Late dinner at a dark café blocks from Rittenhouse Square, iron pots of mussels and Belgian beer and a waiter eager to snag the check and clock out. Such are the summer pleasures of his work—winding down to a glass of red wine, catching the windowed reflection of a girl as she passes, counting the…
Kimber Lester, my student, while you cannot actually write a poem at least write a sentence to tell me why in the eighth stanza of this text the image of a bloody dagger hangs before me? The soufflé, my thought, has fallen. My own poem was lost on the plane from Finland. Under the hungry…
After the initial terror of laying out your clothes in front of everyone, it’s where to put the money, the clothes before water or the detergent first or in between the clothes. Your fingers find the quarters, slip them into slots, push and listen to the water, vaguely familiar, like your heart between the covers…
Once again, as we always do on weekdays now, after the nearly successful kitchen makeover soon-to-be-featured on a television station near you through all the lines and waves propagated by satellites and repeaters somewhere (I can’t tell you which station it will be on just yet—there are clauses in the contract that prohibit us…
contributors’ notes Winter 2005–06 ralph angel‘s Neither World received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. His third and most recent collection, Twice Removed, is available from Sarabande Books. A fourth collection, Exceptions and Melancholies, as well as his translation of Federico García Lorca’s Poema del Cante Jondo, are forthcoming from Sarabande…
Well, there’s the lack of vacuuming, carrot juice spills on the ivory couch, dust running along the floorboards like a pet, veiling the TV, sills, the furnishings of books, shoes without glue, the lack of comfortable seating or dining, the canopy I gave away, childhood desk sold, gold chair left in a spidery garage, rose…
Our father wanted to climb Mount Moriah and we refused to go unless it was understood we were going against our will— unless we could climb by suffering, dragging ourselves step by step through the boxwood glade, withheld birch, glinting ash, oak bent to the will of the south wind— that was our secret, denial,…
Meet the other man in black: David St. John, poet of the lush, the surreal, the erotic, and the exotic. His work is intellectual yet always sensual. His poetic voice is at once profound yet grounded in contemporary diction and idiom. St. John lives in Venice, California (even if his psychic self resides in that…
The dark and heavy coat she always wore hid From her as much as anyone What grew her belly out one thought at a time. And she who did not know her body, Who was surprised to feel it Created with some boy she’d barely met, Ignored the word so much a shock She was…
No products in the cart.