice-cream
    at the church picnic

    and listen to
    gospel music
    outside
    at the church
    homecoming
    and you go to the mountains with
    your grandmother
    and go barefooted
    and be warm
    all the time
    not only...
  • Poem
    By Kwoya Fagin Maples
    My brother still bites his nails to the quick,
    but lately he’s been allowing them to grow.
    So much hurt is forgotten with the horizon
    as backdrop. It comes down to simple math.

    The beach belongs to none of us, regardless
    of color, or money....
  • Poem
    By Ed Roberson
                                                                    strophe
    Faraway trains     distant planes
    the din permeating streets...
  • Poem
    By Annie Finch
    Our voices press
    from us
    and twine
    around the year's
    fermenting wine


    Yellow fall roars
    Over the ground.
    Loud, in the leafy sun that pours
    Liquid through doors,
    Yellow, the leaves twist down


    as the winding
    of the vine
    pulls our curling
    voices—


    Glowing in wind and change,
    The orange leaf tells

    How one more season...
  • Poem
    By E. E. Cummings
    what if a much of a which of a wind
    gives truth to the summer's lie;
    bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
    and yanks immortal stars awry?
    Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
    (blow friend to fiend:blow space to time)
    —when skies are hanged...
  • Poem
    By Joseph Massey
    Sober for once, for what—
    for the words to budge. 

    We spent summer propped up
    by each other's stuttering.

    There are seasons here
    if you squint. And there's

    relief in the landscape's
    sloughed off cusps of color

    fallen over the familiar 
    landmarks, the familiar

    trash—things that last. 
  • Poem
    By Jose Hernandez Diaz
         A mango fell from a tree into a jaguar’s paws. It was late summer. The 
jaguar devoured the fruit and ran into the ocean. The ocean was turquoise like the August sky. The jaguar swam underwater for a...
  • Poem
    By Jose Hernandez Diaz
        A jaguar sat in a tree. It was midsummer. The sun was shining fiercely. The jaguar was a golden color with plenty of brown spots. Then the ghost of Emiliano Zapata walked by. He was in full uniform,...
  • Poem
    By Robert Wrigley
    More oblique the eagle’s angle
    than the osprey’s precipitous fall,
    but rose up both and under them dangled
    a trout, the point of it all.

    Festooned, a limb on each one’s
    favored tree either side of the river,
    with chains of bone and lace of skin
    the...
  • Poem
    By Kit Fan
    It was summer in Hokkaido.
               The forest stole the wind
               and I swallowed my footsteps.
               Nobody came to the springs.
               Butt naked I sat...
  • Poem
    By Sy Hoahwah
         In the month of cleaning family plots, I learned football among graves. All summer, fangs were plentiful. I fed only on fruit and acorns next to a nest built in a discarded doll marking the 50-yard line.
       ...
  • Poem
    By Alyse Knorr
    Between us bobs the baby, solemn in her infant wet suit.
    The pool is the only place where
                  screaming does not indicate terror.

    The neighbor’s pansy beds—O to lie down in those beds
    and doze. Greener than grass, says Sappho,
                  originator of envy.

    My...
  • Poem
    By Robert Francis
    What I remember is the ebb and flow of sound
    That summer morning as the mower came and went
    And came again, crescendo and diminuendo,
    And always when the sound was loudest how it ceased
    A moment while he backed the horses for the...
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