A tear (drop) through my eye lands on the machinery of my cheek And sparks shoot off of my crackling face The mask distorts in unnatural twitch A pole in my brain spins and spits ribbons of storm as a giant flying carousel rises from the top of my head
Johanna Elattar
Robert Jakucs
Davor Mondom
Philip Dean Walker
My wife and I put out seeds to feed the little critters in our courtyard: wrens and juncos, mourning doves, squirrels, chipmunks, now and then a rabbit. This morning a cardinal. That reminded me of Cardinal Puff, a drinking game we used to play on Okinawa back in 1968; I’
“Donc le poète est vraiment voleur de feu.” — Arthur Rimbaud Was Prometheus a poet? Rimbaud says he was, stealing fire from the gods: technology, knowledge, human arts and sciences. He paid a terrible price for his audacity. Whatever was he thinking? Look what we have done with what he gave
Today a Cooper’s Hawk perched itself outside our bedroom window on a low branch of a small tree not twenty feet away. The courtyard of our condo complex. Frequented by all sorts of wildlife: sparrows and wrens, mourning doves, juncos, hummingbirds, now and then a cardinal, chipmunks, rabbits, lots
The headline in today’s Inquirer shocked me to my very soul: “Baby Jesus Stolen from the Shrine of St. John Neumann,” Northern Liberties neighborhood, Fifth Street & Girard. In broad daylight, too. Okay, it was only a plaster figurine, not expensive, though very much beloved— according to the shrine’
Johnny Payne questions the idea of manifestos in poetry, preferring his own mantra: “Write poetry first with the ear, second with the eye, third with the mind.”
"God could be shaking a cocktail for me and I’d still/have a complaint."
Merion West arts editor Johnny Payne reflects on why Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” endures over the centuries as one of the finest works written in English.
The curved universe reflected in this puddle Let us break our stride
“Prairie dogs call through the murmuring grass,/mimicking history—its rhythmic drum beats—/and resurrecting Wodziwob’s sacred chants.”
“in a vale of blue orchid gowns/sewn with bachelor buttons/in lavender blue fields”
“There is a sense of preparation through formal and informal erudition, meant to complicate what it means to write adequately about natural and human worlds, with fewer donnéees and more of a sense of a non-human cosmos, one of manatees and marsupials, in which each creature’s essence is not given t
“to the garage bound welders masked/in metal, tampering the eternal flame”
“Little dragonfly,/Gliding, flew.”
“Yet these walls sound with echoes of the past,/With whispered prayers which linger in the air/And animate this space – still holding fast:/A shelter from the passing world’s despair.”
“Lilies/finch/flinches/nest/basil/hair/hat. I would swear before a jury that those are all legitimate off-rhymes, even if I were convicted of perjury for it. I wish that Shelley or Keats or Lorca or Miguel Hernández were alive so that I could pass this poem along to them.”
“The train cars are trying to sleep/in the postal town. Purple tracks/forsake concrete footer and loading/dock pad. The pale moon/asks homes to hold the bones.”
“No one assigns homework./No one expects anyone to do anything./Disappoint, like ill-fitting pants,/can chafe you to death.”
“Astrology is not a science because women conceived it/and it’s not a religion because the stars, even/with the pictures they pattern,/could never take the place of a god”
“The grand Guignol exaggeration provides an excellent comic read, as we fail to take completely seriously his worrywart grandstanding. Chances are, we have known someone exactly like him, who upon greeting us, got straight to describing their various medical conditions, real and imagined in excrucia
