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December 2010

Sam Martine, "Faces (detail)," 1997

The oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world.

  • Michael Robbins
  • Paula Bohince
  • Tom Pickard
  • John Tranter
  • Charles Baxter
POETRY Magazine cover of December 2010 issue, featuring drawing "Faces" by Sam Martine
From this Issue
    • poem

      Appeared in Poetry Magazine Confessional Poem

      By Michael Robbins
      You had a woodchuck and an opium ball.
      The one ate through the furniture,
      the other sat in its cage depressing me.
      Now the woodchuck sheds its skin.
      I have a cow behind the Dollar Bin.

      You shouldn’t drink diarrhea
      unless you bring enough for...

    • poem

      Appeared in Poetry Magazine Entering the Ouse

      By Paula Bohince
      First the bad boots
      give up their strength, then the toes lift
      their anchors. The ankle
      bones are broken,
      and so on, until the bladder lets go, without
      shame, and the genital
      organ washes away, the ovum
      and her fertile signals. A proxy...

    • poem

      Appeared in Poetry Magazine Lark & Merlin

      By Tom Pickard
                               1

      a wren,
      perched on a hawthorn
      low enough to skip
      the scalping winds,
      sang a scalpel song

      seafrets drift
      sheer along shorelines

      listening to hail spray glass
      and wind
      and a waitress laugh
      in a cafe without customers
      I fell to fell thinking

                               * * *

      a sullen light...

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