logo
I Have Feelers

I Have Feelers

by Matthew Rohrer,
February 2010

Nobody wants to be rain               falling in November

  • Hanging Garden

    by Colin Cheney, January 2010

    They huddled / under the turning maples—almost / as if they were asking to be tried for something / they knew they must have done—

  • Two Poems

    by Adonis, translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa, January 2010

    To the country dug into our lives like a grave, / to the country etherized, and killed, / a sun rises from our paralyzed history / into our millennial sleep.

  • Albania

    by Yang Li translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury, December 2009

    Back in our day there wasn’t anyone who didn’t know Albania / who didn’t know it was the bright light of European Socialism / or that the other bright light was us.

  • The Corset

    by Joanna Grant, December 2009

    This is what you will not understand, / I tell this jelly, this fat crybaby girl.

  • Loving Cyrus

    by R. Dwayne Betts, November 2009

    You’ve learned it 34 years too late and it wrestles / with the story of Cyrus, / the first man you’ve known with a woman’s / curved breast.

  • from Fugue of the New Year

    by Richard Garcia, October 2009

    Next door in the neighbor’s carport, children / laugh, jumping on bubble-wrap, like the far, / perpetual small arms fire in the distance.

  • Asking for Everything

    by Lilah Hegnauer, October 2009

    You thought I literally drained every boy’s canteen and / every last quarter and washer was mine.

  • the sentence

    by Sébastien Smirou translated from the French by Andrew Zawacki, October 2009

    we imagine rose tintedly because his hands are in his lady

  • Monarch & Mulberry

    by Nickole Brown, September 2009

    After that, the sound of hammers and crows / through the open window, then somebody needs to // cut down that goddamn tree.

  • from Green Zone New Orleans

    by Mark Yakich, Guest-edited by Pia Ehrhardt, September 2009

    Forget some call love / Bedside grammar: // The body rules / And it’s a trick

  • Three Poems

    by Brad Richard, Guest-edited by Pia Ehrhardt, September 2009

    We’ll never make it in time: you’re twelve, / riding west to see a corpse in a flood, / I’m your grandson at forty-two, riding east // to see my city’s flooded remains.

  • Snapshot

    by Andy Young, Guest-edited by Pia Ehrhardt, September 2009

    There is the talk of friends, uncles / disappeared, impossible to translate / because in English one disappears, // is not disappeared.

  • Omen

    by Joseph Campana, August 2009

    You are drowning but / knowing so will not help you.

  • The Witch’s Burning

    by Emma Bolden, July 2009

    his lips in the dark dog-warm against / the flat of my foot / became pain became not became flame

  • Requiem for the Orchard

    by Oliver de la Paz, July 2009

    Our hands were/ the real language and we hit each other with closed fists/ just to unhinge the details.

  • Romania. A Post-history Hysteria

    by Chris Tanasescu translated from the Romanian by David Baker and the author, June 2009

    ...fir on a barren rock-sharp wall, the kind / the shepherds around here talk and sing to / before felling when someone young and single dies.

  • The Bleating of Copper

    by Amjad Nasser translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa, June 2009

    Night and horses— / is this what history is all about?

  • Acknowledgment, 1964

    by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, May 2009

    Could have gone west. Could have packed your things, / who cares that you weren’t old enough to drive.

  • Geomancy

    by F. Daniel Rzicznek , May 2009

    All things that find a death there take / an invisible token of that freshwater pout: / a bone is dragged into pines and oak, / an organ ends up sailing around in the rain, / the rest is dissected there on the sands.

  • Canada

    by Henrietta Goodman, April 2009

    When he rows out to collect the geese, / he thinks, like any god, this is just / what you do.

  • Two Poems

    by Rafael Acevedo translated from the Spanish by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, April 2009

    With these five bones, human bones, / Doctor Chanca makes me a cannibal / by arranging feathers from the hand / of another cannibal

  • Decorum: A Study

    by Alison Powell, March 2009

    A person could be at a loss. The width, spools and yardage, meringue / airs, impossible long fingers, of decorum. Its army sashay of the side- / walk.

  • Dumb Show

    by Suzanne Wise, March 2009

    The spine does its turtle charade / and the fingers can be counted on / to dance the spider dance or perform

  • Three Poems

    by Novica Tadic translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic, February 2009

    Poor us, we are all kings / when we gaze at the starry sky.

  • Two Poems

    by Cynthia Cruz, February 2009

    Beautiful, finally, inside the quiet / Latrine of my Mexican / Confessional: // Rode a pony, drove / A tractor, and never / Finished the first grade.

  • Earring

    by Ales Steger translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry, January 2009

    The whole time he tells you what to do. / His voice is chocolate candy filled with hysteria. // He is a loving blackmailer. An owl blind in one eye.

  • Two Poems

    by Umberto Saba translated from the Italian by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan, January 2009

    It’s as if for a man battered by the wind, / blinded by snow—all around him an arctic / inferno pummels the city— / a door opens along a wall.

  • Flocks of Never

    by Drew Blanchard, December 2008

    In these moments, I’d imagine, / though I never saw anything / like it, the spray of twelve gauge / buckshot entering the body / of a goose in mid-air, / and its mate, its mate for life, / would honk, drop down, / honk, follow the limp body / to the ground.

  • Cat Posing for a Portrait of a Dog, Hollywood, California

    by Elizabeth Gold, December 2008

    On this rainy afternoon in Hollywood / California, I'm practicing / philosophy, watching him sip Napa Red / while he remakes me / into a dog-slut

  • Ode to Nitrous Oxide

    by Sharon Dolin, November 2008

    Isn’t it funny how good numb can feel? Is that / the experience? Or is it waking up after—lucid but no longer asking (or caring) /where it throbs—or when—or why—or because of whom.

  • The Body or its Not

    by Keetje Kuipers, November 2008

    I have plans to kill a creature. The best / I can explain it is: I’m afraid. Of what / will be left—a hoof, the jaw, one sun-dried- / soft-as-oats ear.

  • I Think of Pilgrims

    by Terese Svoboda, October 2008

    Cellphoned to their continents, Pilgrims / from whatever persecution, kill those turkeys in / want, want, want, and the landing gear drops.

  • Plague

    by Robert Thomas, October 2008

    Fold back your sleeve, cara, so I can see / the lining and the wrist bone’s alp. A girl / in Castello grew white fur on her tongue // when I was fifteen. All but the pink tip, / like a tiny monk’s head, a tonsured pate. / Then the fur blackened, and the monk grew horribly young.

  • Two Poems

    by Manoel de Barros translated from the Portuguese by Idra Novey, September 2008

    To enter the state of being a tree it’s necessary / to begin with a gecko’s amphibian torpor / at three in the afternoon in the month of August.

  • Only Different

    by Richard Howard, September 2008

    Bruce claims it would be madness to suppose / these two poles of American Romance / —does What Maisie Knew fit at the North Pole? / The Land of Oz
    at the South?—could even / hypothesize each other’s existence…

  • The Gods Describe Building Bodies, like Badger’s

    by Adam Day, August 2008

    We pour the eyes in with a ladle / like post-holes half-filled / with mud-water, tap them in / with it if we have to.

  • What, Friends, Is A Life?

    by Mark Yakich, August 2008

    Honestly I don’t understand many / People. But, Friends, if you plan on dying // By your own hand, don’t use pills. Swallowing / Is simply another way of marking time.

  • Mutable and Immutable

    by Maya Bejerano translated from the Hebrew by Tsipi Keller, July 2008

    let me go don’t be a dog / my very dear cage / haven’t we agreed

  • World's End: North of San Francisco

    by Tess Taylor, July 2008

    Here at the continent’s end, fortifications / linger for the end of the world. They greet // each California morning, these barracks in the fog. / Below, the lagoon is gunmetal, or mercury poured.

  • Two Poems

    by Gabrielle Althen translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker, June 2008

    Space is full of mental rooms where we can go / Like a hunter unleashing his dogs, I freed my spirit into them

  • Two Poems

    by Hamutal Bar-Yosef translated from the Hebrew by Rachel Tzvia Back, June 2008

    I am a poisoned well, / I told the ram / as he flared his nostrils. / Everything in me is poisoned.

  • The Stagnation

    by James Galvin, May 2008

    The stagnation is deafening. / Then some menacing / Nudists walk past / Laughing, which doesn’t / Affect the stagnation.

  • Two Poems

    by Sarah Messer, May 2008

    It’s true I slept with Abe Lincoln. / I now know everything there is to know about this country. / Believe me, I carry a tapeworm for you the size of Kentucky.

  • Two Poems

    by Amy Hegarty, April 2008

    Beautiful baby / With your head cut off / Why didn’t they bury you then?

  • Three Poems

    by Monica Youn, April 2008

    When you have left me / the sky drains of color // like the skin of a tightening fist.

  • Found Myself in Search of Matthias & Paul

    by Robert Gibbons, March 2008

    I said to Connors that the miracle for me was that that wood once had bark surrounding it, & that look, now, those carved figures are the spirit of Man.

  • Two Poems

    by Reginald Shepherd, March 2008

    Night renders everything insensible, / her eyes are filled with feathers, filled / with burning bridges, burning cornfields / wuthering to wind-blown ghosts of smoke.

  • Two Poems

    by Edip Cansever translated from the Turkish by Julia Clare Tillinghast and Richard Tillinghast, February 2008

    No matter the time or place, I’ll always grow for the one who is the sea. / With one thin finger cut in half. / That is why I’m the oldest recipient of your on-again, off-again love.

  • Two Poems

    by Ales Debeljak translated from the Slovenian by Andrew Zawacki and the author, February 2008

    How it rises out of waves in the bay / and shudders like a gentle thrust / of the sea, which sooner forgives / than punishes, doomed as it is to feckless birth.

  • from The Mad Song

    by Michael Schiavo, January 2008

    Of Bedlam in its prairie pride. Of the roach that winds between the stars, triumphal. Of well-water served in garnet goblets. Of crusted penknife sitting on the pillow in the crib.

  • Untitled

    by Pēters Brūveris translated from the Latvian by Inara Cedrins, January 2008

    I am given ten cubic meters of darkness / every night I pace over them obediently

  • Three Poems

    by Adonis translated from the Arabic by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard, December 2007

    In the name of his own history, / in a country mired in mud, / when hunger overtakes him / he eats his own forehead.

  • Why Can’t We

    by Kim Hyesoon translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi, December 2007

    We make Buddha ride an elephant like the way a village boy rides on a man’s shoulder, and we let Buddha run and play, then make him cry, and we make him couple blissfully with a buttery woman and call it Tantra...

  • Two Poems

    by Sean Singer, Guest-Edited by Tracy K. Smith , November 2007

    Mobley talked about revolution. / Asterisk, palladium, forever unjaded. // He talked about two lives—the one we learn with / and the one we live after that.

  • Three Poems

    by Aaron Smith, Guest-Edited by Tracy K. Smith, November 2007

    The woman at the DMV wasn't happy / when I asked if I could keep / my old driver’s license and use it / to fight terrorism. She doesn't understand / I'm trying to do my part.

  • Two Poems

    by Kyle Booten, Guest-Edited by Tracy K. Smith, November 2007

    It is the bog hour, the minute / which dwindles into a speck of ash. / As I do every morning I fall into my chair, / like a pebble thrown into a well. I think / you are not too thin, though I am lying.

  • Cinderella

    by Cynthia Cruz, Guest-Edited by Tracy K. Smith, November 2007

    Briefcase brother, what silver / Steamboat, brother, have you / Got for me this time.

  • Three Poems

    by Terrance Hayes, Guest-Edited by Tracy K. Smith, November 2007

    Yes, I have a pretty good idea what beauty is. It survives / alright. It aches like an open book. It makes it difficult to live.

  • Three Poems

    by Tina Chang, Guest-Edited by Tracy K. Smith, November 2007

    The animal must be shot. You must / be hungry enough to skin it without / flinching, must be willing to cook it, / still trembling over the watchful eye / of the fire.

  • Two Poems

    by David Semanki, Guest-Edited by Tracy K. Smith, November 2007

    Shouldn’t you both be used to it— // a ritual which you revert to each night? / This turning off the light, / lying still, falling asleep.

  • Seven Poets Guest-Edited by Tracy K. Smith

    , October 2007

    Guest editor Tracy K. Smith introduces poems "that will save you from drowning, only to admit they were the ones to push you overboard..."

  • 'struth

    by Christopher Mulrooney, October 2007

    it’s a fine American laggard sea found Haitian / with a boatload sinking under the precipice there / fallen into the new sink / in the new kitchen

  • Mambo Cinema

    by Barbara Hamby, October 2007

    Last night at the mambo cinema, with its wide screen / diamond sheen, my medulla oblongata / was knocked back to the Stone Age, primal scream / rising as I took my seat like a black sheep, Red Queen

  • Two Poems

    by George Szirtes , September 2007

    Somewhere there is a perfect architecture / where light, form, shadow, space all move / to form a language beyond architecture, / where to dream of the wrong architecture / is to dream of dying.

  • Lovelier Near the End

    by Mark Bibbins, September 2007

    The fate of the inter- / office matchmaker // is to be forever / sitting on press // releases intuiting one / big happy time zone.

  • Thumb, Throat, Affidavit

    by Tung-Hui Hu, August 2007

    At this point your credit score / will be helpful. Turn in your old train tickets / and walk the way you have always walked, / feet turned out, heels light as oars.

  • Love Tokens

    by Tran Da Tu translated from the Vietnamese by Linh Dinh, August 2007

    I'll give you a roll of barbwire / A vine for this modern epoch / Climbing all over our souls / That's our love, take it, don't ask

  • Rescue

    by Rebecca Morgan Frank, July 2007

    The hero arrives in an armada, years after you begin dreaming of him in black and white. // Armies stamp through your sleep, dole out chocolate, dried milk with a chalkiness you long for.

  • Double Reed

    by Kazim Ali, July 2007

    when dusk says hand it over / what am I supposed to hand over // in printing you have to choose / between portrait or landscape

  • New Translations of René Char

    by Nancy Naomi Carlson, June 2007

    He was hurled to the ground by the same unjust blows that hurtled him far ahead in his life, toward future years when one person alone could no longer make him bleed.

  • Wholesale Romania

    by Chris Tanasescu translated from the Romanian by Ilya Kaminsky and Martin Woodside, May 2007

    Yes, that’s right, maybe I’ve run out of / patience, we have certainly run out of cigarettes / and the later, as Cioran used to say // hold more fire than the Gospels in our blessed country.

  • New Translations of Polina Barskova

    by Ilya Kaminsky, May 2007

    I will try to live on earth without you. / I will try to live on earth without you. // I will become any object, / I don’t care what— // I will be this speeding train.

  • Four New Translations of Paul Celan

    translated from the German by Ian Fairley, April 2007

    I HEAR THE AXE HAS FLOWERED, / I hear the place can't be named

  • Average

    Three Poems by Jon Woodward, April 2007

    skywriting its name in the/ optical illusion blank spaces/ shifting around the surface/ of the necessary paperwork (also in mouth)

  • Two Poems

    by Oni Buchanan, April 2007

    soporific for the earthly,/ but for the waking,/ a buoyancy, the medium/ for floating up with/ flutter-kick, with wings

  • The Way I Am

    by Mark Rudman, April 2007

    "I always do everything wrong. Sans exception./There I am again using 'sans' instead of 'without.'"

  • Four New Translations of Rumi

    by Coleman Barks, March 2007

    A snake drags along looking for the ocean./ What would it do with it?

  • Four Erotic Poems

    by Chinese poets translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping, January 2007

    Her tears drop on the mirror / and around the guttering lamp insects swirl.

  • Four Poems on War

    by Chinese poets translated by Geoff Waters, January 2007

    A few horses returned with torn flags we couldn’t make out. / I would have a ceremony for you, but what if you are alive?

  • Complaint / Za_alenie

    by Andrzej Bursa translated from the Polish by Kevin Christianson and Halina Ablamowicz , November 2006

    I don't know you personally, but I saw your photo in the paper / and I feel deeply offended

  • Wheel

    by Jennifer Burch, October 2006

    if I am not green and horses do not fly

  • Three Poems

    by Terese Svoboda, July 2006

    The hedges, as square / as the capital letters important / books begin with, screen // the neighbor but not / his feet

  • Three Poems

    by Peg Boyers, July 2006

    ...to leave you is to grow up.

  • After Reading Some Tales of the Hindu Gods

    by Billy Collins, July 2006

    I would see teeth and a quivering tongue / and that little glistening punching bag / that hangs from the roof of the mouth.

  • Responsibility

    by Craig Morgan Teicher, June 2006

    We were trying to make the best / of a very short time.

  • Throwing Star

    by Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman, June 2006

    Aida knew it was the sound that would get to her.

  • Three Haiku

    by Tomas Tranströmer translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly , May 2006

    Night-a twelve-wheeler / goes by making the dreams of / the inmates shiver

  • Sonnet

    by Cecco Angiolieri translated from the Italian by Robert Bly , May 2006

    If I were fire, I'd burn the world down;

  • High Noon

    Two Poems by Antonio Machado translated from the Spanish by George Kalogeris and Gláucia Rezende , March 2006

    By this glass of wine so dark it brims / Like rising nightfall, with a heart whose deepest faith / Is insatiable thirst

  • Doctor of Teeth (White, Natasha)

    by Mebane Robertson, March 2006

    It's lonely it's getting harder / To do the dirty work of ever getting them back.

  • Visiting Chicago

    by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, February 2006

    My El, my pallor, my gas- / fed water, tell me how to touch your walks.

  • The House of Hissing Radiators

    by Adam Davis, February 2006

    Coyotes swarm these hills at night in great flurries of electric lantern-light.

  • Catapult

    by Joanne Straley, January 2006

    The flinch of it lingers // As I exchange my insides for the front of the line

  • Keelhauled: Three Poems

    by Julianne Buchsbaum, December 2005

    The sound of wharves aswarm / with rats woke me from stupor.

  • The Beginnings of Stars

    by Russell Thornton, November 2005

    We build a fire which will repeat at night / what the sun did during the day...

  • After History

    by Carol Vanderveer Hamilton, November 2005

    After history we will all drive home alone / through present darkness and impending rain

  • Stone

    by Nurit Zarhi translated from the Hebrew by Tsipi Keller , September 2005

    This is sanity—when love comes—/to offer a bed, a chair,/sustain and raise it like a pet

  • Star

    by Herman Asarnow, September 2005

    At birth a slow star/ bursts inside us

  • Insomnia

    by Robin Beth Schaer, September 2005

    We sleep on stilts, above the floor

  • A Myth of Justice

    by Paul Kane, August 2005

    And so it transpired, richer took from poorer,/ as if politics rules even in death.

  • Still Life with Hatchet and Picasso

    by Eamon Grennan, June 2005

    The midden / of kindling gleams in cloudy sunshine / like bloodless, dismembered flesh and bone

  • Mirror on High

    by Olga Orozco translated from the Spanish by Guillermo Castro and Ron Drummond , June 2005

    perhaps that agate's circular gaze was your gaze, / which from water in the air unfolds itself

  • Spider Web

    by Paula Bohince, June 2005

    The heart is made first, to make a foothold.

  • The Bypass

    by Sandy Tseng, June 2005

    They were children circumnavigating a haunted house, / trekking into private property

  • Two Poems

    by Jean Gallagher, June 2005

    Then you fell / like something fancy and on fire in my lap / and there’s no going home for me.

  • Anton Van Dyck

    by Marcel Proust translated from the French by Richard Howard , May 2005

    Under pines these riders halt beside a brook / calm like them, yet like them close to sobs

  • Why I Don't Worry

    by Ghalib translated from the Urdu by Robert Bly and Sunil Dutta , May 2005

    The sorrows of the world are truly abundant; but wine is abundant too.

  • Midwinter

    by Tomas Tranströmer translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly , May 2005

    A blue glow / Streams out from my clothes. / Midwinter. / A clinking tambour made of ice. / I close my eyes. / Somewhere

  • “Time Is the One Essential Mystery,” Says Jorge Luis Borges

    by Tony Barnstone, May 2005

    Everything tumbles forward end-over-end / like a stone down a mountain. / I keep waking up (it's a pinprick, / like the mosquito that bit me on the neck

  • Ghazal #61: The Fire of Love

    by Farid ad-Din Attar translated from the Arabic by Robert Bly , May 2005

    The sweetest thing in the soul is the fire / Of your love; still sweeter is the fire / Leaping out of the soul from your love

  • Aswim with Happiness

    Four poems by John Brehm, April 2005

    Our ideas leap like fish upstream / to spawn and die in / sunlight / their backs/flecked with blood / their eyes ruinous and open.

  • Ode to the Black Panther

    by Pablo Neruda translated from the Spanish by David Unger , April 2005

    It happened 31 years ago, / I can’t forget it, / in Singapore, the rain / falling / hot like blood / on the ancient white walls

  • Seven Poems

    by Han Shan translated from the Chinese by Tony Barnstone, February 2005

    Like bugs in a bowl / we all day circle, circle / unable to get out.

  • Two Poems

    by Elisabeth Frost, January 2005

    Again I try to explain how all talk is slippery.

  • Noon

    by Quinn Latimer, January 2005

    Already the ship hovers, a soft mark near the harbor, / the ashen shore unsure if it is approaching land / or leaving, its curved back—that long labor—rocking land

  • Weeping Icons

    by Rigoberto González, January 2005

    One stunned passerby will drop a bottle of cranberry juice on the pavement. / You’ll blink, surprised it doesn’t shatter holding in the red lake of its lung.

  • Harvest & Walking Home

    Two Poems by Monica Ferrell, January 2005

    Tonight the lares have eaten their offerings. / The sweetbreads are gone, black kidneys / Infantine and nacred as mollusk-eggs. The smoke / Circles and begins to clear.

  • Said the Leader of the Free World

    Four Poems by Marjorie Agosín translated by Betty Jean Craige and Laura Rocha Nakazawa, January 2005

    History may even forget that tonight / I determined who would live / And who would die

  • From “Four Square Poems”

    Two Poems by Patrice Nganang translated by Cullen Goldblatt, January 2005

    to look for a lifesaving buoy in the flood / the destruction of the last drop of man

  • Absinthe

    by Salavador Novo translated by Rigoberto González, January 2005

    But your eyelids hold such flowery perfume, / that they breed inside my mind the bastard’s doom

  • From “Mozart’s Third Brain”

    by Göran Sonnevi translated by Rika Lesser, January 2005

    in which city do I want to be? / I want to be in the face / between the realms

  • February

    Two Poems by Robert Wrigley, January 2005

    It’s a special kind of frigidity, / a cold no man’s meager skin is match for...

  • Esfera de Vidro em Campo de Batalha

    Two Poems by Flavia Rocha, October 2004

    The sphere rolls a short distance on the grass, / stops. On a sunny morning, a blink, and the sounds – // march, wings fluttering, shells.

  • from “Dark Under Kiganda Stars”

    Three Poems by Lilah Hegnauer, October 2004

    I want this heat, this choice.

  • World Weather Forecast

    Three Poems by Virgil Suàrez, October 2004

    He smells me, / and I in turn smell a faint scent of tumeric, // or bijol, the colorant my mother used / in her paellas, or arroz con pollo dishes.