Why
Why? by Alex Gross Email Share You’ve asked me already. Yet you want to know. What need have you to question Everything I say and do? Being conventional is overrated. Why? you ask. Because I must be myself. Do I Tell you to learn to play An […]
Where Are You
Where Are You? by Alex Gross Email Share This is the time when I text you I’m bored in this hallway all alone. I need to see your familiar smiley face emoticon But you’re not here, Where Are You? This is the time when you call me. […]
Tell Me
Tell Me by Alex Gross Email Share Don’t walk away from me. I’m trying to talk to you. I know what you’re feeling, But I don’t know what is Going on in your head. Please tell me. It’s obvious I’ve upset you, So don’t pretend I haven’t. […]
Teacher
Teacher by Alex Gross Email Share I remember when I feared you. I Always thought I was inferior, And that sooner or later, you would Find out. I remember when I distrusted you. I always thought I was wrong in some Way. And that sooner or later, […]
Sleep
Sleep by Alex Gross Email Share I’m waiting for you to come to me. I’ve done everything in my power To Please you. It’s cold, and dark, just Like you like it. Now why Don’t you come to me? It’s four AM and I feel like shit. […]
Ode To A Harmonica
Ode to a Harmonica by Alex Gross Email Share I love you, Janis, Because my lips go with you so naturally. I never regret kissing you, Bercause I know that you Have felt my kiss alone. You were made for my kiss. I love you Janis, Because […]
Intruder
Intruder by Alex Gross Email Share Innocent little girl walking. She is preoccupied, at the moment with An enigma which plagues all young girls At a point. Which Barbie Doll do I want? Another thought enters her head: What’s for dinner? Then: What’s on TV tonight? She […]
Do You Know What Its Like
Do You Know What It’s Like by Alexandra Gross Email Share Do you know what it’s like To be different? To never Feel quite right with people? To be in a crowd and yet utterly Alone? To wish for someone Who understands you completely, And come to the […]
Victory
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Something spreading underground won’t speak to us under skin won’t declare itself not all life-forms want dialogue with the machine-gods in their drama hogging down the deep bush clear-cutting refugees from ancient or transient villages into our opportunistic fervor to search crazily for a host […]
Valediction Forbidding Mourning
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) My swirling wants. Your frozen lips. The grammar turned and attacked me. Themes, written under duress. Emptiness of the notations. They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds. I want you to see this before I leave: the experience of repetition […]
Two Songs
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) 1. Sex, as they harshly call it, I fell into this morning at ten o’clock, a drizzling hour of traffic and wet newspapers. I thought of him who yesterday clearly didn’t turn me to a hot field ready for plowing, and longing for that young man […]
Stepping Backward
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow, Next year and when I’m fifty; still good-by. This is the leave we never really take. If you were dead or gone to live in China The event might draw your stature in my mind. I should be […]
Snapshots Of A Daughter In Law By Adrienne Rich
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) 1 You, once a belle in Shreveport, with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud, still have your dresses copied from that time, and play a Chopin prelude called by Cortot: “Delicious recollections float like perfume through the memory.” Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, […]
Snapshots Of A Daughter In Law
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) 1 You, once a belle in Shreveport, with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud, still have your dresses copied from that time, and play a Chopin prelude called by Cortot: “Delicious recollections float like perfume through the memory.” Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, […]
Shattered Head
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) A life hauls itself uphill through hoar-mist steaming the sun’s tongue licking leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid When? When? cry the soothseekers but time is a bloodshot eye seeing its last of beauty its own foreclosure a bloodshot mind finding itself unspeakable What is the […]
Rural Reflections
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) This is the grass your feet are planted on. You paint it orange or you sing it green, But you have never found A way to make the grass mean what you mean. A cloud can be whatever you intend: Ostrich or leaning tower or […]
Prospective Immigrants Please Note
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Either you will go through this door or you will not go through. If you go through there is always the risk of remembering your name. Things look at you doubly and you must look back and let them happen. If you do […]
Power
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Living in the earth-deposits of our history Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old cure for fever or melancholy a tonic for living on this earth in the winters of this climate. Today I […]
Planetarium
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), astronomer, sister of William; and others. A woman in the shape of a monster a monster in the shape of a woman the skies are full of them a woman ‘in the snow among the Clocks and instruments or […]
Paula Becker To Clara Westhoff
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) The autumn feels slowed down, summer still holds on here, even the light seems to last longer than it should or maybe I’m using it to the thin edge. The moon rolls in the air. I didn’t want this child. You’re the only one I’ve told. […]
Our Whole Life
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) by Adrienne Rich Our whole life a translation the permissible fibs and now a knot of lies eating at itself to get undone Words bitten thru words meanings burnt-off like paint under the blowtorch All those dead letters […]
Orion
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Far back when I went zig-zagging through tamarack pastures you were my genius, you my cast-iron Viking, my helmed lion-heart king in prison. Years later now you’re young my fierce half-brother, staring down from that simplified west your breast open, your belt dragged down by […]
On Edges
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) When the ice starts to shiver all across the reflecting basin or water-lily leaves dissect a simple surface the word ‘drowning’ flows through me. You built a glassy floor that held me as I leaned to fish for old hooks and toothed tin cans, stems lashing […]
November 1968
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Stripped you’re beginning to float free up through the smoke of brushfires and incinerators the unleafed branches won’t hold you nor the radar aerials You’re what the autumn knew would happen after the last collapse of primary color once the last absolutes were torn to […]
My Mouth Hovers Across Your Breasts
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) My mouth hovers across your breasts in the short grey winter afternoon in this bed we are delicate and touch so hot with joy we amaze ourselves tough and delicate we play rings around each other our daytime candle burns with its peculiar light and if […]
Moving In Winter
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Their life, collapsed like unplayed cards, is carried piecemeal through the snow; Headboard and footboard now, the bed where she has lain desiring him where overhead his sleep will build its canopy to smother her once more; their table, by four elbows worn evening after evening […]
Miracle Ice Cream
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Miracle’s truck comes down the little avenue, Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls, and, yes, you can feel happy with one piece of your heart. Take what’s still given: in a room’s rich shadow a woman’s breasts swinging lightly as she bends. Early […]
Living In Sin
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) She had thought the studio would keep itself; no dust upon the furniture of love. Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal, the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears, a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat stalking the picturesque amusing mouse had […]
Integrity
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) the quality of being complete; unbroken condition; entirety ~ Webster A wild patience has taken me this far as if I had to bring to shore a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books tossed in the prow some kind of […]
In Those Years
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we […]
In The Evening
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Three hours chain-smoking words and you move on. We stand in the porch, two archaic figures: a woman and a man. The old masters, the old sources, haven’t a clue what we’re about, shivering here in the half-dark sixties. Our minds hover in a […]
In A Classroom
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Talking of poetry, hauling the books arm-full to the table where the heads bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud, talking of consonants, elision, caught in the how, oblivious of why: I look in your face, Jude, neither frowning nor nodding, opaque in the slant of […]
Implosions
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) The world’s not wanton only wild and wavering I wanted to choose words that even you would have to be changed by Take the word of my pulse, loving and ordinary Send out your signals, hoist your dark scribbled flags but take my hand […]
I Dream I M The Death Of Orpheus
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown under an arcade. I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see. I am a woman in the prime […]
From An Atlas Of The Difficult World
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem standing up in a bookstore […]
From A Survivor
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) The pact that we made was the ordinary pact of men & women in those days I don’t know who we thought we were that our personalities could resist the failures of the race Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know the race had failures […]
Fox
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) I needed fox Badly I needed a vixen for the long time none had come near me I needed recognition from a triangulated face burnt-yellow eyes fronting the long body the fierce and sacrificial tail I needed history of fox briars of legend it was said […]
For This
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) If I’ve reached for your lines (I have) like letters from the dead that stir the nerves dowsed you for a springhead to water my thirst dug into my compost skeletons and petals you surely meant to catch the light: -at work in my wormeaten […]
For The Record
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) The clouds and the stars didn’t wage this war the brooks gave no information if the mountain spewed stones of fire into the river it was not taking sides the raindrop faintly swaying under the leaf had no political opinions and if here or there […]
For The Dead
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) I dreamed I called you on the telephone to say: Be kinder to yourself but you were sick and would not answer The waste of my love goes on this way trying to save you from yourself I have always wondered about the left-over […]