Betsy Sholl is the author of seven books of poetry, most recentlyRough Cradle (Alice James Books, 2009) and Late Psalm (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). She has received awards from the NEA and Maine Arts Commission. Her book The Red Line (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992) won the 1991 AWP Prize for Poetry, andDon’t Explain won the Felix Pollak Prize in […]
after Rumi Plaster drips from the ceiling. You close your eyes and think skylight. All night you jackhammer though asphalt, but in the morning the surface resumes unchanged and people drive nonchalantly to work. So what good is thinking about God when it doesn’t blow the tiles off the roof or buckle the street, heaving […]
Behind the art museum, the sky slips its frame, unraveling in random clouds, subject indeterminate, though down the block an old man dressed in sandwich boards shouts repent, convinced the theme is ruin, and it’s his job as people pass to hiss: Behind your pretty face–worms! Behind your fancy car–flames! But when he pistol-points at […]
for Milt Hinton He needs a bigger body, bull fiddle to make that thump, that deeper pulse, he needs four fat inflexible strings made of gut wrapped by steel so he can pluck each night that tree and its strange fruit, its slumped shoulders, and bulging eyes… As he fingers the neck, as he frets, […]
In my aquarium the fish went round and round—kissing fish and clown fish and one very blue fish with a mouth grimmer than Grandfather, whom we could offend without knowing. Then no amount of running next door to beg through the locked screen, what did I do? would help. No amount of saying sorry, stammering […]
At the piano’s most plaintive moment a few bars come and go, bird quick. Was it really blue, and did it sing, that soul sting, sweet piercing you want to repeat? But now the pace picks up, new themes enter and break. To follow you have to run like someone on a dock keeping up […]
Each evening I believe in the everlasting and fear by dawn blight will have crept into the garden. But each morning there you are, watery blossoms dripping from the lip of multiple green faucets, a magician’s trick of scarf after soft yellow and orange scarf rippling from a sleeve. How to name your layers of […]
Prison poetry workshop They call me Babe and make a kissing noise from inside their bars and inside their rage. Most of them are men, though they act like boys who’ve played too hard and broken all their toys. Now they’re trying to break their metal cage. They yell out Babe, make that loud kissing […]