The knife in your hand wants flesh. Its appetite for blood is sharp steel leaning, weeping into the tomato’s meat, sugar beets, steaming rhubarb pie and hunts that juice etching your hands, pulsing your neck and shifting your hips. You slice, you bleed, you leak into pools bubbling the countertop, over the scuffed linoleum to […]
Tracy K. Smith has recorded a new poem, available only here, as a special thank you for your contribution to From the Fishouse. Because of your generosity we can continue to provide audio of exciting young poets reading their work, and continue to improve the way we reach into the community and classroom to promote […]
I want to know the world by feeling how it moves, as it’s too late for crawling or learning new lines or reaching for sex. For many years I had dreams in which wings grew into my shoulders, but when I grabbed for food I starved, and when I tried to rape or make nest, […]
Must you tremble when cars trap shadows, or when the neighbor’s apricots, terribly bitter, fall on the lawn at night? Like the vine and the trellis I want to hug you from behind the way a friend surprises a friend. Awake beneath my bedspread, the stars’ crooked branches, I also need the calm of a […]
Birds graze the tassels, sparrowing actually, or mocking, their colors worth nothing unless I pin their wings in the field. Speaking of fields: the Russians say life is a walk across an open one where mules are buried, and men. The soil remembers a forest that marched right through. In time-lapse. In the filtered light […]
Can’t I make something of her bed, our sleep, and the white seam opening between us, our shared afternoons in the rendition house where nursing ended and trying-to-be-perfect began, when I was swept into forbiddance, then tucked down, her body my lean-to after an hour of knitting (in which her voice vibrated accordingly), not long […]
Loot my point of view, hove my heart free from its hived booth though I know your smoke, its black blossom, is a substance I’ll never become: colors of plaster and grass I’ve prepped flawlessly, rivers I’ve whittled thin. It’s a personal matter to me, the wind. But let it be our cathedral feeling: a […]
I’m not interested in sadness, just a yard as elder earth, a library of sunflowers battered by the night’s rain. When sliced wide, halved at dawn, I see how you exist, O satellite town, your bright possibility born again in drywall and the diary with the trick lock. Hardly held, for years I slept with […]