Tag Archives: poem

POEM WEDNESDAY – Bunny-Hole by Coco Owen

17 Wednesday Feb 2016

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This poem first appeared n the Winter 2010 issue of The Antioch Review.

 

BUNNYHOLE
by Coco Owen


                        She's bedded         down in the hollow 
                     of her mother's        expectation.
                               She's dug          for her furring
                                   curves            a gaze-escape
                               that's her              retreat from
                        the family den          of sex inequity.

                        There, under-               ground, her Flopsy
                    self's centered in         her better nature's
                      itchy need for                separation from her warren kin.
                     Her little hole's                 a burrower's
                         Wonderland                   furnished with
                        a little desk                 & chair of knotty pine.

                            Holed-up,                 hermitlike—
                    this booby hutch             her escape hatch—
                      her invaginate                imagination takes
                  a pubis-eyed view            from her earthen
                   nest of premature             selfconsciousness.
                     Her precocious               interiority's

                    like a tulip bulb,               dirt-bulwarked;
                       a Netherlands               in hiding
                      from predation               of the hawked
                              model of                femininity to which
                      she's promised               her tawny beauty marking
                    her as a fancier's           or furrier's moving target.

                         She hankers in            her bunker, nests.
       She doffs her rabbit coat,            & scribbles code
    in her moleskin notebook               as self-preservation gesture.
                      She's turncoat                   to the topside's
           topsy-turvy etiquette                 expected of game girls.
            Haunted, she broods                her hunted selves.

***

cocoowenCoco Owen lives in Los Angeles and has published poems in 1913: A Journal of Forms, CutBank, The Journal, Rio Grande Review, and The Feminist Wire, among many other venues. She has chapbooks forthcoming in 2016 from Tammy and dancing girl press. She was a finalist in several recent book contests, including for the May Swenson Poetry Award. Owen serves on the board of Les Figues Press and you can read more of her work at http://www.cocoowenphd.com.

 

 

© The Antioch Review 2016

POEM WEDNESDAY – Victors by John Witte

13 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by in POEM WEDNESDAY, Poetry, Uncategorized

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This poem is from the Spring 2015 issue of The Antioch Review.

 

VICTORS
by John Witte

No one remembers with certainty when we began to hate
our voices cold quavering while the voices of others

though we could not understand their language sounded
supple and melodious our own tongues lifted and fell

like hammers she hated her strangled voice he clanged
and pealed a voice not his own as the Romans must have

heard in the palaver of the Greeks a voluptuous music
and fallen silent pierced by their own brazen voices

***

Witte5AJohn Witte’s poems have appeared widely, in publications such as The New Yorker, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and American Poetry Review, and been included in The Norton Introduction to Literature, among several anthologies. He is the author of LOVING THE DAYS (Wesleyan University Press, 1978), THE HURTLING (Orchises Press, 2005), SECOND NATURE (University of Washington Press, 2008),and DISQUIET (University of Washington Press, 2015). He was for thirty years the editor of Northwest Review, as well as of numerous books, including THE COLLECTED POEMS OF HAZEL HALL (Oregon State University Press, 2000). The recipient of two writing fellowships from the NEA, a residency at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and numerous other grants and awards, he lives with his family in Eugene, Oregon, where he teaches literature at the University of Oregon. More may be found on his website: http://www.johnwittepoet.com

 

 

© 2016 The Antioch Review

Poem Wednesday – Y by Leslie Adrienne Miller

21 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by in POEM WEDNESDAY, Poetry

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Y

by Leslie Adrienne Miller
Perhaps it’s a thread that needs to be pulled,
a single stitch caught in the crux.

Whole word in French and Spanish,
vertical axis of Cartesian three

loaning its fragile branch to a boy
in theory.  On y va.  Let’s go There.
 
What happens to unrepaired sequences
in subsequent generations?  Semivowel,

blown umbrella, arrow reversed in wind,
frizzy blot of genetic code directing the symphony

of a trillion sperm, a single Y. . .might fold over,
line up these similar patches of genetic sequence,
 
and then accidentally delete everything
that lies in between.  Je est un autre.

If the face is a christening in flesh,
the boy of him is its opposite,

raising the tent of bones in which
he will harbor all the starry anomalies

that a knowledge of God cannot undo.

***

LAMiller_633Leslie Adrienne Miller is author of six collections of poetry including Y, The Resurrection Trade and Eat Quite Everything You See from Graywolf Press, and Yesterday Had a Man in It, Ungodliness, and Staying Up For Love from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Professor of English at the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Houston, an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an M.A. from the University of Missouri, and a B.A. from Stephens College.

http://leslieadriennemillerpoet.com/

 

© The Antioch Review 2015