Once upon a time I knew that whales had ears. That in them were bones, and by them the tight spiral of time could be gauged. I knew the names of many stars and the myths in which they glowed like cold, dead fire. Once, I trembled before love like fire. Once. O sad heart, […]
For the sun, which will burn out or run down or dramatically implode in a future epoch about as awful as this one. For the one-antlered deer that expired en route to an upstate sanctuary because why not. For the sequoia tunnel tree which was uprooted in a storm the other day. For my boyhood […]
for Heather Heyer Has in it no cretinous Nazis, no lead slurry thickening the water with death, so that is these days a plus. In this line, no ancient and fragile biome has been hounded into collapse. I think. This is a poem, so don’t come here searching for journalism. I will record […]
I have never seen a ghost, though when I was a boy I imagined a haunted world. It isn’t. I should be relieved that within the dark was nothing. That the crumbling shack was just decay. That this was lovely. That the woods behind my house were not patrolled by Bigfoot, shaggy and immense and […]
Or feels endlessly ruinous, at least, I’ll praise the trivial. I’ll praise in winter the half-foot of height lost by the Eiffel Tower. I’ll praise aspirin, which once was made from the boiled bark of the willow tree. Because there is never too much pleasure in this stupid world, I’ll praise chocolate. Decent sex. Out-of-body […]
Always bad form to announce, this is a poem. I’m not sure why. As if the few of us who’ll ever read these lines might think it anything else: a letter to a dying monarch; a guide to constructing something without discernible parts. Like love. Here I am, waiting on the night to press up […]
Paul Guest is the author of four poetry collections: Because Everything Is Terrible (Diode Editions, 2018); My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge (Ecco, 2008); Notes for My Body Double (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), winner of the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize; and The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World (New Issues Press, 2003), winner of […]
What of the atom’s split heart we made for you and the godly flash-bang wrath, the anguished song, the clawed gait, the zipper by which one of us slips into and puts you on, your death we dangle like a carrot, your stunted son mewling always, your ragged arch foes, your bed in rock, in […]