Michael Morse has published poems in many journals including A Public Space, The American Poetry Review, Bomb, The Iowa Review, The LIterary Review, Ploughshares, Spinning Jenny, and Tin House, and in the anthologies Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (New York University Press, 2007); Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days (University of Iowa Press, 2010); and The Best American Poetry, 2012. His first book, Void […]
If most things speak for themselves, can’t it be said that really you’re doing the thinking for them? The first step is all about obsession with exclusion, the cold front coming in and forcing you to hunker down, the migrants winging their way to some gold coast with enough fat in their chests to burn […]
I’ve been told by dozens of angry men that the name on the front of my jersey is significantly more important than the name sewn on my back. Little compensations of detachment— I’m an early draft pick, a team player. I am a Brewer. A Dodger. A Red. Fidelity investments: I have aggressive funds and […]
She wanted to know where he was; how he spent his time, which horses held up better in the foreign climate. And did he think of her at all when seeing fabulous wildflowers or local women. The breath from his cartographer’s assistants cannot dry the maps as quickly as he’d like. He’d like to send […]
I trust initial states, my mental Delaware: As parting snows will downy up the dirt beds, impatient daffodils debut their taxi silks. One imagines a garden of dormant lilacs, dried rattle bags of Columbine, spring ready. All this among the winter head games— an old man in his Pisan compound, worse, in his own head—a […]
So you’re related to the iris, in and of its family that responds to light and gives us, fuzzed and drunk, the general shapes of things in outline and form, before the brain, perhaps fuzzed, perhaps drunk or sad or ecstatic even if undecided and directionless, a chance to talk to whatever shapes and lights […]
Ideal: to drive the lane and look for dishes, to see the open man, give him his bucket. The one-on-one for which we are now counseled blueprints a perfect symmetry that’s hard to hold. Like my friend who dreams of his ex and wakes to find a moonlit lawn of deer. In our nightly houses […]
Here comes Thelonious weather, all elbows and knees and in-between notes—a virtuoso thirst of clouds now tattering big blue and down come colored leaves who’ve left their lives as shades. Harbingers, the notes scurry like small children who in their cravings tend to disfigure themselves. My ear, my Alabama, and my Monk: My single malt, […]