Peter Kline’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, Poetry, The Antioch Review, and other journals. He is the recipient of the 2010 Morton Marr Prize fromSouthwest Review, as well as a 2008-2010 Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, where he is currently a lecturer. He lives in San Francisco, and is a founding member of the poetry and […]
I want to dress you as a man, shark you in a fitted suit, iron-lined, starched to your high white collar, throatlocked in a double Windsor. I want to draw you straight up and down with the tight swish of silk slacks around black captain’s boots, flatten you out with a greatcoat, stack your shoulders […]
You wound a ball of twine around my eyes, then pinned the end between my fingers. You gowned me in white tissue like a hothouse nectarine. The furtive door at last unbarred, I was amazed at the garden’s suggestion throating from vining flower-walls in breaths that quickened with mine. How long I lingered beneath sun […]
After I’m got, I never want to get. They hit the buzzer, then they lock me in and top me with a come-on like a threat. I never want to get unless I’ve got no money for the getting, and no spot to put my body while the doing’s done. I only want to get […]
I’ve been taught to expect divide. Keep your hands on your own side. Birth cut me from my mother but it started earlier: before I even had a heart they put me in a place apart without a light, without a light. No wonder if my heart’s not right. I’ve got a feel for separateness. […]
The kanunist’s fingers blur like a conjurer’s, silk innuendos burlapped by his singing. I sing along. “We are brothers now,” he says, fisting his heart. I believe him, lulled asleep by the argument of dice in a metal bowl. A hand on my skull. We emerge from kerosene into clapboard alleys of the Golden Horn […]
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please. —Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene Jeffers, you flinty sympathist of granite, poet/homilist, provincial seer and storm-bird, let it rest. Your work is finished. They have no use for grand abstraction here. Though Tor House tower is a faerie eyesore […]
Overexposure; light-wash. Even her fingers, splayed in approximation of desire, lose their singleness. Even the hair that flares across her neck and shoulders singes the too-receptive paper. The light changes everything – her legs bent like a soldier trampled in the field become tined spears of lightning; a yoke of flame was once a string […]