Improv - Heather McHugh, "Language Lesson 1976"

oh,
see
Dee?
she
loves
me
death dying destruction dis
ease
me
to
sleepin in
raw power
no place left
too hid
den of lions
i speak
in tongues
licking palettes
in smokestack mouths 

Improv - Aimee Nezhukumatathil, "Canticle with Sea Worm"

i can't hear the hymn so well
a hastening of death clots it
like the minced bone bits,
sleeping on the ocean.

mom, what's happened?
you've taken to resting
a wiggling babe on your chest
did i too struggle for the slow crawl
of freedom? or was i just the

bare rawness of asthma & infection.
I'm still smoking,
your boy touched by an angel
and tapped on the spine by a needle
bigger than me
bigger than god.

Improv - Brigit Pegeen Kelly, "The Dragon"

my mother grows tomatoes that dangle
from a garden, floating
thanks to you, Judy from the house
painted green like sick she don't like.

crops grown tall, like her children,
though we weren't raised 'round
the constant siren of fire engines
and a crackhead who tries to
rip his own arms off.

Improv - Camille T. Dungy, "The Preachers Eat Out"

on the ragged road
a squat and tattered man,
hunched and twisted from
too many years of
  nothing
scrabbled up to me on the street
palm clenched wet with metal coins
flashes his raw teeth, saying
  god is dead,
god is dead.

on the corner, a sister of mine
and yours
was bent over one night and
  never
got up again.

Improv- Ilya Kaminsky, "We Lived Happily During the War"

one bone crushes down
a metal wing's insecure whine--
missiles are picket signs, too.

in the light of a sun god, the children
of Muhammed toss their shoes and sharpen their brows,
while Great Satan picks the bones of the dead
to rise again in folly and farce.

Improv - Natasha Trethewey, "Blond"

earlier today,
i’m bold ‘nuff to say
a black woman asked
if…
my eyes were
real
well this is genuine blue,
miss sugarboo
don’t look too close now
you might try n’…

cop a
feel

oh me, oh my
these eyes won’t lie
if you sidle up,
and…

try to
steal

a piece of this pie
darlin’, don’t try
to melt my knees
“Oh please?”
this fella ain’t free.

Improv - Rodney Jones, "A Defense of Poetry"

i could write my drinking buddies our ars poetica
but it'd be about a Scottish broad's backside and
some fancy ditty-name for ackerdimmicks to use
eventually.

if poetry is the confined, the fairy-in-a-bottle moments
of Shakespeare then i'd say all are punished
made to toil in the muck by a god content
with defeat.

my poems are
vaudeville in a shrink's couch,
a white coat syndrome trembling
around the dotted line.
here here here here
comes the truth:


the works of these hands;
the silk that swelled to clouds?
just thatched-mud dresses
in your bright, wide eyes.

Improv - W.S. Merwin, "River of Bees"

rustling cicadan
that which crawls between rifts
floating stones and heavy smoke
eyes of silver like cloud
which sat headsunk
no more skin felt.
the coughing river which whispered
rattling ghosts, choking moths
thin air and thin soul;
expansion
expansion
expansion
contraction

the galactic engine mutters a mumble—
hold its tongue.

Improv - Li-Young Lee, "Eating Alone"

i have picked beans
from the chest of the earth--
i am not grateful.
in the silence of winter
i comprehend only visions of
waning summer with its brown mountains,
rolling down to the valley barrels of
oak, ash, & yew full of
honey and beer.

today, there's only milk
which is the tricky warm feel
of marrow in the cold vast of everything dying
and i hallucinate a fiery wheat field
and some girl rolling down in barrels of
oak & ash & yew.

Improv - Philip Larkin, "High Windows"

Just as the cold dawn birthed
the obscene disk; naked Sun,
stretching over another hurdle of trees
melted a little more of my friend's face,
offending more of me than i'd
like to write about

last night, the room held up
by pillars i slept under squeaked
a few mousy reminders that i was
to be crushed, little by little,
beneath their solemn fucking.

the next morning in the car
with my friend, the music we played
between tightly shut windows
lessened the hurt a bit, having god
get naked instead of me.

Improv - Stephen Graham Jones, "Green Pants"

I once was a loyal dog in a big kitchen with tall stoves and shorter women at the ground level of a tower where dying fathers wanted the door shut to nurses who shuffled quickly between bedside charlatan shows to our hole in the ground to eat applewood salmon and fresh greens boxed in trucks dragged by dogs more thirsty than I was shoulda coulda or woulda ever been.

Alone one night I was in charge of a pan of rice and boiled my wrist on pure steam it curled my skin and shot my nerves and the green-skinned doctor in the bright room of aliens dying cheated our system and asked, "Would you like some vicodin?"

Improv - Yusef Komunyakaa, "My Father's Love Letters"

Uncle Ricky,
the worldly one who tinkered with machines
and let the Air Force mold his throat
to concrete from stuttering mud
sent postcards and phonecalls from
Colorado, where the nerd roams

Act II, where the story twists--
he wasn't at tech conferences
or guitar-themed bonfires, he was
straight-laced to a fault:
His fault was loving men.

At nine, he was already
accepting his mother's dress
for his own; her heels
his feet, her paint

his war. The dust's long
settled now, Paw-Paw was lowered under
and can't stop Liza's fake tits
with the Cross Maw-Maw now carries.

as for me I haven't gotten a call
no matter 'cause I love 'em all.

Improv - Anthony Hecht, "The End of the Weekend"

A fireless pot of dug earth
cradles a lake freely popping crystals
as though it were boiling, much
like the hot gut-stab of
fearing children.
A clock was ticking, somewhere
in the box of worlds behind the
wooden swing's creak which
she and I
conceived. Life begins at conception
where we fused together our young
fear of her popping out
crystals with my name on them.

Improv - Seamus Heaney, "Digging"

All along the watchtower
my father paces, walking in
an undead fashion through
the tiny world of Lamar Hutchinson.

He once rode a shaky chariot
on a peeled leather throne--
his proclamations  filtered through
a shot-up transmission.

I don't remember--
did he yell or gesture me into
the cab of that fat-assed truck
when i learned how to redneck

through traffic? Regardless, we're
older now; strong in words but
not bodies--we both know how
to drive, but we'd rather not know

where we're going.