By Alice Oswald
It's a rush, a sploosh of sewage, twenty thousand cubic metres being pumped in, stirred and settled …
Explore Poems: Cities & Urban Life
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- By Jayne CortezWhy do people always choose saturdays
to wig out
I mean the ones who scream leave me alone
i hate your… - By Jayne Cortezi am new york city
here is my brain of hot sauce
my tobacco teeth my
mattress of bedbug tongue
legs… - By Andrew FrisardiThe city lies back in its winding-sheet
While little digits drum a steady beat
On roofs and terraces, … - By Li-Young LeeAnd when, in the city in which I love you,
even my most excellent song goes unanswered,
and I mount the… - By Milan DěžinskýTranslated By Nathan FieldsI had taken him to his mother
and was returning along the D8.
In the breakdown lane several cars, and … - By Karyna McGlynn& Memphis is out in Full Fang!
Skeletons skip down our pitted streets.
Whole families with matching hobo stipple
roam tragicomically through the sprawling
candy deserts: polka-dot bandanas
on sticks, flapping Chaplinesque shoes.
Unclaimed pumpkins pile high
behind razor wire. The air's thick
with caw & trouble. Our... - By Toi DerricotteWhen relatives came from out of town,
we would drive down to Blackbottom,
drive slowly down the congested… - By Jan Wagnerdort, wo die stadt versickert,
beim bahndamm, jenseits der in ihrer pracht
erstarrten, riesigen zikade
des umspannwerkes, siehst du sie: gebraucht,
getürmt, ein ganzes feld, gezackt
oder gewellt die maserung in jedem bauch
und dunkler als sämtliche rembrandts
zusammen: gummiakropolis,
heiligtum des banalen—im herbst berennt es
der sturm, erduldet... - By Jan WagnerTranslated By David Keplingerwhere the city starts to come undone,
at the railroad embankment, beyond the staunch
colossal cicada of the substation
in its splendor, you start to notice:
used up, towering, a field of them, worn
or rippled texture in each paunch
and smokier than all the rembrandts
put... - By Walela NehandaCrip (noun): slang for a disabled person/the whole of
the disabled community/
a school of thought
Example: “I’m on crip time”
Meaning: Time bends differently when the universe that is
my body dictates it
Crip (noun): a Black gang that originated in... - By Sally Wen MaoIn Santa Monica, the sunrise has this way of emptying
everything inside you. I visit my future deathbed.
It’s February 1961, and I watch myself sleep.
Dawn: outside my window, date palms sway and lovers
in blue Corvettes make their morning getaways.
There will never... - By Salima RiveraLate night sounds and smells entice
and we prowl like cats
thru Pilsen sidewalks and alleys.
The dank night breeze scatters paper
and other debris like malignant leaves
through mucky gutters.
Tiny shards of glass glitter
like cheap costume jewelry
under the harsh sodium street light
turning weedy vacant... - By Maurya SimonDelirium in the downtown mall today:
Burt Reynolds! All the henna-haired girls
sneer, while their mothers, enthralled, say,
“I saw you in this, I saw you in that–
you were marvelous, simply... - By Amy M. AlvarezNaturally, 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...
- 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... - By Tracy K. Smith200 cows more than 600 hilly acres
property would have been even larger
had J not sold 66 acres to DuPont for
waste from its Washington Works factory
where J was employed
... - By Frank Marshall DavisChicago is an overgrown woman
wearing her skyscrapers
like a necklace ...
Chicago’s blood is kaleidoscopic
Chicago’s heart has a hundred auricles
_____
From the Congo
to Chicago
is a long trek
—as the crow flies
Sing to me of a red warrior moon victorious in a Congo sky ... show me a... - By T. S. EliotI. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest monthApril is the cruellest month The Waste Land begins with a subversion of the first lines of the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer. He paints April... - By CAConradOver seven billion human beings live on Earth now. We have displaced or made extinct so many other species of animals, insects, and plants that we have actually lost track! In the age of Emily Dickinson less than a billion...