Explore Poems: Realistic & Complicated

I still feel the same
As the day that I first met you
Though softened by all of this time

I still think…

When Sarah Vaughan pipes from the great American songbook,
I forget time is dragging my body from one…

i

The last time I lost you, I had turned
To salt. The hospice nurses all assured
An easier passing…

I think, no matter where you stray,
That I shall go with you a way.
Though you may wander sweeter lands…

What if you come
Again and swell
The throat of some
Mute bird;
How shall I tell?
How shall I know.
That it is so,
Having heard?

A man by the name of Skinner becomes famous
for keeping caged
        pigeons, whom his clock feeds or starves
        at random. Their tiny twitching heads exaggerate until...

I know it won't be received
Or sent. The page will be
In shreds as soon as I have scribbled it.
Later. …

It’s 9/11 the first time you stay.
In the morning you bring Taliban poems back to bed.
I drink cardamom…

and it ends, of course, in fabulous heartbreak, like anything—
it’s not an if, but when—so the trick …

My teacher says of their cat, now gone
missing. In his absence, everything is still.

The small, silvered…

Is this the last time I’ll admire the guys
in their neon-yellow slickers, guiding us
to our parking spots…

Do I hear you, flitting dream, shaking your feathers?

I am sitting perfectly still, preventing the …

I wanna be bitchy
I said I wanna be a bitch
cause when you nice
true love don’t come
into your life

You get…

Sometimes, I think you get the worst
of me. The much-loved loose forest-green
sweatpants, the long bra…

When you looked up and said, “Thank you,” I saw
your gratitude rise over us like rain.
It seemed external…

1. You crush me with your damning glimpses, Anna. You,so rancorous, so wounding, and so cruelly bred…

Some folks will tell you the blues is a woman,
Some type of supernatural creature.
My mother would tell…

How horrible it is, how horrible
that Cronenberg film where Goldblum’s trapped

with a fly inside his Material
Transformer: bits of the man emerging

gooey, many-eyed; bits of the fly
worrying that his agent’s screwed him—

I almost flinch to see the body later
that’s left its...

1.

He had a caribou's face. Once he let me 
lick the sadness there. It tasted of salt

and moss-covered rocks. He grew the beard
of a mountain goat. He scaled the face

of a mountain. Lying beside him, I stared
into the face of faceless...

We lived in a stone farmhouse at the edge of town.
I’d been assigned to process asylum claims
and you’d come to write about the abandoned homes
in the island’s interior the government was selling cheap.
A family of barn swallows lived inside our...