these tender girls tears recent / with stained souls, brides of dead, / cadaverous Erebus; unguarded ladder / long the down going…came Anticlea then

INSTRUCTIONS: To all students, please address your index card: "To the Finder of this Balloon." Beneath that, write something that will encourage the finder to email you back. Then tape the index card to your balloon's string.Happy Ballooning! To the Finder…

did I read that right?

My sixth grade teacher used to tell us all the time about how being poor is nowhere near the same as liv­ing in poverty.

So where does that leave me, Roscoe Loomis wondered, dismounting his silver, aluminum steed in his sweat-soaked, spandex outfit, and, clearing the saliva from his beard he walked over, checked and smiled, learning that the bike track's timing unit showed it was Roscoe's…

Being an uncredited bonus composition, written in the sublimest access of divine afflatus this poet believes his lyric verse has ever known. “In olden times, dark was not counted fair”: Those were the words, I think, of some old poet. …

Removing the deeply embedded jack-blade frommy naked side, like any slicked-upsplinter, was just a bit jarring on the first bite, on first try, I must admit. I freelydo so now to your frozen-over faces. You made your…

We can’t just bomb Berlin or Dresden,/ Nagasaki or Hanoi, to make things safe

If I remember him at all it’s because I decided not to flunk him so he could graduate. I had this theory that teachers should be bound by the same oath as doctors, First, do no harm.

Let me swim into your eyes. Let me show you my world. My album. My Albania. My albumen.

One day, my feet and hands got into an argument. My feet argued that they were superior because they were not only the foundation of my body, but the cause of its mobility. They were modest in size, yet supported and transported an entire body that towered over them.…

Or, do my own red flags counter balance his. My back and forth, my restlessness, my one foot out the door, my ‘once a leaver… always a leaver’, my pitter patter for a former flame... peppered with my transgressions, my mistakes. Or, worse, the way I have

It will always be this way/ won’t it, she said. Me insecure, you unfaithful

philanthropy corrugated with a smirk / printed aside every cardboard box and room / every cardboard house with every cardboard door.

I was in life, in my dream. I was feeling around underneath your clothing. My fingers were shining in the underwater afterlife of memory, searching for those lovely nipple-sized mollusks. I lived in a land somewhere between the past and the future. Now