Another Old Bird Flies Across the River by K.R. Segriff Doris of the frozen roast hurled at the son-of-a-bitch in the produce aisle who talked shit about Gramps. Doris of the palm-tree nails creeping across her buried spine, as she recalls the sensation of touching bone. Doris of the chartreuse bedroom painted a shade Gramps despised while he was off in Verdum with god-knows-who. Doris of the late August veranda, sizzling her skin so dark all the old hens whispered into thei

We're Not Farmers by Diana Park We've been starving for so long. Our voices echo in our bellies, our throats vibrate. We've milked the cow, then sold it. One by one you behead the chickens. I put them in soup so the food will last. What's left are a few hens and one cock. You take the eggs away. To forget, we sleep. Putting o

Waiting on Elvis, 1956 by Joyce Carol Oates This place up in Charlotte called Chuck's where I used to waitress and who came in one night but Elvis and some of his friends before his concert at the Arena, I was twenty-six married but still waiting tables and we got to joking around like you do, and he was fingering the lace edge of my slip where it showed below my hemline and I hadn't even seen it and I slapped at him a little saying, You sure are one aren't you feeling my fa

1999 by A. Van Jordan Prince tour, Public Hall, November 21, 1982 By the time I got here, the album was already history. 1999 dropped in 1982, when I worried about what I’d do with my life after high school, and as I fretted over 
 how my hair looked on mornings 
before I left for school; though, sadly, my worries were not in that order. 
 But when I faced the end of the century, 
 I realized I knew little more then than I did when

Walking with Jesus by Barbara Crooker in the Blue Ridge Mountains, eating corn fritters and okra, passing the black-eyed peas. He loves redbirds and kudzu, all that green tenaciousness. He’s not so much of a fan of men in white sheets, gun racks, the Stars and Bars, but he’s Jesus, so he loves them anyway. The gospel of football eludes him, but he sure likes to tailgate. He tells me that all the commandments are really about sitting with your neighbors on a wide front porch,

I Am Learning to Abandon the World by Linda Pastan I am learning to abandon the world before it can abandon me. Already I have given up the moon and snow, closing my shades against the claims of white. And the world has taken my father, my friends. I have given up melodic lines of hills, moving to a flat, tuneless landscape. And every night I give my body up limb by limb, working upwards across bone, towards the heart. But morning comes with small reprieves of coffee and bir

Ode to a Drone by Amit Majmudar Hell-raiser, razor-feathered risers, windhover over Peshawar, power's joystick-blithe thousand-mile scythe, proxy executioner's proxy ax pinged by a proxy server, winged victory, pilot cipher unburdened by aught but fuel and bombs, fool of God, savage idiot savant sucking your benumbed trigger-finger gamer's thumb Today's blog poem was first published in the book, Dothead , published in 2016 by Knopf Doubleday. You can also read it again here

Things on Fire by Fatima Van Hattum A flat, so small, the stove was also the counter, the rice cooking on the back burner and the cutting board, balanced on the front, red peppers sliced thin one time, I turned my back for a minute to finish the climax to a story, you yelled the cutting board was on fire the door to the shower hit against the toilet and
 you had to turn sideways to get in 
the bathroom was through our bedroom 
I hid under the covers in the morning so your br

ABC by Robert Pinsky Any body can die, evidently. Few Go happily, irradiating joy, Knowledge, love. Many Need oblivion, painkillers, Quickest respite. Sweet time unafflicted, Various world: X=your zenith. This poem was first published in 1999, in The New York Review of Books . Click here to read it there and definitely look around--they publish lots of great poetry and review more books than any of us could possibly ever read. I love reading well-written reviews, and this s