Poetic Medicine

By Arthur Rimbaud I've swallowed a terrific mouthful of poison.—Blessings three times over on the impulse that came to me!—My guts are o...

By Rainier Maria Rilke You, darkness, that I come from I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world, for the fire makes a circ...

By Jim Daniels An average joe comes in and orders thirty cheeseburgers and thirty fries. I wait for him to pay before I start cooking. He pa...

By Lucille Clifton i wish them cramps. i wish them a strange town and the last tampon. I wish them no 7-11. i wish them one week early and w...

By Sherman Alexie The morning air is all awash with angels . . . - Richard Wilbur The eyes open to a blue telephone In the bathroom of this ...

By Yael Globerman I The man who almost wasn't sits down at the table. The woman who barely made it serves him plum cake. This is my home...

By Shadab Zeest Hashmi I know each poplar and willow of this town, how telephone wires sag with the weight of belligerent crows, the Tonga-h...

By Martín Espada Niggerlips was the high school name for me. So called by Douglas the car mechanic, with green tattoos on each forearm, and ...

By Charles Simic The mail truck goes down the coast Carrying a single letter. At the end of a long pier The bored seagull lifts a leg now an...

By Stephen Dunn A wish for something moral like a wound pitying the knife its inability to be pleased or sad. Or perhaps an afternoon one da...

By Shel Silverstein There is a place where the sidewalk ends And before the street begins, And there the grass grows soft and white, And the...

By Aaron Smith I’ve been meaning to tell you how the sky is pink here sometimes like the roof of a mouth that’s about to chomp down on the c...

By Marge Piercy We cannot have monogrammed towels or matches with our names on. We cannot have children. We cannot share joint tax returns. ...

By Edna St. Vincent Millay Was it for this I uttered prayers And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs, That now, domestic as a plate, I s...

By Yehuda Amichai "What kind of a person are you," I heard them say to me. I'm a person with a complex plumbing of the soul, S...

By Rafael Campo Unluckily, the day begins: a bomb has detonated in Mumbai. Again, we ask ourselves. Is this what we’ve become? Unluckily, th...

By Jeffrey McDaniel In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decide...

By Jane Kenyon I took the last dusty piece of china out of the barrel. It was your gravy boat, with a hard, brown drop of gravy still on the...

By Robert Lowell The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod ha...

By Walt Whitman 1 O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done; The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won; The port i...