By Shane McCrae
The joke you hear today you’ll hear
Again next year again each ev-
ery birthday after for the first…
Again next year again each ev-
ery birthday after for the first…
Explore Poems: Midlife
Showing 1-20 of 159 poems
- By Brenda HillmanHaving stopped using dolphins to locate explosives in the Cold War
they had 30 leftover dolphins.
An officer… - By Ada LimónI pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later I yell, Mourning dove afterparty! (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground the afterparty.) I am getting so good at watching that...
- By Richard SikenDriving, dogs barking, how you get used to it, how you make
the new streets… - By R. Erica Doyleletting the words fly like smoke uncurling from our mouths
we lie in bed with dykes ten years our junior, make
pot heaps to share, sleep in the same flannel sheets,
plot colored artist collaborations underground and not top 40,
draw the constellations from... - By Corey ZellerWe spend the evening listening to folk songs from the early 2000s. Make a stew. Cut carrots the color of Halloween or your brother’s nail polish. Rib eye and onions. Oyster mushrooms dug out of the earth by some guy...
- By John TickhillIn a sesone of somere þat souerayne ys of alle,
Þat was þe myry monþ of May when many myrthys spryng,
Þe sonne ys somnore and syre and sendyth tyl vs doun,
And byddyth vs bisy for to be oure bodys for to glade;
Man for to myrth hym in al maner wys,
Bestys for to buske ham on bentys tyl abyde, - By Beth Ann Fennellyreveals itself in retrospect. Unlike the first,
whose March arrival bade you gasp, hands clasped,
like a child actor instructed to show joy, when the last
departs for points south, there’s no telling,
and no tell. Well, so what? You know their cycle.
In August,... - By A. Van JordanLately, my friends ask me, out of love,
have I written about my mother,
who suffers under the storm of Alzheimer’s disease,
and I tell them, “I don’t write about my family,
never directly, at least.” To write this poem seems so
out of character... - By Anni LiuHe takes me, his adult child swaddled in foreignness, to the southern provinces.
Opaque scenes unfold, here among people with whom I once belonged.
We walk streets lined with vendors and dappled plane trees.
Everything I reach for, he buys.
I record each parting hour... - By W. S. Di PieroThe city budget squads have trimmed its hours.
“You can’t get in, just go home why don’t you.”
I couldn’t tell how old she was.
Chalky braids crisscrossed her head;
the trenchcoat bunched around her waist
like paper flowers, her bare legs
streaked pink.
She held a... - By Anne SextonI was thinking of a son.
The womb is not a clock
nor a bell tolling,
but in the eleventh month of its life
I feel the November
of the body as well as of the calendar.
In two days it will be my birthday
and as... - By John ClareAnd what is Life?—An hour-glass on the run,
A Mist retreating from the morning sun,
A busy, bustling, still repeated dream;
Its length?—A minute's pause, a moment's thought;
And happiness?—A bubble on the stream,
That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought.
What... - By Christian WimanAll my friends are finding new beliefs.
This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees.
In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew
God whomps on like a genetic generator.
Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon.
Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with... - By Kathleen OssipTo have arrived here, weighed down with fistfuls
of calendar entries, unsuitably
boggle-eyed as if new—
so these are mountains,
there is horror, which is the subway line
where I may lay down my creed
and when will my breath stop
acidulating like this?
Exceed, said 27. In... - By Kit FanIt was summer in Hokkaido.
The forest stole the wind
and I swallowed my footsteps.
Nobody came to the springs.
Butt naked I sat... - By Matvei YankelevichAs winter went on, every morning’s spoon of buckwheat honey
resembled more the taste of that isosceles at midpoint
of your weight, its smell brought sweetly back the pendulum-like pace
moving us from windowsill to floor, from floor to bed, and back
to floor,... - By Sally Van DorenI have scrawled audible lifelines along the edges
of the lint trap, dropping the ball of towel fuzz
in the blue bin lined with a thirteen-gallon bag.
My sons' wardrobes lounge on their bedroom floors,
then sidle down to the basement, where I look
forward... - By Mona Van DuynPoised upside down on its duncecap,
a shrunken purple head,
True Blueberry,
enters its tightening frame of orange lip,
and the cream of a child’s cheek is daubed with
Zanzibar Cocoa, while
Here at the Martha Washington
Ice Cream Store
we outdo the Symbolistes.
a fine... - By Stephen DobynsNihilism, but not in a negative
sense—such was his thought,
what else to call it? Like snow
inside a novelty snow globe,
vague possibility descended
from probability, descended
from likelihood and certainty.
Now not even air. Those great
words discussed in college—
truth, beauty, justice, which
had come to embarrass...