And I wondered if I was awake or asleep, if it was the moon's paleness or Lucifer's, if it was midnight or dawn!

“She’s trying to paint me into a corner with her question mark army. She’s wanting to light my pants on fire. She seems super mad at me.“

It was all a bullfight in the end—/The smell of death contends/With rain, and more blood than/We can measure or imagine is/Surrounded by spinning black/Umbrellas—

What if I said / I will never / talk to stone / brush grown to a golden / edge needs sing all night / who care?

“Ah, but what if we — [gestures at the ‘painting’] what if it — were to invite nonsense…embrace nonsense…produce nonsense…even mean nonsense?”

Sometimes, when the origin of ideas of the sublime and the beautiful / are struck by lightning, I root into the hail of stones / at the precise center of the world / and sink into that dust.

To simply be a part of the changing afternoon light  The old man I see / in my visions is composed of all the days / in between  Your sense/awareness of who you are cannot be confined within / language  You go up to Medicine Bow / and open the sky and step through

A selection from Bret Schneider’s poetry cycle, Poems of the Drone Years

Better a handful / of calm than / two of clutching / at the wind….

Two new poems by Joel Newberger, read at the Caesura issue 1 event.

Then, early one morning, as the night was thinning out; as — like a ball of alms rice whitened with yogurt in the hand of the mendicant called Time; like a lump of foam on the dark river of the night sky; like a fragment of the celestial nymph Menakā’s white crystal nail file; dappled as beautifully as a honeycomb

I am stupid, I am ungifted, I am awkward, but I pray to you, tall spruces. I am quite awkward, I am… a coward. Yesterday, I was frightened of a man I don't respect. It's because of my cowardice that I can't learn to ride a bicycle. I haven't enough will power for anything, but I pray to you, tall spruces.

“I decided early that poetry is made of exact details.” Ultimately, in his poetry, [Flora’s] details are raised far beyond prosaic, everyday specification, simple catalogues of what make up, to use the title of one of his early books, The Physical World (1977).

I want to follow the paths of the stars, I tell myself. But this is not true. I want them to follow me. After all, the Earth is the center of the universe, and, as I am the center of the Earth, the universe revolves around me.

Two men on opposite end of screen faced each other in hieroglyphic pose; fists and elbows raised swaying in geometries as yet to me unschooled.

The act of writing, as Mancinelli conceives of it, takes her into her darkroom, a “place of the unknown, where [her] demons nestle [and her] most tenacious and impenetrable shadows [can be found].”

Selections from Intact (2018) by Claudia Masin, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers.

Today I begin in earnest. What does it matter that my thoughts are clouded? A light will shine through in the end.

I loved Kent's ability to use the poetic art form to criticize not poetry itself, but the popular trends that muddy and obscure poetry by forcing all of us to dig through the garbage to find actual substance.

“From One Hundred Poems from the Chinese” doesn’t aspire to the brevity and concision of classical Chinese poetry. They’re relatively long, jumping between themes and styles, and always very funny.