Philip Metres is the author of Pictures at an Exhibition (Akron Poetry Series, 2016); Sand Opera (Alice James Books, 2015); I Burned at Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2015); To See the Earth (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2008), Come Together: Imagine Peace (Bottom Dog Press, 2008), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since […]
1. Outside, in a country with no word for outside, they cluster on trees, red bunches. I looked up ryabina, found mountain ash. No mountains here, just these berries cradled in yellow leaves. When I rise, you fall asleep. We barely know each other, you said on the phone last night. Today, sun brushes the […]
I. This is an apple. What is it? A table. Some bread and tea. II. And this? This is a ruble, a rue, a wish I could sell you exactly what I feel. A double negative: if you can’t not speak, then write. Sit and eat the peeled apple in your hand. III. I understand […]
The light wakes me, the alarm did not. Bad sign, it’s six and I’ve got an eight o’clock flight. Outside, Sasha’s stuttering that my phone line was dead, the traffic’s bad, his Volga cab sputters from the cold. My suitcases form a perfect wall around me, Cold War border in the vinyl backseat. Sasha borders […]
On Moscow’s outskirts, falcon and falconer once stretched the orbit of trust. They’ve left only the name, sokol’nik, lost circles from sky to departed hand. Last orange light washes through trees tugged by wind. A friend chops carrots, I slice apples, cramped around the table. He tells of a strange book—a single word repeated two […]
The old scrolls were opened but never all at once, so the eye would wander over the course of months each inked and painted shrub, each circuitous path, and never know where it might lead—so hangs back, rests awhile in thickets of this imagined world, a landscape where only a hand-span unfurled at once, and […]
Never again! Again. Never again. It’s over. Ever over. Over, over again. We’re even. Even forever. Again and a gain, never a gain. No. Over for never. Novacaine. It’s over, Cain. Cain/Abel, Cane Hobble, Can’t-Able. Cannibal. Camp Bull. Can. Unable. No! Never again. Ever and over, again. Again. Again.
from Instants he’s alabaster sprawl & horizontal, splayed ( legs giving up to the fall the other man ( guides him to he’s a guitar the other ( man leans over his knee coaxes notes from spinal ( column & chord Jacob & angel ( he’s statued & sussed pended & dares ( to trust […]