Laurin Jefferson

Essay on Confessional Poetry: My Eyes Have Seen What My Hand Did

. . . In which the poet recalls one term’s beginnings and proposes a rehabilitation.

What is understood as confessional poetry today does not have much in common with the particular triumphs of its original practitioners.

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose

Kelly Link

Dear Mary (if that is your name),

I bet you’ll be pretty surprised to hear from me. It really is me, by the way,
although I have to confess at the moment that not only can I not seem to keep
your name straight in my head, Laura? Susie? Odile? but I seem to have forgotten
my own name. I plan to keep trying different combinations, Joe loves Lola, Willy
loves Suki, Henry loves you, sweetie, Georgia?, honeypie, darling. Do any of these seem right to you?

Two Shops Dealing in Tie-Dye Fabrics

Jane Miller

In a town famous long ago
for its field of irises and its bridge
with seven sections (like a poem!),
and an annual horse market,

Bells in the Endtime of Gyurmey Tsultrim

Norman Dubie

The bowl made from a tobacco-yellow skull
And the blood of a yearling ox
With seeds of quince floating in it.

Tremendous Vehicles

Thylias Moss

Mama wants to see something else but you know how blood is, tra-la-la, Mama’s driving us to the country ’cause she thinks we need some staid time, tra-la-la, driving by the rural slaughterhouse, tra-la-la. I’m missing the concrete where I wrote: I love me some concrete; miss the teasing traffic lights: go ahead, stop; tight fit of houses, tessellated apartments, looking in Sra. Guzman’s rooms to tell time from her closer clock.

6:27

Geoffrey Nutter

When I get time to play, it’s gonna be just you, me, and the Department of Beer.
Amend that: all of the above, all of the above and more beer, and all of the above and the State of Alaska.
Damn right I don’t rightly know what I’m capable of alone and left to my “devices.”