Other Poets/Other Poems

Gilbert Allen, Issue 42

Anonymous, Issue 17

Antler, Issue 36

Amy Beeder, Issue 16

Boyd W. Bensen, Issue 31

Donna Biffar, Issue 15

Kimberly Blaeser, Issue 27

P. W. Boisvert, Issue 39

Rick Cannon, Issue 28

Jared Carter, Issue 24

David Chorlton, Issue 40

Billy Collins, Issue 1, Issue 18

Philip Dacey, Issue 6

Denise Duhamel, Issue 13

Stephen Dunn, Issue 34

Stuart Dybek, Issue 41

Dave Etter, Issue 14

Norma Hammond, Issue 22

David Hernandez, Issue 23

Susan Holahan, Issue 12

Tim Hunt, Issue 42

Angela Just, Issue 32

Lisa Kadous, Issue 20

Julie King, Issue 30

Lyn Lifshin, Issue 19

Louis McKee, Issue 5

Eve Merriam, Issue 7

Pamela Miller, Issue 8

Lisel Mueller, Issue 29

D. Nurkse, Issue 9

Alexis Orgera, Issue 35

James Reiss, Issue 26

Len Roberts, Issue 2

Kristopher Saknussemm, Issue 10

R. T. Smith, Issue 38

Cathy Song, Issue 21

Judith Valente, Issue 37

Mary Ann Waters, Issue 11

Charles Harper Webb, Issue 25

J. D. Whitney, Issue 33

Bayla Winters, Issue 3

Lila Zeiger, Issue 4

Return to Sample Poems

Prodigy

My baby is born
with a cigarette in his mouth

at three weeks he can say
credit card numbers

and by six months he can enroll
in gun kindergarten.

Landscape

Families
chopped up like forests

single mothers
lone pines

windbreaks against
the children's arid plain.

Knowledge

In the dead center of my life
the black of midnight stretches like spent elastic
Morning is hard to come by, I sleep by fits and starts,
nothing fits into anything,
the starts I make are all part-hearted.

I hate dreaming of you
of the hospital months,
of your body shrunken like some ivory netsuke,
I could pick you up and wear you at my waist.
Go away. Which means Come back.
Can't. Won't. Drop dead. fianlly. Never.

--Eve Merriam
Copyright © 1997 by Free Lunch Arts Alliance