Aubade On East 12th Street

The skylight silvers
and a faint shudder from the underground
travels up the building’s steel.

Dawn breaks across this wilderness
of roofs with their old wooden storage tanks
and caps of louvered cowlings

moving in the wind. Your back,
raised hip and thigh
well-tooled as a rounded baluster

on a lathe of shadow and light.


- August Kleinzahler





Meditations in a Swine Yard

A god isn’t worth the salt
In our bread if we can’t
Stamp our feet & shake a balled fist
At eaters of the brightest insects

On their first day here.
Sometimes we must tug him out
Into the hog’s bloody mud.
His beauty is our blue

Derision, like a child banging
Her rag doll against the floor,
Calling for Daddy. A god isn’t worth
A drop of water in the hell of his good

Imagination, if we can’t curse
Sunsets & threaten to forsake him
In his storehouse of belladonna,
Tiger hornets, & snakebites.


- Yusef Komunyakaa




Manhattan Island Poem

Thin river woman with a concrete star
wedged in her ear. I wrap
a blue scarf of old movies around my eyes.
At night I am a jar of fireflies dying.

- Gregory Orr

Source: Moments In Erasure

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