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Confessional

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  • Poem

    Take the I Out

    By Sharon Olds
    But I love the I, steel I-beam
    that my father sold. They poured the pig iron
    into the mold, and it fed out slowly,
    a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,
    Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he
    marketed it, and bought bourbon, and...
  • Poem

    Calling Things What They Are

    By Ada Limón
    I pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later I yell, Mourning dove afterparty! (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground the afterparty.) I am getting so good at watching that...
  • Poem

    Gratitude

    By Cornelius Eady
    I’m here
                 to tell you 
                                 an old story. 
                                 This
    Appears to be
                     my work.
                                    I live
                                    in the world,
    Walk
             the streets…
  • Poem

    Enter the Dragon

    By John Murillo
    For me, the movie starts with a black man
    Leaping into an orbit of badges, tiny moons

    Catching the sheen of his perfect black afro.
    Arc kicks, karate chops, and thirty cops

    On their backs. It starts with the swagger,
    The cool lean into the...
  • Poem

    Crip vs. Crip

    By Walela Nehanda
    Crip (noun): slang for a disabled person/the whole of
         the disabled community/
    a school of thought
    Example: “I’m on crip time” 
    Meaning: Time bends differently when the universe that is
         my body dictates it 

    Crip (noun): a Black gang that originated in...
  • Poem

    Into the Weeds

    By Kevin Prufer
    The brutality of those two men
                                                     who broke into her apartment
    and murdered her boyfriend,
           ...
  • Poem

    Meditation During the Sufferings and Deaths of Others

    By Sharon Olds
    I did not deserve to be beaten,
    and I did not deserve ballet lessons––
    except insofar as everyone deserves ballet lessons.
    Me mum thought I was well worth beating.
    She would not have thought that I deserved to starve.
    I deserved the milk in her...
  • Poem

    The Skokie Theater

    By Edward Hirsch
    Twelve years old and lovesick, bumbling
    and terrified for the first time in my life,
    but strangely hopeful, too, and stunned,
    definitely stunned—I wanted to cry,
    I almost started to sob when Chris Klein
    actually touched me—oh God—below the belt
    in the back row of the...
  • Poem

    The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator

    By Anne Sexton
    The end of the affair is always death.   
    She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,   
    out of the tribe of myself my breath   
    finds you gone. I horrify
    those who stand by. I am fed.   
    At night, alone, I marry the bed.

    Finger to finger, now she’s mine.   
    She’s...
  • Poem

    In Celebration of My Uterus

    By Anne Sexton
    Everyone in me is a bird.
    I am beating all my wings.   
    They wanted to cut you out   
    but they will not.
    They said you were immeasurably empty   
    but you are not.
    They said you were sick unto dying   
    but they were wrong.
    You are singing like a...
  • Poem

    Menstruation at Forty

    By Anne Sexton
    I was thinking of a son.
    The womb is not a clock
    nor a bell tolling,
    but in the eleventh month of its life
    I feel the November
    of the body as well as of the calendar.
    In two days it will be my birthday
    and as...
  • Poem

    Crossing the Atlantic

    By Anne Sexton
    We sail out of season into an oyster-gray wind,   
    over a terrible hardness.
    Where Dickens crossed with mal de mer
    in twenty weeks or twenty days
    I cross toward him in five.
    Wrapped in robes—
    not like Caesar but like liver with bacon—
    I rest on the...
  • Poem

    The Room of My Life

    By Anne Sexton
    Here,
    in the room of my life
    the objects keep changing.
    Ashtrays to cry into,
    the suffering brother of the wood walls,
    the forty-eight keys of the typewriter
    each an eyeball that is never shut,
    the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest,   
    the black chair, a...
  • Poem

    Wanting to Die

    By Anne Sexton
    Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
    I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.   
    Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

    Even then I have nothing against life.
    I know well the grass blades you mention,   
    the furniture you have placed under the...
  • Poem

    With Mercy for the Greedy

    By Anne Sexton
    Concerning your letter in which you ask   
    me to call a priest and in which you ask   
    me to wear The Cross that you enclose;   
    your own cross,
    your dog-bitten cross,
    no larger than a thumb,
    small and wooden, no thorns, this rose—

    I pray to its...
  • Poem

    The Starry Night

    By Anne Sexton
    The town does not exist
    except where one black-haired tree slips
    up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
    The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.   
    Oh starry starry night! This is how
    I want to die.

    It moves. They are all...
  • Poem

    Music Swims Back to Me

    By Anne Sexton
    Wait Mister. Which way is home?   
    They turned the light out
    and the dark is moving in the corner.   
    There are no sign posts in this room,   
    four ladies, over eighty,
    in diapers every one of them.
    La la la, Oh music swims back to me   
    and...
  • Poem

    The Moss of His Skin

    By Anne Sexton
    It was only important
    to smile and hold still,
    to lie down beside him
    and to rest awhile,
    to be folded up together
    as if we were silk,
    to sink from the eyes of mother   
    and not to talk.
    The black room took us
    like a cave or a...
  • Poem

    Her Kind

    By Anne Sexton
    I have gone out, a possessed witch,   
    haunting the black air, braver at night;   
    dreaming evil, I have done my hitch   
    over the plain houses, light by light:   
    lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.   
    A woman like that is not a woman, quite.   
    I have been...
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