Burning Trash
(John Updike)

At night—the light turned off, the filament
Unburdened of its atom-eating charge,
His wife asleep, her breathing dipping low
To touch a swampy source—he thought of death.
Her father’s hilltop home allowed him time
To sense the nothing standing like a sheet
Of speckless glass behind his human future.
He had two comforts he could see, just two.

One was the cheerful fullness of most things:
Plump stones and clouds, expectant pods, the soil
Offering up pressure to his knees and hands.
The other was burning the trash each day.
He liked the heat, the imitation danger,
And the way, as he tossed in used-up news,
String, napkins, envelopes, and paper cups,
Hypnotic tongues of order intervened.
.

(Read more of John Updike’s poetry here)

Editor’s note: ‘Midnight Poetry’ is a showcase for work by poets across the spectrum—from the pantheon of literary giants to contemporary, underground and new voices.

If you would like to submit your work for consideration, please see our Submission Guidelines.

Love Poems. 20. Assorted Sizes.
(Seb)

1. When I am called to prophecy, it is your name I will sing/ I will curl my body around yours, as cold and tight and final as any wedding ring.
2. Love? I was stars torn down and the crashing swound, I was the breeze in your heart and I longed for tender slaughter.
3. We were dancing, to “Love Train” by the O’Jays and your small breasts, like fluttering birds were pressing against the sheer silk of your blood red dress/ It was not their shape it was not their promise, it was not their proximity, it was the freedom of the heart which drove them/which set fire to the want in me. I loved you there and then for that freedom/ I loved you beyond the tiny lights and the bass and the sweat and the whispers and the sway/ for the freedom in your yes, as you came to me and in your no as you drove away
4. The moon has called and the tide has marked my card/ My ever broken heart belongs to you – each dust grain smudged upon your finger, each sharp and fragile shard/ I will come any distance you call – each ecstatic mile, every gruelling, intolerable yard
5. A sunless smile, a sudden sight – you came to me, you banished night you lay nuclear clouds around my cock and stars around my head, fed me chicken soup to cure my cold and drove the addicts from my bed
6. I will navigate any length of night, from brilliant, burning corners to it’s cold, dark starless heart.
7. Her husband was an astronaut, lost to and lost in space. We would meet on Thursdays and lay in bed reading books all day, aloud to one another. She read me “everything that rises must converge” and I read her “beautiful losers” We would fuck three times before lunch then haze the day with red wine , Italian sausage and cocaine. It ended when she cut my name into her wrist and I did not have the courage to drive to the hospital in a rainstorm.
8. I have been lured and snared. I hungered for the voice I heard, yours was there.
9. We drank beer by the sparkling waters of the bay/ on a afternoon in perfect Marin County Spring/ I played Carole king songs for you, on my guitar/ you were barefoot, wearing Daisy Dukes, you’d laugh, you’d blush, you’d sing.
10. You say you cannot love me/until all my old lovers are dead/I say give me the weapon to kill them/ it’ s there, between your legs.
11. A passive neck, a peaceful blade, I was salt stripped from the water/pure to your blood, you pure to mine.
12. If I loved you for your body/ that would be alright. But, knowing no man ever loved a woman for her mind and lived/ I may not make it through tonight.
13. If you want me gone, I will burn to smoke and let the breeze leave no thing
14. As ash is to alum as love to desire – it is pure to the tongue but is it pure to the fire?
15. I remember your fedora hat, you overlarge teeth, your nasal laugh, your hunger for a Tim Horton’s double-double in the middle of the freezing Cleveland night, the stroke of your hand, the tiny gasp of air escaping you, your interior, your tiny ears and the way you would scream at spiders. You were magnificent.
16. “Kiss me now, you kissing fool” said the Mango to the Cherry/Not until I see your naked seed – this alone is necessary.
17. I rested my fingers on her wrist, and in whisper I did say “Lunch in Cincinnati, Breakfast in San Jose?”
18. I saw her at the Chevron station between Statesboro and Savannah/gassing up a green BMW 330i/in a royal blue polka dot dress and pearls, all bare arms in the fierce Georgia sun and a neck that stretched to the clouds
19. Who comes here through the ashes, who comes through the downpour. Who walks this dark, old hallway, love’s light lit, in spite of the monster that cowers behind my door?
20. And the moon leaves no trace, age marks no passage/on your flawless, child-like face/you for me will be always the moment/that I knew that I loved you.

(Read more of Seb’s poetry here)

Editor’s note: ‘Midnight Poetry’ is a showcase for work by poets across the spectrum—from the pantheon of literary giants to contemporary, underground and new voices.

If you would like to submit your work for consideration, please see our Submission Guidelines.

A Trinity
(Sara Spock)

Bottle bumps glass,
Dionysus sloshes
from galley to parlor
unaware or neglecting
the riot in his wake.

Pages slip open,
Maria wakes early
to pass on conviction,
judgment or design
by the treads of her feet.

Gravel crunches shoe
as Joshua ponders,
to linger, to quit.
Gods or saints
wont save him
tonight.

(Read more of Sara Spock’s poetry here)

Editor’s note: ‘Midnight Poetry’ is a showcase for work by poets across the spectrum—from the pantheon of literary giants to contemporary, underground and new voices.

If you would like to submit your work for consideration, please see our Submission Guidelines.

Wild Geese
(Mary Oliver)

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

(Read more of Mary Oliver’s poetry here)

Editor’s note: ‘Midnight Poetry’ is a showcase for work by poets across the spectrum—from the pantheon of literary giants to contemporary, underground and new voices.

If you would like to submit your work for consideration, please see our Submission Guidelines.

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock
‘Now they are all on their knees.’
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
‘Come, see the oxen kneel.’
In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know
I should g with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.