Deborah Landau
~

It was good getting drunk in the undulant city,
whiskey lopping off the day's fear—

dawn came with an element of Xanax,
dusk came and I dumbed myself down.

Where there were brides, grooms,
these bored boysoldiers with iPhones and guns.

I'm a soft target, you're a soft target,
and the city has a hundred hundred thousand softs;

the pervious skin, the softness of the face,
the wrist inners, the hips, the lips, the tongue,

the global body,
its infinite permutable softnesses—

soft targets, soft readers, drinkers,
pedestrians in rain;

in the failing light we walked out
and now we share a room with it

(would you like to read to me in the soft
would you like to enter me in the soft

would you like a lunch of me in the soft
in its long delirium?)

The good news is we have each other.
The bad news is Kalashnikov assault rifles,

submachine guns, pistols, ammunition,
four boxes packed with thousands of small steel balls.
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Combined head shots of Paige Lewis, John Green, and Kaveh Akbar
Introducing Ours Poetica

On September 12, a  new tri-weekly video series debuts which combines the reading, screening and discussion of poetry.   Poet Paige Lewis curates the videos, along with series producer and novelist John Green, and special guest and poet Kaveh Akbar.  The series will capture, "the intimate experience of holding a poem in your hands and hearing it read by a distinctive—sometimes unexpected—voice." 

via POETRY FOUNDATION

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Cover of Zbigniew Herbert's The Collected Poems

"In a 1987 interview that appeared in the Partisan Review, the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert said, 'It is vanity to think that one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.' With that metaphor, we are asked to see poetry as a gauge, a measure, a tool, a way of understanding the nature of phenomenon."

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