“Seek mercy for eggs we scrambled in a youth/spent banging pots and pans together./For the telling of clumsy lies, our voices/cracking like pecans together.”
Johnny Payne’s Column
Latest Poetry
Essays & Criticism
Latest Interview
Category: Poetry
Hands Together Ghazal
The Treachery of Poetry
“How/it both is, and is not/a type of existence.”
Bruegel, Columbidae, and Walking Home
“And then a tide of blood fell back in me/after that I walked with open ears/I found that the trees had voices, and/they sang like forgotten, sunless seas.”
Moon Bloom and Lithopedion
“Night flower,/short-lived lover/of darkness,/offspring of cactus,/desert jewel/lulled awake/by moonbeams”
Down at the Ecoplex
“Doom is there staring, everywhere/I go, like a brazen coyote/dead center of the road/half-starved so it doesn’t care anymore.”
The Hand
“The hand drops a fresh globe/into the scoured skull, secures breath upon/the hemispheric nostrils and stands back,/appraising…”
Mannequin Exposé
“Among a murder of mannequins/the guilty can’t be picked out of a lineup.”
Skwentna, AK
“The woods sigh. And then, a thousand miles away,/I’m in your arms again. Your breathing is an ocean./I’m drifting away. You whisper.”
For Your Penance
“There is a fervor that I do not surge with,/A saintliness with which I do not sing.”
Butter Weed
“Having just emerged from her tv and ac,/she was too sun-shocked and asphyxiating/to hear ‘it’s a lovely shoot’/as my spade severed the root.”
Fire Island
“I scatter the sandpipers who/run from me/but not/the tides.”
Shadow
“her body, between the buildings/behind her and the parked cars/in front, throwing a coal-black shadow/on the ground the color/of tarnished silver…”
Ben Jonson’s Prison Conversion
“You had time to contemplate its masonry/and recall that other jail, the temple/of muscle and flesh built by your trade/of bricklayer, now turning wan and idle.”
Following Bishop, This Excess Our Sentience, and Amnesia Palace
“The far shore wore a gauzy veil of rain./Dark thunderheads rose over Evian/and shook the silver surface of the lake,/ruffling like shot silk.”
Gowpen and Undertow
“This isn’t a good look,”/I can only foretaste your reply, wind or blister/looking at me. Break glass in case of emergency./in each hand, precariously awaiting your reply.