The Unexpected Harte
JS Apsley
Arts
A collection of 320 articles.
Lady Lazarus Worries Me
after Sylvia Plath Her poem’s zigzagging lines. Its shout buried in soap and fury. The admission of having tried it twice before, though it didn’t stick should have warned us. God, I wish someone had read it closer. Had known. Had said, Girl, get your head out of
Discovered Cries
I thought my favorite sound was classical guitar: thin rosewood shaping pitches warm, round, bright. But yesterday a seagull called, quite loud, its high staccato song, forlorn, a tragic promise, hungry but resigned. My body opened, lightness spread through me, through chest, limbs, face, with muscles loosened; I rose with
Träumerei
The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage (1874) by Edgar Degas
The young girls are like linen hanging out to dry, breeze-buffeted and slightly see-through. They pose, wait with awkwardly clasped hands, rehearse their steps. Upstage, just off-center, a ginger-haired ballerina pulls her hair away from the nape of her neck, perhaps caught mid-yawn or breathless
Showstopper
There I was torn chiffon & tarnished silk, the spotlight froze it all– dust settling from the warm light, eyes of serpents or fox or both, mouths agape & the announcer’s stuttering words. one hand over my breast, the other holding the remains of my gown; I still feel
Mood Swings
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
Unicorn Summer
Johanna Elattar
The Best Laid Plans
Robert Jakucs
Godsend
Davor Mondom
Sepulchress
Digging beneath the dirt of my body is the only way I know to escape it: its fatal birdcage, its sung prison of bones. And as I labor You tell me of all the women who failed to listen, how now they are enshrouded in salt pillars & sunken in
The Bubble
Philip Dean Walker
Roberta's Little Creatures
An ekphrastic of Roberta Hahn Edward's 2025 watercolor of a "Little Creature" She started when still quite young, creating little husks of life on watercolor paper, bringing them into being, wringing them from pores in the sheet, bright and strange little monsters, never mean or dirty
Severed Hearts / Murdered Brains
an ode to Maybe
a Close Family Friend has an adage: never trade a definitive Yes for a Maybe He never said a continuation for what I should do when the potential Maybe represents Everything I Want not that I want to leave Everything and Everyone I know for an Unknown but that the
Ecdysis
Still Life
Her Plastic Heart
Disintegration
Here’s to the Cardinal Puff
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’
Dinner
Desire in Ten Parts
Landscape
Scattering, Over and Over Now
The Poetry of Ma Dai
Gowpen & Undertow
Paper Birds at the Crosswalk
Equilibrio Instabile
Observance
Swimming
Leadore
The Word Made Flesh
With Every Classmate I’ve Lost, I Feel like I’ve Failed a Test
Inflection Point
Here To There
A Conversation with Salvator Rosa
The Poet as Thief
“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
Three States Triptych
The 7th Burial Mound
The Forty-Ninth Year
Unraveling
Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life)
Live from the Hadal Zone
Grace
Animal Instinct
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
Wonder Me
Orchard Season
Pray Silence (The Mind of the Meeting)
Three Elegies for the Everyday
FLATLAND
In the Valles Caldera
Bubble of Loneliness
Ancient Cooperation
Easter Plum
Pistachios
Ars Poetica: or, Benzaitan’s Rules for Poems (That She Told Me In A Dream)
Dream Person
The Morning News
Heat of a Bayou
Dämmerschlaf, or, Twilight Sleep
What You Could Not Spare
Emergency Room
Not Quite Touching Sestos
A Silencing
Crepe Myrtles
Deny Your Surface Self
Văcărești
I Wake Up Daily Which Cannot Continue Forever.
How to Write a Poem
While We Were in Motion
Exit Terra
Porschegasbord
In Search of Dreams
At the Cardiologist’s
Mystifying Answers to Magic 8 Ball Questions Regarding Recent Political Events
Bad Angel's Home
Solaria
An Alternate Ending
Gilgandra, 1963
Words Unheard
Summer in the Mountains
Haberdasher
Mother-in-Law
Stealing Baby Jesus
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’
Ice Skating on Lake Estancia
Shahuhude (Foolish)
The Teacher Retires
A Manifesto Against Manifestos
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.”
The Sound of Silence
Like a Rock
Cheers
"God could be shaking a cocktail for me and I’d still/have a complaint."
The Endless Vitality of "Ode to the West Wind"
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.
At Woodlawn
Three Haiku
The curved universe reflected in this puddle Let us break our stride
The Discarded
Villanelle for Stronghold Table and Daydream
“Prairie dogs call through the murmuring grass,/mimicking history—its rhythmic drum beats—/and resurrecting Wodziwob’s sacred chants.”
Indigo Goodbyes
“in a vale of blue orchid gowns/sewn with bachelor buttons/in lavender blue fields”
Fieldnotes: Annie Christain’s “The Vanguards of Holography” and Caroline Harper New’s “A History of Half-Birds”
“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
The Ficus Frost
“to the garage bound welders masked/in metal, tampering the eternal flame”
Melodic Dream of Attic
“Little dragonfly,/Gliding, flew.”