Table of Contents (in order that should be read)

1. Graham Foust - In the Space Provided

2. Mark Halliday - Summer Perdu

3. John Gallaher - And Generally the Future is Uncertain

4. Christine Garren - Love Poem

5. Graham Foust - Of What Seems Like My Father

6. Franz Wright - Old Story

7. Joel Brouwer - Aesthetics

8. Ted Kooser - Shooting A Farmhouse

9. Franz Wright - How You Will Know Me

10. Graham Foust - Country and Western

11. Norman Dubie - Aciident

12. Zachary Schomburg - Islands in the Black Night

13. Christine Garren - Christmas

14. Mark Levine - Counting the Forests

15. Ralph Angel - In Every Direction

16. Mark Halliday - My Moral Life

17-18. Patrick Lawler - That Was Another Patrick Lawler

19-20. Samuel Coleridge - Kubla Khan

21. Franz Wright - Bild, 1959

22. Zachary Schomberg - Experiments in Invisibility

23. Charles Simic - Old Couple

24. Ted Kooser - Turkey Vultures

25. Keith Waldrop - Proposition 1

26. Wallace Stevens - Disillusionment of 10 O'Clock

27. John Gallaher - It's Any Move, It's That People Are Places

28. Ashley Capps - April

29. Rae Armantrout - Form

30. Michael Burkard - Told Some Realisms and Truisms

31. Ralph Angel - Even Because

32. Joel Brouwer - Lesser Evils

33. Charles Simic - Winter Night

34. Robert Haas - A Story About the Body

35. Christine Garren - The Well

36. Norman Dubie - Poem

37. Michael Burkard - Amends

38. Mark Levine - Eclipse, Eclipse

39. Wallace Stevens - A Postcard from the Volcano

40. Graham Foust - Google

41. Mark Halliday - The Man Who is not at the Table

42. Keith Waldrop - Potential Random # 5

43. Zachary Schomburg - Experiment in Geography

44-46. Patrick Lawler - Patrick Lawler Writes About Patrick Lawler

47. Ashley Capps - Black Ice

48. Wallace Stevens - Hymn for a Watermelon Pavilion

49. Rae Armantrout - Seconds

50. Charles Simic - Gallows Etiquette

51. Keith Waldrop - Potential Random # 1

52-53. Mark Halliday - Nebraska Novel

54. Ashley Capps - Rosa Canina

55. Rae Armantrout - Greeting

56. Keith Waldrop - Potential Random # 2

57. Joel Brouwer - Explanations

58. Graham Foust - Blood Test

59-60. Wallace Stevens - Farewell to Florida

61. Charles Simic - Note Slipped Under a Door

62. Dorianne Laux - How it Will Happen, When

63. John Gallaher - On the Map of the Folded World

64. Mark Halliday - Parkersburg

65. Wallace Stevens - Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

66. Joel Brouwer - Diagnosis

67. Dorianne Laux - Family Stories

68. Christine Garren - Portrait Before Dark

69. Ashley Capps - Encore

70. Mark Halliday - Schnetzer Day

71. Graham Foust - After Aretha Franklin

72-73. John Gallaher - When One has Lived Too Long Among Other People

74-75. Robert Haas - Heroic Simile

76. Franz Wright - To John Wieners: Elegy & Response

77. Michael Burkard - Unappreciated Butterfly

78. Norman Dubie - Sky Harbot

79. Rae Armantrout - Rehearsal

80. Ralph Angel - This

81-82. Ralph Angel - Breaking & Entering

83. Ted Kooser - After Years

84. Zachary Schomburg - Bear and Camper

85. Keith Waldrop - Potential Random # 7

86. Charles Simic - History Book

87. Ashley Capps - Lullaby

88. Ted Kooser - Flying at Night

89. Robert Haas - Meditation at Lagunitas

90. Michael Burkard - Lunar Shoulder

91. Keith Waldrop - Potential Random # 8

92-93. John Gallaher - The Rejected House

94. Michael Burkard - Small Paintings on Paper

95. Ted Kooser - In January

96. Christine Garren - Message

97. Zachary Schomburg - A Band of Owls Moved into Town

98. Joel Brouwer - Serena

99. Wallace Stevens - What is Divinity

100. Graham Foust - Panama

101. Franz Wright - Morning Arrives

102. Keith Waldrop - Potential Random # 9

103-104. Norman Dubie - At Corfu

105. Rae Armantrout - Performers

106. Franz Wright - Domesticity

107. Ashley Capps - Ars Poetica

108. Keith Waldrop - Potential Random # 10

109. Joel Brouwer - Recluse

110. Rae Armantrout - Interval

111. Christine Garren - The Deserted Field

112. Wallace Stevens - The Emperor of Ice Cream

113-114. Rae Armantrout - Manufacturing

115. Robert Haas - Untitled

116-117. Robert Haas - Untitled # 2

118. Ted Kooser - At the Cancer Clinic

119. Ralph Angel - It Takes a While to Disappear

120. Charles Simic - Hotel Insomnia

121. Joel Brouwer - Bridge

122. Ashley Capps - Tar

123-124. Norman Dubie - February: The Boy Breughel

125. Franz Wright - Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse

126. Ted Kooser - Carrie

127. Ralph Angel - Tidy

128-129. Patrick Lawler - Marx Dancing with History meets Marques Dancing with Time

130. Dorianne Laux - Break

131. Christine Garren - The Shore: A Love Poem

132. Charles Simic - The School of Metaphysics

133-135. Samuel Coleridge - A Soliloquy Of The Full Moon, She Being In A Mad Passion

136. Robert Haas - Spring

137. Ashley Capps - My People

138. Joel Brouwer - Childhood

139. Norman Dubie - Not the Bathing Tank at Madras: A Romance

140. Ralph Angel - Man in a Window

141. Mark Halliday - My Strange New Poetry

142. Franz Wright - Auto-Lullaby

143. Christine Garren - The Ritual

144. John Gallaher - Poem for the End of January

145. Graham Foust - Devotio Moderna

146. Michael Burkard - Small and Smaller

147. Charles Simic - Bedtime Story

148. Ted Kooser - Selecting A Reader

148) Selecting A Reader

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.

---Ted Kooser

147) Bedtime Story

When a tree falls in a forest
and there's no one around
to hear the sound, the poor owls
have to do all the thinking.

They think so hard they fall off
their perch and are eaten by ants,
who, as you already know, all look like
Little Black Riding Hoods.

---Charles Simic

146) Small and Smaller

for charles simic

dime store lingo
says make an
early choice between
my kiss and his -
a one-time detective
waits for a rare
bus - an overnight
waitress opens an
umbrella but just to
check it out - no
rain anywhere -
small car with almost
not even a driver
stops to pick her up -
small and smaller -
end of line

---Michael Burkard

145) Devotio Moderna

Who but us
could know wisdom's cut,

the pain of pain's
leaving, same as you?

Who would smooth us to
a circle? You would. You would.

You and your planet. You
and your flagrant blue room.

---Graham Foust

144) Poem for the End of January

In the wind, the so-much wind,
call them a couple people in winter,
dark against the snow.

What has who they are to do with it,
this winter wind,
this calling them?

What has who we imagine them to be
to do with it,
in the elocution of the wind,

to speak the countable trees up and down
in a glaze of snow over ice,
without sanctuary?

As seeing is further surfaces.
And when it is done,
we all have new names.

What has winter to do with it?
What has the wind
to do with it?

This performance in pale hues.
Some calendar photograph. Some figures
in morning snow.

Which is dark against light. Which is
that I don't mean any of this.
It's winter. I'm reading from the script.

---John Gallaher

143) The Ritual

We left early in the morning and walked across a field
and at last came to a stream
and sat down on the bank and looked over it.
In one gray pool we saw our forms,
blown there like dark glass. Over us,
the planes were taking their passengers into the city
and etched in the sky were their shaken lines of exhaust--
while we floated together on the water, rested--
her shoulders on the liquid, our hands too,
before the other shore as if betrothed.

---Christine Garren

142) Auto-Lullaby

Think of a sheep
knitting a sweater;
think of your life
getting better and better.

Think of your cat
asleep in a tree;
think of that spot
where you once skinned your knee.

Think of a bird
that stands in your palm.
Try to remember
the Twenty-first Psalm.

Think of a big pink horse
galloping south;
think of a fly, and
close your mouth.

If you feel thirsty,
then drink from your cup.
The birds will keep singing
until they wake up.

---Franz Wright

141) My Strange New Poetry

In my strange new poetry the lines will be black
and long. They will be dense with not ordinary life
but the wiry vitalism of a guy in a Pirates cap
heaving a pink rubber ball against the side of a drugstore
at midnight. There will be sentences but not
only, not always, not just properly, some stray dog
will skitter through the torn fence beside the polluted river
to half bark half growl at kids in a metal dinghy.
"Gimme the worms, Jody. Gimme those worms!"
You, you won't quite know what you think--
you won't nod your old professional approval
but like if a tall stranger in tight jeans
suddenly in the kitchen at a party touched your neck
and kissed you hard or said "You stupid bastard"
you'll step back and a minute later still feel hot
and not forget the damn poem with its nettles.
You'll sway in it like trying to move through
a rocking Amtrak express halfway to the cooked city
with both your hands out and balance turned into
mostly raw luck plus nerve - it won't be
allegorical for you, no way, it grins
and calls you Big Shot and you narrow your eyes
like a Cherokee hearing the wrong footsteps.
Gime those worms, Jody. The back lot of
the Ramblin' Root Beer distributor has for some reason
two goats in it and in my new black lines
they too get expressed, It's a thickness
and a dark kind of living in the words
in my strange new poetry that soon I put
right on paper, next week or sooner than that.

---Mark Halliday

140) Man in a Window

The morning’s mail rises up the stairwell
with its simple breakfast; postage from Gambia
rivaling the khaki toast and jam, pomegranate
for importance both of paint
and shrinking perspective. The orchid goes
nervous in its stringy waist
for the master does not answer
Gertie’s repeated knocking. Her husband

rests a wooden ladder
against the evidence of black glass;
making a mask
with his large hands against the new sun,
he peers into the locked room
tapping on the window with an appropriate

rhythm that reminds him
of haying bells. He then begins his descent
wondering if with old Harold dead
will the younger master
leave him to starve
out among the rocks of a yawning heath.

His good foot, which is only middling today,
is testing the air
for a ladder rung or the untimely lawn
while he begins to fall
toward a railing of iron lilies and javelins.

The orchid on its pewter tray
screams waking old Harold
who farts so loudly
that Gertie begins to laugh and cry
from her hallway,
now greeting the unlikely Lord
who opens the door to his cool dark tank
as if it were a solemn medieval lake.

---Ralph Angel

139) Not the Bathing Tank at Madras: A Romance

The morning’s mail rises up the stairwell
with its simple breakfast; postage from Gambia
rivaling the khaki toast and jam, pomegranate
for importance both of paint
and shrinking perspective. The orchid goes
nervous in its stringy waist
for the master does not answer
Gertie’s repeated knocking. Her husband

rests a wooden ladder
against the evidence of black glass;
making a mask
with his large hands against the new sun,
he peers into the locked room
tapping on the window with an appropriate

rhythm that reminds him
of haying bells. He then begins his descent
wondering if with old Harold dead
will the younger master
leave him to starve
out among the rocks of a yawning heath.

His good foot, which is only middling today,
is testing the air
for a ladder rung or the untimely lawn
while he begins to fall
toward a railing of iron lilies and javelins.

The orchid on its pewter tray
screams waking old Harold
who farts so loudly
that Gertie begins to laugh and cry
from her hallway,
now greeting the unlikely Lord
who opens the door to his cool dark tank
as if it were a solemn medieval lake.

---Norman Dubie

138) Childhood

Surrounded by ragweed and burdock. The silo, crumbling then,
invisible now. A nimbus of squirrel skulls glowing yellow in
the dirt. My memory as empty. Did I climb to the barn's lightning
rod, or just threaten? We weren't farmers. In summer, the
dead man's fields, ours via probate caprice, sprouted gladiolus,
blueberried, rhubarb. We watched bewildered, filled vases and
bowls, but most of it rotted where it stood. The daffodils still
come up without me to cut, rubber-band, and sell them by the
roadside. Four cars a day came by. Here's the rusty coffe can I
dreamed full of dimes.

---Joel Brouwer

137) My People

We bury the sofa for no good reason
Who poisoned Jim's meds
Who pistol-whipped Stick's buddy's sister
Who lashed those cumulonimbus
clouds to the highway, Lord?
We pray for our enemies
We pray for the elms and the poplars
We are some damn switch hitters
The sky, the sky, we always say
You can hear the knife slide through the sun.

---Ashley Capps

136) Spring

Today his body is consigned to the flames
And I begin to understand why people
Would want to carry a body to the river’s edge
And build a platform of wood and burn it
In the wind and scatter the ashes in the river.
As if to say, take him, fire, take him, air,
And, river, take him. Downstream. Downstream.
Watch the ashes disappear in the fast water
or, in a small flaring of anger, turn away, walk back
toward the markets and the hum of life, not quite
saying to yourself There, the hell with it, it’s done.
I said to him once, when he’d gotten into some scrape
Or other, “You know, you have the impulse control
Of a ferret.” And he said, “Yeah? I don’t know
What a ferret is, but I get greedy. I don’t mean to,
But I get greedy.” An old grubber’s beard, going grey,
A wheelchair, sweats, a street person’s baseball cap.
“I’ve been thinking about Billie Holiday, you know
if she were around now, she’d be nothing. You know
what I mean? Hip-hop? Never. She had to be born
at a time when they were writing the kind of songs
and people were listening to the kind of songs
she was great at singing.” And I would say,
“You just got evicted from your apartment,
you can’t walk, and you have no money, so
I don’t want to talk to you about Billie Holiday
Right now, OK.” And he would say, “You know,
I’m like Mom. I mean, she really had a genius
For denial, don’t you think? And the thing is.
You know, she was a pretty happy person.”
And I would say, “She was not a happy person.
She was panicky and crippled by guilt at her drinking,
Hollowed out by it, honeycombed with it,
And she was evasive to herself about herself,
And so she couldn’t actually connect with anybody,
And her only defense was to be chronically cheerful.”
And he would say, “Worse things than cheerful.”
Well, I am through with those arguments,
Except in my head, though I seem not to be through with the habit—
I thought this poem would end downstream downstream—
of worrying about where you are and how you’re doing.

---Robert Haas

133, 134, & 135) A Soliloquy Of The Full Moon, She Being In A Mad Passion

Now as Heaven is my Lot, they're the Pests of the Nation!
Wherever they can come
With clankum and blankum
'Tis all Botheration, & Hell & Damnation,
With fun, jeering
Conjuring
Sky-staring,
Loungering,
And still to the tune of Transmogrification--
Those muttering
Spluttering
Ventriloquogusty
Poets
With no Hats
Or Hats that are rusty.
They're my Torment and Curse
And harass me worse
And bait me and bay me, far sorer I vow
Than the Screech of the Owl
Or the witch-wolf's long howl,
Or sheep-killing Butcher-dog's inward Bow wow
For me they all spite--an unfortunate Wight.
And the very first moment that I came to Light
A Rascal call'd Voss the more to his scandal,
Turn'd me into a sickle with never a handle.
A Night or two after a worse Rogue there came,
The head of the Gang, one Wordsworth by name--
`Ho! What's in the wind?' 'Tis the voice of a Wizzard!
I saw him look at me most terribly blue !
He was hunting for witch-rhymes from great A to Izzard,
And soon as he'd found them made no more ado
But chang'd me at once to a little Canoe.
From this strange Enchantment uncharm'd by degrees
I began to take courage & hop'd for some Ease,
When one Coleridge, a Raff of the self-same Banditti
Past by--& intending no doubt to be witty,
Because I'd th' ill-fortune his taste to displease,
He turn'd up his nose,
And in pitiful Prose
Made me into the half of a small Cheshire Cheese.
Well, a night or two past--it was wind, rain & hail--
And I ventur'd abroad in a thick Cloak & veil--
But the very first Evening he saw me again
The last mentioned Ruffian popp'd out of his Den--
I was resting a moment on the bare edge of Naddle
I fancy the sight of me turn'd his Brains addle--
For what was I now?
A complete Barley-mow
And when I climb'd higher he made a long leg,
And chang'd me at once to an Ostrich's Egg--
But now Heaven be praised in contempt of the Loon,
I am I myself I, the jolly full Moon.
Yet my heart is still fluttering--
For I heard the Rogue muttering--
He was hulking and skulking at the skirt of a Wood
When lightly & brightly on tip-toe I stood
On the long level Line of a motionless Cloud
And ho! what a Skittle-ground! quoth he aloud
And wish'd from his heart nine Nine-pins to see
In brightness & size just proportion'd to me.
So I fear'd from my soul,
That he'd make me a Bowl,
But in spite of his spite
This was more than his might
And still Heaven be prais'd! in contempt of the Loon
I am I myself I, the jolly full Moon.

---Samuel Coleridge

132) The School of Metaphysics

Executioner happy to explain
How his wristwatch works
As he shadows me on the street.
I call him that because he is grim and officious
And wears black.

The clock on the church tower
Had stopped at five to eleven.
The morning newspapers had no date.
The gray building on the corner
Could've been a state pen,

And then he showed up with his watch,
Whose Gothic numerals
And the absence of hands
He wanted me to understand
Right then and there.

---Charles Simic