POEM OF THE DAY BY PIMONE TRIPLETT

Last Wave

No warning, the fissure, the wave, the wreck, reckoning.

No warning, mantle's woe unto trench maw, bespeaking mega thrust.

And ocean receding, fish flapping in sand, silver.

Till water curved its back, crashed, spurting stones, dogs, shards, children.

Sky, sea, two spools unwinding in wet.

Though tourists were in love, the building-sized blue arc above them.

No warning, TNT force of thirty-two billion tons.

And the father's back slapping hard, water's uppercut coming on full.

And the arms shooting open, the child let go.

And the bellow-fat beast stamping its feet unchained.

Spattering the lime-striated caves, dry a second before.

Though a woman leaps from one rooftop to another, lives.

Though in village legend, long drought follows the flood.

And the tectonic subducts drop-kick one plate against another.

Though a taxi driver pauses over his noodles at the start of thunder.

Though money's made to dance on tables, entertaining locals.

No warning, this fist, signature.

Though seafloor systems exist, pricey items.

Though boys and men run the beach, yelling get back.

And some bodies drag along the coral for miles.

Though one fly rubs its hands.

No warning like a voice turned inward.

Though for two hundred thousand their last taste is salt.

No warning and the voice is as if.

Sky, sea, the two spools unraveling.

The voice breaking, birthing, up-wrathed, out-wrung—

Pimone Triplett

A TINY DROP OF TRUTH

Sometimes The Night's hot whisper
is nothing more than a black snake's hiss of a word
we cannot always quite discern-

a momentary corridor
of connectivity between us
and the haunted darkness
between the stars-

a smooth shiny pebble of a word
barely graspable in its hard
slippery-slopishness

nearly as ethereal on its surface
as the thought
at its dark heart,

a thought with a tiny drop of truth
in its blood, like a poison,
secretly insinuated into
the winding stream of things
in an attempt to stimulate
some sort of healing
between it and the world,

a truth that by fevering up the blood a bit
and dis-quieting deep dreams
and there-by prying open the inner onion-eye
that sleeps, deeply, at the center of the mind
forces itself

to at least be

disbelieved.


-Jason Ryberg, 2010

POEM OF THE DAY BY BRUCE BOND

Hunger

Take this phone face down in its cradle,
the woman there awakened by the bell
that never rings, that sleeps on the table
without the man who broke things off, who calls

back her marriages like abandoned farms
or something cold her mother said. Take
that. Take all the little teeth she frames
in photos, the carpet she pulls in mistaken

hope to bare the beaten slab below.
Or the punished mirror in her trash bin.
Take the stars of every glass she throws
to fate. And so the hour she cannot burn

her hoard of letters but thinks instead of how,
yes, she will buy a dog, something to find
her here this side of the living, for now
there will be another mouth to feed.

And feed it she does: her bones, her hands,
the chest of every pounding door. With each bite,
each morsel of meat she dangles overhead,
there is always a leaping heart to snap it.

And while the dog bears the name of her ex,
she admits nothing, and in weeks to come
he doubles his size, his appetite, the flexing
of her bed, his cry for more blood, more crumbs,

more hide to chew, more squirrels to scatter
with his jaw. For what she does is never
enough to settle the matter, whatever matter
that is, never the thing to douse the fever,

though she cannot give him up, any more
than sacrifice the world they eat. She knows
that now, knows there are nights so mired
in stars and hunger she takes to heart, who’s

to tell him no, no. And the whole yard stirs
to see her bent beneath the day’s fatigue,
a broken gate beside them, her whispering
tenderly into his eyes: bad dog, bad dog.


-Bruce Bond

POEM OF THE DAY BY WALLACE STEVENS

The Snow Man


One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.


-Wallace Stevens

SON OF “IT”

Sometime’s
It comes to us
early in the morning
just before the Boss Man turns on the big light
or the middle of the saddest,
most haunted part of night-

some kind of slavering,
black behemoth, from what little we can see;

all teeth, tusks and talons,
snuffle and snarl
and primal, predatory aura.

A lonesome and sorrowful thing,
that looks to be part wombat,
swamp gator and slithering bottom-dweller,
mandrill, blood hound, wild boar
and raging wooly mammoth,

as well as something distinctly...

other.

Sometimes it batters at the gates
of my brain with its great paws,
and its battering ram of a skull
like the giant fist of an angry
underworld god, shaking the walls
of this remote little city-state of mind.

Sometimes
It just rubs its back up against
the great tree trunk of my spine,
thrumming and thrumming
with what surely must be the funky frequency
of warm fuzzy love,

or, at the very least, the manic need
to satisfy some maddening metaphysical itch
(his or mine, Im never sure).

And, sometimes
it’s content to merely loiter
and look on, inquisitively,
studying our most insignificant routines
from just inside the tree line,
just beyond the reach
of our guard lights,

nothing but your classic “dark silhouette
and glowing set of eyes...”

But, of course, it could never really
charge out of that dark forest
of the wild night world of the soul,

and, by some freak cosmic occurrence
of a just and loving god blinking
or even looking the other way,

make its way into our safe, little,
climate-controlled environment.

Could it?


-Jason Ryberg, 2009

POEM OF THE DAY BY CAMILLE DUNGY

Daisy Cutter

Pause here at the flower stand-mums
and gladiolas, purple carnations

dark as my heart. We are preparing
for a war, and I want to drag home

any distraction I can carry. Tonight
children will wake to bouquets of fire

that will take their breath away. Still,
I think of my life. The way you hold me,

sometimes, you could choke me.
There is no way to protect myself,

except by some brilliant defense. I want
the black iris with their sabered blooms.

I want the flame throwers: the peonies,
the sunflowers. I will cut down the beautiful ones

and let their nectared sweetness bleed
into the careless air. This is not the world

I'd hoped it could be. It is horrible,
the way we carry on. Last night, you catalogued

our arsenal. You taught me that devastation
is a goal we will announce in a celebration

of shrapnel. Our bombs will shower
in anticipation of their marks. You said this

is to assure damage will be widely distributed.
What gruesome genius invents our brutal hearts?

When you touch me I am a stalk of green panic
and desire. Wait here while I decide which

of these sprigs of blossoming heartbreak I can afford
to bring into my home. Tonight dreams will erupt

in chaotic buds of flame. This is the world we have
arranged. It is horrible, this way we carry on.

-Camille Dungy

THE BOSS

THE BOSS from zach rizer on Vimeo.