Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Meditation 3 No. 38, Shane Anderson

On Earth As It Is

Eel, harpoon curries, antlered in darkness to in on foreskin ornately flaking, foreskin tenderly peppered, against cap-a-pie mirrored swords also, ornately left oh dear out, inkhorn fish left in, coat hangers could coagulate fat could deflower inside warmth more flower; eels antlered in darkness galore when ornately could coagulate fiddlesticks in oily and deer lick could flower forever; this beyond caked ornately flaking in tenderly stacking, antlered in sparkling so ornately or harpoons if itching around also bladders more unless stewed eels sharpen, eels ornately even between cap-a-pie sharpened, harpoons not in below could mirror fat flake, blankets could but …

2 Poems, Marion Deutsche Cohen

On Earth As It Is

"“Time should be more elastic”

more topological.

Space too.

Pain, while necessary to alert and keep us alive

shouldn't hurt so much.

Creation, Wendy Galgan

On Earth As It Is

There are no stars visible from here.

Just crumbling cornices and pointed brickwork,

and the gray parchment of the midnight sky.

Too much light escapes this city,

too many streetlamps and turn signals,

too many bulbs left burning

to scatter their illumination through steel and glass

and throw a corona between the sky and us.

Ok The Damned, Gabriel Blackwell

On Earth As It Is

No description available

Two Poems, James Bishop

On Earth As It Is

God,

Who created the dimpled planets,
who created my own cracked ass,
who numbers the hairs on my head,
who watched the liquid earth pass

below Port-au-Prince,
who sat drumming to the hum of the cherubim
while a city collapsed.

God In Ocean City, New Jersey, Christine Fadden

On Earth As It Is

Sometimes, God, summer weighs on me like wet ropes. My lungs seize trying to have the most fun in the world before school starts. September is Hell and we all die and go there after Labor Day. Yesterday, I saw my English teacher stuffing her bright red face with pink cotton candy. She is supposed to be reading books all summer, not coming here—wearing her hair down and eating the same things I do. I felt like the boardwalk was going to explode one splinter at a time under my feet, even though yesterday was the kind of day my …

Insurance Report: Investigating Acts Of God, Lisa Grunberger

On Earth As It Is

In the brick building on South and 9th

the woman sat and smoked a cigarette by the window

windows her landlord lied about

because the hot air seeped in in the summer

stalks her that’s the word she used

and in the winter the goddamned cold comes in

the way her second husband used to with his muddy shoes.

A Prayer For Babe, Aaron Burch

On Earth As It Is

My memory had always been fuzzy. Dull. Furry? For a long time – years; miles, maybe – I knew not what to do with it, how to manage. I tried cleaning it, petting it, running my fingers through the fur. Attempts at acceptance, at making peace with. Tried squinting my eyes, tried glasses, used mirrors.

Yes, Father, David Brennan

On Earth As It Is

A Catholic Priest, my father, walks the beach in Tampa, 1968. The sun halfway through setting. Facing the water, hands in the pockets of his plaid shorts, he thinks he hears, impossibly blowing in off the empty rippling expanse, a woman singing:

“A woman’s voice. It is not the voice of God, at least not the voice that I have been taught to listen for. Her song is the very essence of what we have been schooled in defining as temptation: sensual, sugary, mournful. A woman walking the waves of the sea; I wonder where she is—she who believes …

As No One Lay Trying To Die, James Greer

On Earth As It Is

These will prep the churchy masses and the desperate tryst. I sold the rest stop and I told the best stop and I stop and stop. These our American rhythms. These our God bless you platitudes and God bless you. Please.

Double Columns Prayer, Ira Lightman

On Earth As It Is

No description available

Two Poems, Margaret Pritchard Houston

On Earth As It Is

I wonder sometimes

why

in that flashing instant

I agreed to this.

To the straining of ligaments

pressed

by my created creator

widening, in my blood-red womb.

For You, Adam Jordan

On Earth As It Is

I checked the bush. I tried the sky, the crickets' legs, soccer fields, and apples' cores. I stoodunder thunderclouds, kitchen counters, catechism teachers inside superstores. I studied Crusoe's isolation after Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Hosanna, Rick Hale

On Earth As It Is

Los Angeles, Michelangelo, Jude, peopling the lost souls, tell me now:

Do you remember this eye, this hand, these ears, this

mouth? May I break my solemn invocation with a sneeze?

Forgive me. No bless yous –

my sinuses are cork-tight. No soul will leak tonight. I have Benadryl, Claritin,

Zyrtec. The clerics. They'll not deliver me unto

any Egyptian waters; I haven't yet written my holy litany,

my radiant magnum dopus.

Guru, Amy Minton

On Earth As It Is

It has come to my attention through the wisdom of Guru Jaua Opi that directly behind my navel exists a terrifying labyrinth of decaying gas pipes, one of which is leaking a weak blue flame.

The Guru says, This is your life force. Or I think he said that. His accent is very heavy and the screeching war planes overhead mute all sound for a minute and a half, but he keeps talking. It holds the fire, I think he says. He pounds his own navel. What does your flame look like?

You're Asleep, Stephen Mead

On Earth As It Is

I think

On automatic pilot

In a commuter plane.

Flying at night is the most peaceful thing.

These lights are our own Tivoli,

A cathedral of sky. Going so deep

While floating as if through glass

As it forms, is to apprehend

How significant smallness can be,

Meaning us in this vast cavern,

Meaning those spires,

Those good window faces—Look—down there in the dark.

Benision Before Your Venison, My Dear, Gordon Mcdermott

On Earth As It Is

Quello infinito e ineffabil bene

What continues from that leastless

yeasty body, that sunny-

science in the bleb of the ‘that’,

no, —the that—

which is directed, like light, to a loved body

inductivly, indelably, and reductivly

rendered to be that

which had once meant who

as in ‘Our Father which

art in Heaven’

—which body was bread

Two Poems, Anthony A. Lee

On Earth As It Is

The Sermon

(there were two of them, interrupted by a moment of contemplation)

was on the impossibility

of imagining death or anything

after that—only

hotel rooms and penthouse windows,

shoes empty on the floor,

the private pool below the balcony

blue in its shininess,

the lapping of the ocean tide

on the rocky shoreline, its pleasant whisper—

which obviously is not enough.

Two, Megan Mcshea

On Earth As It Is

Precisely this fogged window, which prevails in the cold, wet night, blinks out onto an uninhabited land of Other People?s houses and in sight of all that forgotten real estate, along with all the amiable conversations on phones across America and evenings shared in movie houses, around the corner from a recent homicide, down the block from wild lots and weeds, great unknowns, colossal, all evolving along with Darwin and his species. One?s life, assumed to be finite, ticking away. Night covers things up but you can still hear the rain.

Lighter Than Air, Nikki Magennis

On Earth As It Is

On April the 20th, 2008, Padre Adelir Antonio de Carli took off from the town of Paranagua in a chair attached to a thousand helium balloons. The lower half of his body was found in the Atlantic two months later.

Prayer, Jake Ricafrente

On Earth As It Is

Our state—of books, condition, the body politic—

Is disrepaired, or worse, and wanting light to spill

Past veils, the banks of secrecy (chadors, Swiss laws,

And airy fabrication: all the latent bric-

A-brac of want), I probe the minor predicated clause,

Some ancient honey fungus, a continental shelf

For aims, designs. The world is tired of itself.

Three Poems, Victoria Bosch Murray

On Earth As It Is

The doctor asks where it hurts.

With the tip of a borrowed pen you trace the absent rib,

that Biblical scar, tickle the edge

of the raised ridge, a vacant dune between

land and sea just below your left breast—

like asking where pleasure starts,

where whiskey settles, when you first knew

his hand in your heart.

Acts Of Reparation To The Virgin Mary, Brian Oliu

On Earth As It Is

Our Lady of Guadalupe

Of course it would be to you—you, dark-haired, you, an image of you on the forearm of a girl that I loved for a second or three, some time between the nights by the ice counting rotations and the time the girl called me from the house of a woman she met while jailed. She would talk to higher men in exchange for a sheet to pull over her arms, over her shoulders for a few nights. Of course we did not count the rotations. Of course she ignored you on her arm despite my constant …

Poems, Alicia Jo Rabins

On Earth As It Is

DEAR LORD

I’m embarrassed by my love for You

and by the ugly cries

that escape me at night Worry birds

circling overhead, looking for You.

Summer's almost over, but

the tree’s single bud

has not opened.

Serve And Volley, Micah Riecker

On Earth As It Is

It’s Sunday and You’re inundated but I’m not asking for anything except a few moments of your time. Your eyes, Lord, and an ear, if I may.

After Eden, Tracey S. Rosenberg

On Earth As It Is

Why are you laughing as you send me away? I'm not done.

There are fresh grasses I want to roll in,

buzzing fizzing fairies to chase like a spring kitten

(I promise to set them free, every last one).

When you let me come in, there was no one else you wanted.

The Prayers Of Saint John Of The Cross, Adrian Sobol

On Earth As It Is

Saint John of the Cross went to God to weep. His hands, he noticed, had aged. God told John, Age is but a signpost, a ticket on the light rail to the Kingdom of Me. It was easy for God to say, the Ageless, the Endless, the Unbound. John went to Saint Teresa for her succor and her wine, which she fermented from the blackberries growing in her garden. Soon, they were drunk and haughty. He sang a blues tune and Teresa accompanied. They recounted stories of Christmases together, of their fathers, who would argue incessantly. Fistfights were a …

Dear God, Ethel Rohan

On Earth As It Is

I remember, as a girl, I could fly. I also remember You visited often. Not a luminous light, or an apparition, or anything I could hear or touch. You were a presence, a comfort, a knowing. Back then, I didn't need faith. I had certainty.

December 17, 1977, Mattox Roesch

On Earth As It Is

Lord, the storm woke me tonight, at least, that’s what I remember.

Two Poems, Danniel Schoonebeek

On Earth As It Is

The word for what you want from me is novena,which means

nine days I will shave your beard and tell you: what falls

wants to rest with what falls, which is why your beard

wants to rest with the leaves in the trash bag, and why

when the leaves fall, what you want is to rest with me.