Explore Poems: Mythology & Folklore

Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind,
child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you
do not break with…

See’st thou yon gray gleaming hall,
Where the deep elm-shadows fall?
Voices that have left the earth
  …

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until...

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her...

Midnight has come and the great Christ Church bellAnd many a lesser bell sound through the room;And …

Lēodum is mīnum swylce him mon lāc gife;
willað hȳ hine āþecgan gif hē on þrēat cymeð.
Ungelīc is ū…

God of Nations at Thy feet,
In the bonds of love we meet,
Hear our voices, we entreat,
God defend our free…

was, according to Virgil, always a fickle, unstable thing. Woman. Wyf. Merger of wife and man. To indicate: not-girl. Not-yet-claimed, not-yet weeping. And aren’t they often weeping? The mother, tearing her hair out, running toward the battle lines, filling heaven...

My delirium is a transformocean
Rocking me like the seven thousand waves
That brought Wangolo to Ziltik.

Cric . . .
Crack . . .
Tim Tim
Bwa sèch

It’s a tale of salty foam,
Of centuries-old laughter
Breaking out anew in wet reflections,

Of the coming and going of...

1.
If a house is haunted like a radio
is haunted         If a body is a radio
of blood         If a body of ghosts
hums like blood over a valley of
bone         If blood is a...

He and I sought together,
over the spattered table,
rhymes and flowers,
gifts for a name.

He said, among others,
I will bring
(and the phrase was just and good,
but not as good as mine,)
"the narcissus that loves the rain."

We strove for a name,
while the light of...

Over Skype, I try to document my mother’s
bald-shaved youth—she has a surplus in truths,
and science has proven what it had to prove:
every helicopter-screech I dreamed of was my mother’s first.
Rippling my dumb hand, I wake up in childhood’s crypt,
where prayer...

I know not what to do—
My mind is reft.
Is song's gift best?
Is love's gift loveliest?
I know not what to do,
Now sleep has pressed
Weight on your eyelids.

Shall I break your rest,
Devouring, eager?
Is love's gift best?—
Nay, song's the loveliest.
Yet, were you lost,
What...

Over and back,
the long waves crawl
and track the sand with foam;
night darkens and the sea
takes on that desperate tone
of dark that wives put on
when all their love is done.

Over and back,
the tangled thread falls slack,
over and up and on;
over and...

                                                            Hunger like her mama
                                                            Most strong in White gaze as in
                                                            a Cowbird’s flirtation
                                                            Sprouted in eyes to tongues
                                                            to bellies pregnant with stolen milk
                                                            to restless hands
                                                            These fingernails filled with Black body,

Some are transformed just once
And live their whole lives after in that shape.
Others have a facility
For changing themselves as they please.

I think there was a movie once
where Frankenstein fell in love with a vampire.
A small mummy at first interfered
but later provided the requisite necessary
clarifications. He can only
meet you at night. Her face
is scarred in a permanent expression
of doom, but her...

Days of rain. The drey outside my window would keel
and the wind would plunder. My heart was valent
with possibility: I could be anyone now, half woman,
half asterism. Fragmental as a new year. Patron saint
of the rutilant and cindering. I could...

Mama birthed me, Papa sold me in the land of weeping willows
Traces of sin trail miles across skin, I go by Never Forget
My body’s evidence of daddy’s pestilence spread across the land

His sin traces my skin, a path never forgotten
Nameless,...

i.
 
Dog. The time you take home, the time you take away from home.
The insistence, the instance worried at with your thick tongue.
 
Stink. Because of what you found on the ground and put in your gut.
Harry. As in beset, or beast....