Here comes some modern poetry

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

DO NOT SHOOT ME, BUT HERE COMES SOME MODERN POETRY!
Take note please that I will be extremely selective in poems that I dare to present.
Will do my best not to present any of the 99.7 % that is pure gobblygook , sprayed over with rose perfume and set in a pretty glass bottle.
I found this modern poem and saw right off that its very, very good even tho' it is quite modern..
And yes, I am very biased against what the powers that be in poetry are lauding as great in these modern times...
As truly most of it is trash and does so well represents the very limited minds and barely educated buffoons in charge of illuminating the world with top level poetry..
Contest me on this and I'll be forced to prove it but the many horrific examples would bore you to tears and perhaps even madness, methinks..-Tyr

http://www.thrushpoetryjournal.com/m...ames-hoch.html

Return to March 2017 Edition


James Hoch
​

Parking Garage
by James Hoch

In the end you have to go home.
You have to leave the hospital room

where you stand bedside, though
there’s no bed anymore, which

an hour ago was hers. In the end
nothing belonging to no body,

hers no longer hers, you must head
down the ramp, through the sliding

glass doors and cheap fluorescence
of a gray garage, and find the car

she parked somewhere weeks ago.
Which level? Which space?

You ask someone in scrubs for help,
and she can see you are not right

and gentle with your notrightness.
You are saying nothing new.

You are a son; your mother has died.
All you need to do is find the car.

But you can’t even, and break again–
It will be this way awhile:

Driving down the turnpike, tired of
feeling rented, chemo urine talc

stubborn in the leather, you tell yourself
your body needs to be yours again–

Then relief, guilt, a profusion
filling the car. But all that’s fiction,
​
a person you have yet to become.
Right now, grief is simple: Find the car,

let the engine run some, take care
not to damage anything on the way out.




James Hoch’s poems have appeared in The New Republic, Washington Post, Slate, Chronicle Review of Higher Education, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review and many other magazines. His first book, A Parade of Hands, won the Gerald Cable Award and was published in March 2003 by Silverfish Review Press. His most recent book is Miscreants (WW Norton, 2007). He has received fellowships from the NEA, Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers conferences, St Albans School for Boys, Summer Literary Seminars. Currently, he is Professor of Creative Writing at Ramapo College of NJ and Guest Faculty at Sarah Lawrence.




Return to March 2017 Edition

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Another one, stunningly good..-Tyr

http://www.boxcarpoetry.com/037/champion_anne_001.html

The Hilton Conjoined Twins
by ANNE CHAMPION

Beauty isn't pain, as they always told us.
Pain is pain. We looked so beautiful
in our plump, starched petticoats
that we became a giant cupcake, two
dollops of frosting on top in the shape
of bows. And later, the coal black eyeliner,
the flapper girl fringe, and the knee high
leather boots—we were two bad girls
in cahoots, whispering our lusts
to one another, then shimmying behind
whorls of smoke. We sang with high pitched
canary voices about love and heartbreak,
but we didn't know the first thing about loneliness.
It was all an act: the children begged
for autographs, the men demanded
we lift our skirts, show exactly
where we were glued. Only pain is pain.
We shared slopes of skin, choreographed
our four legs like tangled gymnasts,
slid into spotlights double-wide
and innocent eyed. When we curtseyed,
their applause made the tent tremble and purr.
We longed for the man who swallowed fire,
doodled our names with his last name
in our diaries, and when our bodies
blossomed, every man we coaxed
with our twenty fingers of longing
was him, snuffing out the flame
in his stomach, pulling it up reignited—
men were nothing short of magic,
and we were a double scooped
ice cream cone made to share.
Beauty is not pain. We tried to marry
some of them, but every judge
called us indecent, incestuous.
Secretly, they wanted to watch us:
who could condemn a threesome forced
by God? When the curtains fell, when our manager
ran off with our money, when the drive-in
movies replaced the stage, only then
did we daydream about cuts—when one
of us would slice her finger on the paper
grocery bags at work, we'd look at each other
in awe. It could be so gentle, a swift slice of skin.
Scalpels dangled over our dreams
like baby mobiles over a crib, metal clangs
soothing us to sleep. When one of us starts
to vomit, the other hums jazz: the show
is over. We charm no one. Our bodies
ache. We know that when one of us dies,
the other will bear her like an anchor,
until she pulls us both under.
Only pain is pain.





Anne Champion is the author of Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013) and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Pinch, Pank Magazine, Thrush Poetry Journal, Redivider, New South, and elsewhere. She was a recipient of the Academy of American Poet's Prize, a recipient of the Barbara Deming Memorial grant, a 2015 Best of the Net winner, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a St. Botolph Emerging Writer's Grant nominee, and a Squaw Valley Community of Writers Poetry Workshop participant. She currently teaches writing and literature at Wheelock College in Boston, MA. Visit her online at www.anne-champion.com.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.boxcarpoetry.com/037/emme...amson_001.html

ANGELA WILLIAMSON EMMERT

How Every Day I Fed You
(during those days of horror)
and Still You Did Not Love Me

How I fed you every day through the worst
winter we could remember when we heard
wolves that cried to a white quartz moon
and the night was so cold it became us
and we were the cold and were swept up
to the sky like spirits and would have
surely died but we were not hungry
and that was what held us to earth.

How we brought the chickens to live
in the house and dug in the snow to feed
them and I begged them to lay oh please
lay oh please lay and the soft letting go
when you ate one - how the eggs when
they came felt like love.

How in the spring when the light spoke of
living and the earth spoke of living and we
spoke of living you carried supplies
to survivors who opened their doors
with their children half-starved and
you were the light and the green
of your coat was the color of hope
and was it for this that you left me?

And now what you said still clings to my skin
and the earth will not feed me and the sky
will not have me and the light will not
touch me and I will know hunger
without you

************************************************** **********************

Hard to find in modern poetry but some gems do exist..--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.boxcarpoetry.com/037/pryor_caitlin_001.html

CAITLIN PRYOR

For You, in the County Jail

It floods, as all things do in the end.
A critter thrusts his heft into the confines

of your cell and there you are
to love it. The toad submits to your will,

loafs geode-like in the clutch of a paper cup.
Where once as a boy you would have recreated

his natural habitat, as our joke goes, with a single twig
and lone oak leaf, today you have nothing to offer

this warty soul. The cottonwoods cry and you
are behind bars—are there bars anymore?

Or is that mere poignancy: the film star's soft hands
fondling the steel as he speaks, screams, let me out.

Let me in, I'd like to say. Let me in says the tiny toad
flushed under the door by May's outrageous rain,

let me in. Are you hungry, I wonder. Are you tired,
are you terrified, are you fine. No pets allowed

the wardens shrill, no succor now, for you—your eyes
aglow, your veins full of whiskey—slipped

behind that slippery wheel, an idiot,
a mirage, a speck of hope gone rogue.

Do you belong here. Does the creature
whose throat shudders like a tired balloon.

What are you, knight errant who fills
my nights with questions, my lungs with smoke.

Here is the church, here is the steeple.
Here is a jail and here

a squad car—open them. Go on:
number each misstep like a dim star—

you know their pulse, daring,
already dead behind those cinder blocks

that hold you. Let me in.
Let me out the crystal snickers, incarcerated

in its gray hide, erupting like bad cement.
Let me out say your bones, let me out

creaks the toad. When will you upend
his little prison and where my god will he go.

What will I find when I break you
open. Your big, bloody heart

counting my own: syllables in a poem,
a nest of opal, chalcedony, quartz.


Caitlin Pryor's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Cold Mountain Review, Nimrod, The Mississippi Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of The Mississippi Review Prize, The Ron McFarland Prize for Poetry, and an Avery Hopwood Award. She holds a PhD from The University of North Texas, where she is currently a lecturer in the Department of English. (www.caitlinpryor.com)