Posts tagged “poems”

  1. Four poems from Teow Lim Goh's ISLANDERS, a collection of poems about the Angel Island Immigration Station, followed by a brief Q&A with the poet.

    2 comments
  2. [Originally.]

    Oh my God, Jenny, you're such a mystery
    You like money and making out both, which is wild.
    Just straight-up nuts. You're asleep, almost as if
    you were tired or something. Maybe tired from your lifestyle
    of Doing It. Which is your job, Doing It, for money.
    I wonder which one you're dreaming about

    39 comments
  3. Slowly, the emperor came to question
    whether there ever would be a miracle.

    5 comments
  4. Originally.

    Look, I have a lot of other stuff on my mind, too, I just –
    some nights I can't sleep and yes, one of the thoughts
    that enters my head is: What if God were a swan and you had to fuck him?
    And I can't apologize for that,
    or won't.

    58 comments
  5. Originally.

    Oh My God You Guys, I'm Fucking Thirty-Six Now
    Thirty-Six
    I Have To Like...Oh My God

    I'm officially too old to love, I feel like
    No one is even in love with me right now,
    which is garbage,
    okay some people are obviously but none of them count

    60 comments
  6. SOME GUY, KEATS PROBABLY: my god, sir knight
    what has happened to you?
    you look like some sort of lake without sedges
    a sedgeless lake
    if such a thing can even be imagined
    no sedges on you
    a sedgeless man

    77 comments
  7. NOT ACTUALLY A POEM but some extremely great science writing that the weather service still uses, it gets me so HET UP as I read it because I am like "YEAH those branches are gonna start swaying!!! oh heck oh heck here it comes! MORE WIND!"

    Description on Land | Description at Sea

    Calm: Smoke rises vertically. | Sea like a mirror.

    97 comments
  8. Before We Had Mirrors

    We looked for ourselves
    beneath the clouded surfaces
    of everything, back then.

    12 comments
  9. The Garden

    My father bends over the koi pond to count the fish,
    which are fewer now, dwindling in number.

    First it was the birds, then it was sickness,
    then age, something in the water—

    Then death settled in, comfortably,
    made up a bed and boiled pond scum for tea.

    9 comments
  10. I imagine Geach and Wallace in the lecture halls, in the libraries – the famous Radcliffe Camera at the Bodleian, maybe, not so different from the room where I read their work. They’re greedily soaking up Western literature. They’re searching for themselves, but they keep finding the same stupid story: a woman experiences a sliver of life, then kills herself because of a man.

    36 comments
  11. Butterfly Pavilion I stand before the cocoons, waiting for a twitch in the shells, a crack revealing a colorful wing. There are none. The cocoons are pinned to cork boards, each dangling from its tip, ordered by species and country of origin. Some look like snails. Some look like tiny black bugs. Some are the green of the first leaves of spring. Nothing today. I turn to the butterflies around me, broken out of their…

    3 comments
  12. Song of Herself 1 Is it cool if I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, Like, just for a minute? Even though what I assume I would, like, never ask you to assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you, or even probably better because I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I know it’s sort of lazy of me, and I’m super sorry, but If it’s cool with you do you…

    28 comments
  13. Run rabbit run. You. a defiant pulse of color on the whitewashed hallway— I think that I knew that you would leave eventually, and I think that it’s fitting that we would discard you silently and collect your traces like streamers the night after a sweaty school dance.   Run rabbit run. in my head. you’re already walking away. Pointed nose, black hoodie you recede into a background of doormen and dog walkers and snow…

    4 comments
  14. The Last of the Lily Maids

    “Or when the moon was overhead Came two young lovers lately wed; ‘I am half sick of shadows,' said The Lady of Shalott.” –Alfred, Lord Tennyson

    The ocean spills from my conch shell ears. I hear only my own sighing, as though I am still half-submerged—the last of the lily maids, a creature too destitute for a barge…

    3 comments
  15. 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 come from a small place where people grow big ambitions and leave, or furtively guard what they’re passionate about while getting on with the everyday business of work and family. I have ties that keep me here, and I don’t mind it so much. I make art on…

    9 comments