Category

Simile

Showing 1-20 of 127 results
  • Poem
    By Raúl Zurita
    Translated By William Rowe
    And then rained down from ferocious clouds
    our empty pupils heard the suspended breakers
    beat while down…
  • Poem
    By Joshua Seigal
    I don’t like similes.Every time I try to think of onemy brain feels like a vast, empty desert;my eyes…
  • Poem
    By Ada Limón
    Is it okay to begin with the obvious? I am full of stones—
                is it okay not to look out this window, but to look out another?

    A mentor once said, You can't start a poem...
  • Poem
    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
    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
    By Ama Codjoe
    1.

    He had a caribou's face. Once he let me 
    lick the sadness there. It tasted of salt

    and moss-covered rocks. He grew the beard
    of a mountain goat. He scaled the face

    of a mountain. Lying beside him, I stared
    into the face of faceless...
  • Poem
    By Lynn Emanuel
    Love is boring and passé, all that old baggage,
    the bloody bric-a-brac, the bad, the gothic,
    retrograde, obscurantist hum and drum of it
    needs to be swept away. So, night after night,
    we sit in the dark of the Roxy beside grandmothers
    with their shanks...
  • Poem
    By Justin Phillip Reed
    There it goes, thin thing,
                  cheshiring between trees
                                whose reaper-robes trail
                         ...
  • Poem
    By Aria Aber
    Over Skype, I try to document my mother’s
    bald-shaved youth—she has a surplus in truths,
    and science has proven what it had to prove:
    every helicopter-screech I dreamed of was my mother’s first.
    Rippling my dumb hand, I wake up in childhood’s crypt,
    where prayer...
  • Poem
    By H.D.
    Over and back,
    the long waves crawl
    and track the sand with foam;
    night darkens and the sea
    takes on that desperate tone
    of dark that wives put on
    when all their love is done.

    Over and back,
    the tangled thread falls slack,
    over and up and on;
    over and...
  • Poem
    By Beth Ann Fennelly
    reveals itself in retrospect. Unlike the first,
    whose March arrival bade you gasp, hands clasped,
    like a child actor instructed to show joy, when the last
    departs for points south, there’s no telling,
    and no tell. Well, so what? You know their cycle.
    In August,...
  • Poem
    By Reginald Dwayne Betts
    [An Outline for a Film]

    A woman leans against a man who leans
    against a brick wall watching cars stop like dead men
    on this one-way street. Some dude glares
    like O-Dog from Menace, his face towards some street
    we'll never remember where a man...
  • Poem
    By Tom Andrews
    1.

                         Day brings a steady
    hand, a sure breath every other day ...

    My brother again on the edge of his bed,
    sitting up with his eyes closed,
    his palms pressed, a brief prayer.

       ...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Positivity

    By D. A. Powell
    “Anyway, it isn’t forever,” Chris said,
    “eventually you’re dead.” And we laughed

    Besides, everything is better now. Not us
    but implants, blenders, children, heart attacks.
    There’s never been a better time to be alive
    than when you are. If you are. Black-throated
    blue warbler says chewchewchewchewchewww
    drawing...
  • Poem
    By Ruth Awad
    Days of rain. The drey outside my window would keel
    and the wind would plunder. My heart was valent
    with possibility: I could be anyone now, half woman,
    half asterism. Fragmental as a new year. Patron saint
    of the rutilant and cindering. I could...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    First of December

    By Natalie Shapero
    God come on stop cutting me
    out of your photos God stop dragging
    the mouse around my shopworn
    body like a chalk outline then clicking fill
    with background God I know

    that times are tight I know you only
    made one death per person I’m sorry
    to...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Metonymy

    By Richard Siken
    Someone wheeled me to the curb. A different friend helped me into a car. We got to the condo and managed to get me down the stairs, into the living room, where I fell asleep on a mattress we put...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Tartarean Sun

    By Kara Krewer
    Under which she pruned
    the peach trees and a tiny gateway
    opened in her spine. That pain
    distilled there like a drop
    of molten glass. And was the first of many
    chambers to form.

    There was her bedroom,
    where she bloomed
    in the white fog of sleep
    and so...
  • Poem
    By Genevieve Arlie
    The geometer wishes he were David
    cut from stone by lightning, his mind

    gyring wide into figures of space
    out of time, ever gauging the shock

    of the word for the pathos, ever
    slinging the rock of his wound

    at the sugared glass of me.
    I'd rather...
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