Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer via advice@the-toast.net, with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line. Dear Spinster, I had hoped that university would be my golden ticket to a golden world far away from the endless kitchen sink drama of my home-life. So really I was always bound for disappointment. Rather than dancing my way through a golden haze of new friends and old books, I…

(Incorporating words and phrases from Moby Dick)

here is a rifled heart, half-unhinged,
by the visible absence of the whale;
bare words and facts cannot sustain
his vision of that beast, twice risen

Let me tell you about New York City. The sidewalks are sort of like highways. The people are sort of like cars. We all say vroom as we walk. We say it out loud instead of having conversations or thinking. Vroom, we say, vroom. We are busy people. Let me tell you about New York City. No one goes to Time Square. No one. Ugh. Time Square is empty, silent. Vines grow from the walls.

Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer via advice@the-toast.net, with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line. Dear Spinster, Every day this summer I have gotten up to read the news with a sense of powerless dread. Bombs in Gaza, the lack of regard toward Ferguson and all the other communities where people of colour are executed by American cops, more missing Aboriginal women in Canada, tanks on…

They told me she did not exist, at first,
that stained glass loves to trick the eye.
The worst thing about the windows is that God rarely 
passes by; the church does not illuminate
with light. Instead, we're tricked into thinking
that this bright-leggèd woman has a tail.

In this theory
I come slowly
to Venus.

From a Fischer-Price shapes sorter, I pull chiffon scarves I’ve stuffed into the square hole. The sheer red: color of an opened heart on the table, color of a vase of roses—a color he cannot name. Red I say, rounding my arm up & letting go at the height of it, to watch him fixed on the way the lines of the fabric float down around the edges of some invisible shape. It pools there…

Saint Flannery hear my plea May your ears listen to my supplication My sentences won’t do my will They sprawl like unruly vegetables                      Weed and fertilize. Prune and watch for caterpillars. The workshop rise up against me. They laugh at my moral endings.                      The soul to achieve grace              …

FIRST YEARS FOUND POEM The author notes that these are student answers to exam questions on Zadie Smith's On Beauty, and Camus' The Plague.   During a phone call to the house of his enemy, He speaks to the son of his enemy, Even though he is fully conscious of its futility.   He is a 57 year old white American, He is a fanatic poetry lover, He is a school dropout who actively thinks he is…

Dylan and Katherine are a brother and sister who discovered they had independently written different poems on the same topic. After The Men Are Dead Katherine Seitel After the men are dead the women find comfort in one another. Margaret’s went first. He had a bad heart and died young, just 40-years-old. He built, lovingly, a doghouse in the backyard and left four child sized noses, sniffling, and two adult female hands, wringing in grief…

But you’re always saying Charaxus is coming

With a full ship. That much, I think, only Zeus

knows, him and all of the gods.

It isn’t right for you to think you know these things.

But send me as a messenger,

to offer many prayers to Queen Hera

That Charaxus might arrive here

with his ship unharmed

And find us safe.

Urns

Shipwrecks that happened a long time ago

Non-specific odes to heroic masculinity

Specific odes to a masculine hero

A woman who is taking a bath

What your friends should do when they stand at your grave someday

Greek independence from the damn Turks

The Light Brigade

Highwaymen

Chicago

Any other, lesser brigade

IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT SCENES WOULD ONE LIKE TO HAVE FILMED   Dickie Greenleaf and Tom sit for hours at the bar, It’s the one that I think is in Naples, Tom says he is sorry for the scene on the boat, Dickie laughs and says, please, these things happen.   A hand peels out from the crack in the rocks, Miranda returns thin but happy, Her hair is a mess, she is…