How to Take Over the World
invent a catchy slogan that rhymes with your name buy the best adjectives. think with your penis. swear that poetry is dead kill it with an axe. slap someone across the head. high 5 a stranger. make him miss. grow a porn mustache. grab your crotch when you speak. carry a luggage of verbs do not use them. roll your tongue in the mouth then speak one word. giggle at the news. say hemingway was a pussy. burp when asked your name. are you still with me? grab your crotch...
Read MoreNational Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month in the United States, so Wild Violet will be celebrating by publishing poems daily, rather than our regular weekly posts. We begin with two poems about the transition from winter to spring: Lyn Lifshin’s “On the Afternoon the Geese Come” depicts some of the precursors of warm weather. Peter Layton’s “On a Watch” uses spring imagery to paint a tender picture of loss. Come back tomorrow for more...
Read MoreOn a Watch
The stream swells snowmelt over blankets of pine needles the remembered smells are here embedded in the rough hewn boards’ cabins the upswept mountain flowers strewn. A doe and its fawn may pass looking cautiously between fallen branches and the new growth you and I would walk these trails summer becoming fall then winter. Ice winds and the now scattered sun you’d ask me your thought about questions us in our heavy coats I miss your gray one and...
Read MoreOn the Afternoon the Geese Come
you can smell ice breaking up, scene of watercress uncurling. Only a few months from the longest dark day, willows fling blond tentacles. Wet clay smells sweeter. In blackness past the metro last night, a fingernail moon. Some say it smells wilder than a full moon, that herons listening for fish under the pond’s crust can smell dreams of anything moving
Read MoreThere is a Fine Line Between a Party and a Riot
Most of my words sit like sugar-free mints at the tip of my tongue. Now I encounter athletic words. They push off my restraining grip and climb nimbly to the high board, vaulting, twisting, hurtling through space in showers of sparks. I lurk below, flat-footed. Tame words—cat, chair—wait politely with me on flash cards stapled to construction-paper-covered corkboards. (Overhead projectors may be called into play.) Off the high board comes tintinnabulation! Onomatopoeia! Can I corral their exuberance? My thought balloon lights up. The divers...
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