For November

LINES: THIS LIVING HAND

This living hand, now warm and capable
of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
and in the icy silence of the tomb,
so haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
that thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
so in my veins red life might stream again,
and thou be conscience-calmed— see, here it is—
I hold it towards you.

© John Keats 1820

Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): from Something Solid: Miscellaneous Sonnets: Frequencies

for Mary Walker Graham

I.
“We’re at our most bestial when threatened not
with hatred but indifference; what our blood wants
is reaction of some kind.” New Hampshire night,
our own reaction, you pliant, penetrable, laid out beneath me as
flies fidgeted our room, pirouetted moist air. Yet
we sank beneath bestiality to do just what indifferently
we wanted, beneath our glut of blood, so the summoned
beasts might react with this: ripped limb from limb,
buried in low-lying Virginia swamp marsh, given what
aphorism is only got in extinction, darling, as I quote
what you said at the bar before. In other words, they
hated us. The one-night stand wouldn’t matter if your
brain didn’t have the right words in it: stories, sequences,
slammed-down metaphors of a singed self. Frequencies.

II.
As the world between her legs tightened around
her, what she saw in bed with me was stark: okra,
stamens, roots, all that in nature coalesces in erect
growth; and a shadow father bent, then erect, then
bent again, perverse from amassing wealth in a world
whose submissiveness poisons him. Beneath the sultry,
wooded surface, what I saw was a semi-frightened
animal, along for an all-night ride (gruesomeness of
4 a.m. New Hampshire sun), knife thusly thrusting
into the backs of everyone around her, managing
to have stamina enough against constraint to take
what she was taking. The mattress thumped: above,
an angel was unable to conceal laughter, understanding
it was all in the script, including the garish sun’s leer.

© Adam Fieled 2018-2025

Frequencies II was originally published as Hit or Miss in Otoliths 50 in 2018. 

From American Writing: A Magazine

OCTOBER

These edges
do not chafe.
They flake in my fist.

Even the yellow leaves
have turned to dust beneath the moon,
and like a ghost
that cannot forget,
the oak is tinged
with shadow.

What remains
but a skein of poplars,
like a scar against
the east, and smoke
unpeeling, fragrant
from burnings. I spurn
illusions.

Pools
darken the earth,
before frost
cracks and blackens.

I cover myself.

© Angela Kozol 2001

From Tears in the Fence

THIS IS WHAT THE KID SAID

I am random and barren, swift in the city,
rodent-vermin, summer visitor full of grit
and grind but searching for her to command
me, to royal me, blame me for her alarms.
I am able to do this because she bursts,
uninjured, uninjuring, with a thirst
for unblemished lines, words that bloom all year,
unlike my own that I shed like milk teeth.
I need a challenge, to scour my clarinet,
Issue myself a dozen writs of calumny,
spin her wits on my razor, my bill, the yoke
that broke the day she threw me like a fish, back
into the geyser, all for a bottle of sounds,
of restful refrains, and powder for drying wounds.

© Mark Russell 2014