O My Pa-Pa, by Bob Hicok

Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop.

They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs

and wives. We thought they didn’t read our stuff,

whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never,

or those that end, and he was silent as a carp,

or those with middles which, if you think

of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch

of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights

in the woods, they’ve read every word and noticed

that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex

and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello

from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs

is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like

“My Yellow Sheet Lad” and “Given Your Mother’s Taste

for Vodka, I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Mine.”

They’re not trying to make the poems better

so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook

or electrocution, as a group

they overcome their individual senilities,

their complete distaste for language, how cloying

it is, how like tears it can be, and remember

every mention of their long hours at the office

or how tired they were when they came home,

when they were dragged through the door

by their shadows. I don’t know why it’s so hard

to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked,

not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball

of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man

with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence

was his presence, his present, the Cheerios,

the PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees,

that they’re the most intricate version of standing up,

who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know

that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy.

A bomb. A bomb that’ll go off soon for him, for me,

and I notice in our fathers’ poems a reciprocal dwelling

on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared

as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted

the rocket cars, as if running away from them

to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers

wasn’t fast enough, and it turns out they did

start to say something, to form the words hey

or stay, but we’d turned into a door full of sun,

into the burning leave, and were gone

before it came to them that it was all right

to shout, that they should have knocked us down

with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified

by the distance men need in their love.

Like Riding a Bicycle, By George Bilgere

I would like to write a poem


About how my father taught me 


To ride a bicycle one soft twilight,

A poem in which he was tired


And I was scared, unable to disbelieve


In gravity and believe in him,

As the fireflies were coming out


And only enough light remained


For one more run, his big hand at the small


Of my back, pulling away like the gantry


At a missile launch, and this time, this time


I wobbled into flight, caught a balance


I would never lose, and pulled away


From him as he eased, laughing, to a stop,

A poem in which I said that even today

As I make some perilous adult launch,

Like pulling away from my wife


Into the fragile new balance of our life


Apart, I can still feel that steadying hand,

Still hear that strong voice telling me

To embrace the sweet fall forward

Into the future's blue


Equilibrium. But,

Of course, he was drunk that night,

Still wearing his white shirt 


And tie from the office, the air around us


Sick with scotch, and the challenge


Was keeping his own balance


As he coaxed his bulk into a trot


Beside me in the hot night, sweat


Soaking his armpits, the eternal flame


Of his cigarette flaring as he gasped


And I fell, again and again, entangled


In my gleaming Schwinn, until


He swore and stomped off

Into the house to continue 


Working with my mother


On their own divorce, their balance


Long gone and the hard ground already


 Rising up to smite them


While I stayed outside in the dark,


Still falling, until at last I wobbled


Into the frail, upright delight


Of feeling sorry for myself, riding


Alone down the neighborhood's 


Black street like the lonely western hero

I still catch myself in the act 


Of performing.

And yet, having said all this,

I must also say that this summer evening


Is very beautiful, and I am older


Than my father ever was


As I coast the Pacific shoreline


On my old bike, the gears clicking


Like years, the wind


Touching me for the first time, it seems,

In a very long time, 


With soft urgency all over.

Days of the Depressed

He told me I was just a head in a bed.

One Liner

Alexandra Ustach

Me, You, Me You

click this link:

Me and You and Everyone We Know

No Matter Where We Go, by Henrik Nordbrandt

No matter where we go, we always arrive too late

to experience what we left to find.

And in whatever cities we stay

it is the houses where it is too late to return

the gardens where its too late to spend a moonlit night

and the women whom it's too late to love

that disturb us with their intangible presence.

And whatever streets we think we know

take us past the gardens we are searching for

whose heavy fragrance spreads throughout the neighborhood.

And whatever houses we return to

we arrive too late at night to be recognized.

And in whatever rivers we look for our reflections

we see ourselves only when we have turned our backs.

from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Literature

Translated from the Danish by the author and Alexander Taylor

Little Ruth, by Yehuda Amichai

Sometimes I remember you, little Ruth,

We were separated in our distant childhood and they burned you in the camps.

If you were alive now, you would be a woman of sixty-five,

A woman on the verge of old age. At twenty you were burned

And I don't know what happened to you in your short life

Since we separated. What did you achieve, what insignia

Did they put on your shoulders, your sleeves, your

Brave soul, what shining stars

Did they pin on you, what decorations for valor, what

Medals for love hung around your neck,

What peace upon you, peace unto you.

And what happened to the unused years of your life?

Are they still packed away in pretty bundles,

Were they added to my life? Did you turn me

Into your bank of love like the banks in Switzerland

Where assets are preserved even after their owners are dead?

Will I leave all this to my children

Whom you never saw?

You gave your life to me, like a wine dealer

Who remains sober himself.

You sober in death, lucid in the dark

For me, drunk on life, wallowing in my forgetfulness.

Now and then, I remember you in times

Unbelievable. And in places not made for memory

But for the transient, the passing that does not remain.

As in an airport, when the arriving travelers

Stand tired at the revolving conveyor belt

That brings their suitcases and packages,

And they identify theirs with cries of joy

As at a resurrection and go out into their lives;

And there is one suitcase that returns and disappears again

And returns again, ever so slowly, in the empty hall,

Again and again it passes.

This is how your quiet figure passes by me,

This is how I remember you until

The conveyor belt stands still. And they stood still. Amen

from TheVintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry

Translated from the Hebrew by Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav

Light, at Thirty-Two, by Michael Blumenthal

It is the first thing God speaks of
when we meet Him, in the good book
of Genesis. And now, I think
I see it all in terms of light:

How, the other day at dusk
on Ossabaw Island, the marsh grass
was the color of the most beautiful hair
I had ever seen, or how—years ago
in the early-dawn light of Montrose Park—
I saw the most ravishing woman
in the world, only to find, hours later
over drinks in a dark bar, that it
wasn't she who was ravishing,
but the light: how it filtered
through the leaves of the magnolia
onto her cheeks, how it turned
her cotton dress to silk, her walk
to a tour-jeté.

And I understood, finally,
what my friend John meant,
twenty years ago, when he said: Love
is keeping the lights on. And I understood
why Matisse and Bonnard and Gauguin
and Cézanne all followed the light:
Because they knew all lovers are equal
in the dark, that light defines beauty
the way longing defines desire, that
everything depends on how light falls
on a seashell, a mouth ... a broken bottle.

And now, I'd like to learn
to follow light wherever it leads me,
never again to say to a woman, YOU
are beautiful, but rather to whisper:
Darling, the way light fell on your hair
This morning when we woke—God,
It was beautiful. Because, if the light is right,
Then the day and the body and the faint pleasures
Waiting at the window ... they too are right.
All things lovely there. As the first poet wrote,
in his first book of poems: Let there be light.

And there is.

Always Unsuitable, by Marge Piercy

She wore little teeth of pearls around her neck.

They were grinning politely and evenly at me.

Unsuitable they smirked. It is true

I look a stuffed turkey in a suit. Breasts

too big for the silhouette. She knew

at once that we had sex, lots of it

as if I had strolled into her dining room

in a dirty negligee smelling gamy

smelling fishy and sporting a strawberry

on my neck. I could never charm

the mothers, although the fathers ogled

me. I was exactly what mothers had warned

their songs against. I was quicksand

I was trouble in the afternoon. I was

the alley cat you don't bring home.

I was the dirty book you don't leave out

for your mother to see. I was the center-

fold you masturbate with then discard.

Where I came from, the nights I had wandered

and survived, scared them, and where

I would go they never imagined.

Ah, what you wanted for your sons

were little ladies hatched from the eggs

of pearls like pink and silver lizards

cool, well behaved and impervious

to desire and weather alike. Mostly

that's who they married and left.

Oh, mamas, I would have been your friend.

I would have cooked for you and held you.

I might have rattled the windows

of your sorry marriages, but I would

have loved you better than you know

how to love yourselves, bitter sisters.

Summer Conclusions, Alexandra Ustach

Because I like the hue of his purple shirt

and how it pops against his tanned skin

Because of this slight breeze amongst all the humidity

Because of the wild flowers in the tin pail

Because of the green

Because of flannel on reasonable summer days

Because of wealthy side streets with pretty doors

The Victims, by Sharon Olds

When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and

took it, in silence, all those years and then

kicked you out, suddenly, and her

kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we

grinned inside, the way people grinned when

Nixon's helicopter lifted off the South

Lawn for the last time. We were tickled

to think of your office taken away,

your secretaries taken away,

your lunches with three double bourbons,

your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your

suits back, too, those dark

carcasses hung in your closet, and the black

noses of your shoes with their large pores?

She had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it

until we pricked with her for your

annihilation, Father. Now I

pass the bums in doorways, the white

slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their

suits of compressed silt, the stained

flippers of their hands, the underwater

fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the

lanterns lit, and I wonder who took it and

took it from them in silence until they had

given it all away and had nothing

left but this.