Poetry
This is Thin Air Online’s Archive of pieces that are classified as poetry, both long form and short.
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Love Or Something Like It by Carolyn Adams
She envied the pink plastic furnishings of other girls. Hers were makeshift, cast-off cardboard from the kitchen, the laundry room. Hairstyle experiments matted her cottony hair, and there was a pinhole in her forehead from a brief curiosity concerning acupuncture. Aware of the benzene in her DNA, she still managed a shy smile. A gleam…
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Grandma Told Me by Tom Garback
Fires start in rainstorms, grandma told me once. Behold this tangle of thorns. The rose garden blooms by blood in the snow. Daffodils, the willing weeds. Roots on the waterworn cliffs, platonic pornography. I scoop mouthfuls of her words and fondly break into wilder sprints to boys my age with eager ears, embittered tongues, halos…
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Three Poems by Jade Riordan
Cat’s Delight If the moon was spun of yarn and the stars were strands of thread lying between awake and asleep I would tie them to my bed Bubblegum Breath Each bubblegum bubble I blew gained a core floated off the Earth and became a planet once more Ribbons You tied ribbons around…
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Two Poems by Dani Putney
OCD You’ll break the lamp on your desk, use the shards to stab your cubicle mate. Please, they beg, stop. So you move the lamp to the corner of your desk. A colleague will pass, you’ll slam their face into the lamp, glass on purple lips, what a mess. So you bury the lamp under…
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At the National Portrait Gallery I Make Impossible Requests by Leah Dawson
O Eleanor Your buck tooth smile Thin lips pressed against a pink track of gums Who could have known Your first name was Anna O Eleanor On the way to Babylon a coyote shot between its amber-yellow eyes. How were you…
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Fatherhood Therapy by KG Newman
Before he fell asleep in my arms by the campfire again he saw something in the flames. First a cat, then a monster, then a burning tree, the same he climbed earlier in the afternoon, high enough to look out at Pike’s Peak and see the snow still holding strong in late June, his dad…
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Two poems by Amanda Leahy
Pink + White Everyday control. We being pink + white we just nod slow, move north nod again, eyes close. It’s hurricane season everyday. It could all cannonball the same way. It could all shoot up, kneel into something like a birth, no kiss no glory. No telling. No immortality. White Ferrari On eyes, in…
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Tree of Life by James Croal Jackson
candlelight vigil in the gunmetal streets sharp rain sinking into pittsburgh’s deep roots two blocks from your parents’ the synagogue where your mom taught preschool community congregation drowned & drowning the crowd’s gathering silence small fires between bodies we canceled the halloween party to gather at lilly’s for proximity how close to eternity we become…
