by McKenzie | Nov 9, 2015 | Poem of the Day Series
THE LITTLE GIRL BY THE FENCE AT SCHOOL Grass that was moving found all shades of brown, moved them along, flowed autumn away galloping southward where summer had gone. And that was the morning someone’s heart stopped and all became still. A girl...
by McKenzie | Nov 8, 2015 | Poem of the Day Series
CROCUS I wanted to stay in the earth: There, I needed no skin—the dark body was all around me. I had no tongue. Above me, sleep, a heaven of snow. Years, years. Then the split, the blue heart lifted almost out—who was coming to save me? How...
by McKenzie | Nov 7, 2015 | Poem of the Day Series
IT BLOWS YOU HOLLOW It takes your bones to bed, tongues out the marrow. Says it will meet you halfway, a hotel deep in Oklahoma where you’ll get adjoining rooms and have a couple of nervous breakdowns. It’s a no-show, waylaid. It orders the...
by McKenzie | Nov 6, 2015 | Poem of the Day Series
VESPERTINE I can still see it, evenings: the sky an orange liquor over the coming dark, a woman brushing the twigs from her hair, dwarf trees sparkling with a lavender mist. But it’s something else, a step into the old, wonderful story in which the...
by McKenzie | Nov 5, 2015 | Poem of the Day Series
EDGES Edges of the field, the blue flowers, the reddish wash of the grasses, the cut green path up to the garden plot overgrown with seedlings and weeds— green first of all, but light, the cut of the sunlight edges each shift of the vivid...
by McKenzie | Nov 4, 2015 | Poem of the Day Series
WHATEVER IT IS A DEAD THING MIGHT DO My iPhone insists I don’t mean “sestina” but instead “destroy,” and I think okay, now that’s something I can easily do: destroy, that is, especially here in November in which a...