Carolyn Kizer

My Dead

People love the rubber until the rubber meets the road.

I’m buying jade cicadas for all my dead is how I am.

My dead, carry me home. My dead, carry me home. Through fire, make me warm. Under water, make me fluid. Across earth, make me solid. From air, breathe your dead breath into me. Carry me home, my dead. Carry me home, my dead. I will carry you, too.

A physician who arrived on the scene after ICE agents shot Alex Pretti said the officers were not performing CPR. Instead, they appeared to be counting Pretti’s bullet wounds. (Sources: MedPage Today, Daily Kos)

I’m carrying my dead.

Birds need water as much as they need seed. Love needs action as much as it needs language.

The first murder was nearly half a million years ago, which shows violence has been in our nature since our ancestral humans. The blows were directed at the face so the killer could see who they were killing as they were doing the killing. Does it surprise me that the agent who fired the last five shots did so while Pretti was lying unresponsive and face up? Not at all. He wanted to see who he was killing as he was killing him, to see who he was destroying as he destroyed him. This is an old story. Hate is as old as love. But compassion had already evolved in our ancestors as sustained and long-term, as a way of showing commitment to others and surviving as a group. I believe our capacities for love and compassion are greater than our capacity for hate. I believe they can help us survive, even when that means surviving each other.

I’m so sad that I know this sadness cannot be entirely my own.

Wael Tarabishi

A man in the Oklahoma birding group just called a northern mockingbird his northern mockingfriend.

Holding in pee when I’m ten steps from the bathroom is how I am.

I think Utahns should bring back the whistling and whittling brigade, but only to get ICE out of the state.

I think I like poets about as much as I like librarians. I say that as a poet who almost studied library science and who’s been around a bunch of poets and worked in libraries alongside a bunch of librarians. I like what poets and librarians do. I like what they stand for. I just don’t expect much from either group when it counts. Look, words. Look, data. You know?

Weavers and birders on the other hand? Fuck yeah. All the fuck yeahs. Take umbrage with this post if you must. Take my disappointment, frustration, and annoyance, too, while you’re at it.

Of course I don’t mean any of this. I mean the weavers and birders part. They’re the folks I turn to when even caramel corn isn’t enough to see me through.

Who’s keeping me alive right now? Oklahoma birders, that’s who. They don’t just post photos of birds. They tell stories, like this one:

This roadrunner got under the hood of my Cutlass and rode all the way from Don and Loel’s house in Tuttle to my home in Moore, Oklahoma, and lived in our neighborhood for almost a year before disappearing.

That is the shit, my friends. A gem of a story in only thirty-eight words.

These typos in a post by Blue Ridge Wildlife Center are perfect: If you believe that loons can take off from land, is lie. Liar told you that. From now on forever, I am going to say Is lie. Liar told you that whenever the situation warrants it.

You know how you get a weird answer from a Magic 8 Ball, so you just jiggle it? I sometimes find myself wanting to jiggle people a little into a different mindset or behavior. Not violently. Just so their hollow icosahedron floating in its cobalt alcohol solution will land on a better face.

I’m eating a whole thing of caramel popcorn with my tongue so I can keep typing is how I am.

Carolyn Kizer didn’t shut up, either.

I know folks don’t mean to. That’s part of the problem.

Thank you for coming to my fuck you.

I dreamed I was at a rave but didn’t want to be, so I went outside and picked up dog poop from people’s lawns.

Hugging my weighted therapy dragon is how I am.

They all killed him. Every agent who harassed him, restrained him, kicked him. Maybe one of them shot. Maybe more than one. But they all killed him. They are all the shooter.

GestapICE.

Alex Jeffrey Pretti

Hundreds of words that translate to one: dismissal.

From a member of the Oklahoma Ornithological Society: Folks, we have a native songbird killing event starting tomorrow for many of the states in the United States. This is supposed to go for over a week in my area (Oklahoma). If you have nesting boxes up for bluebirds and other cavity nesters, consider adding a handful of clean, dry pine needles or straw for insulation. Make a bowl with your fist pushing the needles or straw up the sides. Also, do whatever you can to feed these native songbirds and offer fresh water. I use an old frypan with a small heater in it on my back deck rail and change it twice per day. I also have a larger birdbath in the yard that also has a heater in it. Good luck to everyone. Stay safe.

I keep misreading bandanas as bananas and wondering why I need to stock up on bananas to stay warm in style all winter long.

I dreamed I doubled as a fire extinguisher.

I mentioned assless chaps one time in a comment on a friend’s post, and now Facebook is showing me all these ads for assless chaps is how I am.

For me, the pronoun they works on many levels. One complaint about using they in the singular is that it’s grammatically incorrect. But is it? The mind is plural and decentralized. We may be one, but “I” may not even be a thing other than an understanding between us, a kind of “you there, me here” shorthand, a fiction that appears to simplify living. They is a better pronoun for me than he or she any day. It does more than help me escape the waist trainer of gender essentialism. It helps me remember that my mind is not one and never was and never will be.

When we lived in Seattle, everyone thought my life partner was Moby, especially at the health-food store. I was like THAT’S MY MOBY GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY MOBY.

Nobody owns language or its rhythms. It’s what we make it, all of us, not what power wants to make it.

I’m not ashamed to say I’ve prayed to God for my daily zero-sugar Cherry Coca-Cola.

I’m dipping turkey bacon in chocolate hummus is how I am.

Please can I just be plastinated now please please pretty please.

Can you guess what I’m doing based on what I’m wearing: a tank top, a tennis skirt, kneepads, a headlamp, slippery socks, my reading glasses, earplugs.

The other day, the life partner and I were watching television before bed when the remote control slid off the sofa and landed with a thud on the area rug. We were both silent as we tried to figure out what happened. Then the life partner said, in all seriousness, Detachable penis.

We heal together. We heal in community.

The purple gallinule found in Massachusetts who wasn’t named at the wildlife rescue where she was taken so the staff wouldn’t get attached to her? Her name is Tandy. I’m naming her Tandy.

I just misread a headline as Reducing Puppet Size May Help with Night Driving. I was like of course the puppets should be smaller so they don’t block the view, especially when it’s dark out. Pupil. The actual word was pupil.

Bewildering Cage is, as of this very moment, the title of the manuscript I’m working on. It fits with the body theme, the asylum/psychiatric hospital theme, with the gender identity/sexuality theme, and nature of existence theme. Thanks to Centa Therese for commenting on the Terrance Hayes poem that contains the phrase “bewildering a cage,” which I misread as “a bewildering cage,” so thanks, also, to my dyslexia. Massive thanks to Ren Wilding for reminding me we are galaxies. The galaxy itself may be a bewildering cage, but we can move around, and dance, in it. We just can. And we can talk like dolphins.

(Now I have the song “Here Comes the Rain Again” in my head, but with the lyrics changed to Talk to me / Like dolphins do / Walk with me / Like dolphins do. EEEEEEEEEEEE EEEE EEEEEEE.)

The Wasting (2016- )

Just trying to name this period in U.S. history. I think this works because it captures the wasting away of culture and the literal wasting of people in the streets.

From a Facebook ad for a dog carrier: Safety buckle prevents jump-out panic. We all need that buckle, Facebook. Every one of us has jump-out panic right now.

I am ill-equipped to hear this much talk about golf this early in the morning or ever really which is why I try not to leave the house if I can help it is how I am.

I’m doing the Safety Dance today. Ivan Doroschuk of Men in Hats wrote the song after being kicked out of a club for pogo dancing. It’s a protest against bouncers prohibiting the dance style. Often interpreted as anti-nuclear, Doroschuk says the song is more broadly anti-establishment.

I just gave myself an asthma attack by laughing too hard after doing an impression of a dolphin singing “My Sharona” is how I am.

People who are making comments like, Bring back the chokehold, can fuck all the way off.

Each success, no matter how small, in practice of what I love is a lightning strike against the dark. — Clare L. Martin

Each action, no matter how small, in service to the world is a lightning strike against tyranny. — Dana Henry Martin

Each action, no matter how small, in service to the world is a silver sound in the dark. — Ren Wilding

I organized my closet for five hours yesterday is how I am.

A birder in Oklahoma called scaled quail cottontops, and it’s the first time I’ve smiled in days.

A woman killed her six-year-old son and herself here in Utah yesterday in Canyonlands. No more. No more death. No more murder. No more horror. No more. No more. No more. No more. No more.

Her dog was in the back seat.

Today is one of those days in the desert when the wind sounds like a warning.

Poets are alive in their lines.

It’s hard in this desert rain to not feel the heavens have been slain.

We need to be together now, as poets, as creatives, as thinkers, as human beings. Whoever you turned to yesterday, whoever turned to you, may you all look back and realize that you helped each other go on. There is healing in being together during difficult times, unthinkable times. I was with two poets yesterday who made today possible by making yesterday less impossible. May Renée Nicole Good rest in peace. May we live in peace.

Listening to songs I first heard when everyone I knew and loved was still alive.

I dreamed poetry was outlawed in the United States.

There was a mass shooting in Salt Lake City last night outside an LDS church at a funeral. Two dead. Three hospitalized in critical condition. Three more injured.

Renee Nicole Good

Sometimes just by giving it language, you discover something within you that’s been waiting to be heard for a long time.

To be spared is to be pared, part of you left but part removed. To be spared means to pare, to reduce what happened to its essence and to find your own essence despite what happened. Injured but not killed. Damaged but not broken. Burned but not torched. You are what is left over, what you can afford to be, what you still have to give others. In Old English, spare means not enough. Were you not enough to be worth destroying or not enough after being destroyed? In Latin, pare means prepare. Do you feel prepared now that you’ve been skinned?

My weekly stats report from Grammarly: Grammarly analyzed 801,077 words. You were more productive than 99% of Grammarly users. If only some of those words were any good.

Writing makes the unspeakable speakable, survivable. I walk this line, this lettered terrain, until I find myself, for only then can you find me. Only then can I find you. Here we are in Ma time, in what’s happened and what could happen. The pause, the upbeat, the architecture of connecting and letting go. I’m waiting, bated, inked blood in my heart and on my tongue, reduced to vowels, then to a single sound. You know the one. That first utterance, O.

I’m about to buy my dog a treat-dispensing toy piano is how I am.

Could not sleep. Watched the news. What the fuck. I mean fuck. I mean fuck. What the fuck.

Meanwhile, in Utah: An artificial intelligence that writes police reports had some explaining to do earlier this month after it claimed a Heber City officer had shape-shifted into a frog.

This body doesn’t know which gender it is, so it’s using all of them.

(Adapted from John Gallaher’s Time doesn’t know which genre this is, / so it’s using all of them. Every time I read the word genre, I think it’s gender.)

I dreamed I accidentally dated the devil and thought he’d ruined my life, but then I yelled at him in front of everyone in a Walmart parking lot. He dove inside a gold Oldsmobile Cutlass and never came out again ever. So that’s where he is if you need to make a deal with him or whatever.


Carolyn Kizer

Let’s just call her what she was: a siren, a soothsayer, a mythmaker, a chorus, a riot. I met her. She took a sliver of me. I am but a sliver of her. You will never remove that sliver.

Image: A photo of Carolyn Kizer that ran in Poetry Northwest.

Demons

Was I creating demons when I was at a poetry dinner party in Kansas City with Carolyn Kizer, and the entire group attempted to elide over her comments when she talked about another well-known poet attempting to rape her?

Was I creating demons when a member of my poetry class in Kansas City started stalking me, leaving flowers, torn-up copies of my poems, and letters about how bad and offensive my writing was on my windshield?

Was I creating demons when a poet and publisher in Kansas City screamed in front of a large group of poets, including my best friend, that I wanted to fuck him behind a dumpster?

Was I creating demons when a poet in Seattle who had agreed to work with me on my poetry googled (from his IP address) the words married and naked in combination with my name before we met? When he then canceled the appointment, told me I was childish for writing cut-up poems, and said I was wasting his time. When he also created a fake blog username and trolled me on my site (again, from his IP address) for months, trashing everything I wrote, including my poems.

Was I creating demons when two other Southern Utah poets said my work was pornographic and I should find another state that would accept it, while refusing to let me join their two state poetry society chapters and telling me they’d stopped meeting when they hadn’t?

Was I creating demons when a poet who’d been following my work for months and said he wanted to publish some of my poems left a hostile, sanist comment on one of my microessays in which I was lamenting the fact that people are jumping from a bridge down the street? When he screamed that my writing was the last thing he needed in his life, as if he hadn’t followed me and chosen to read, and laud, my work up to that point. As if he didn’t have the power to stop reading what I wrote or unfriend me or mute me or any of a suite of well-adjusted options that were available to him. That poet later disappeared during a mental-health crisis. When I was asked to help, I skip-traced him to his brother’s house, and he was eventually found safe. Because that’s who I am. Not someone who creates demons or treats people like demons. I’m a person who helps people when they need help, no matter how they’ve treated me.

Was I creating demons when a poet asked to read one of my manuscripts, then replied that he was sorry he’d even asked to read it? When he then rewrote part of it the way he’d like to see it, infantilized me and my work, assumed the speaker was me, treated the work not as work but as the opportunity to intervene in my personal life and my past, and talked about me in extremely sexist ways. When I responded and he continued the attack and infantilization, using my own work against me by calling me a little fist of a girl, a line from one of my poems. When he continued to move between unwanted intimacy, flirtation, and attacks in successive emails, even after I asked him to stop communicating with me. Or when my life partner had to intervene to make him observe my boundary.

Was I creating demons when a poet I’d known for more than twenty years threatened me here on Facebook, publicly in front of the entire poetry community, saying I was committing both a transgression and a manipulation when I told him I loved him, platonically, as a friend, something my context made clear? Was I creating a demon when he did similar things to other women and female-bodied poets.

Was I creating demons when a poet messaged me about a gay Arab who had gotten ahold of a photo of him in bed without his shirt on and how upsetting that was for him and who then sent me that photo through DM so I could see what he was so upset about? Or when that same poet viciously attacked a woman who was experiencing psychosis and got a group of poets to gang up on and attack her, which could have put her life in danger. Or when he refused to take his public post about her down so she could get some help without being pushed further into a dangerous or life-threatening situation. Or when he later told me I was borrowing the term CPTSD and wielding the label sanism, implying I don’t live with the former like he does as a war veteran and therefore have no right to identify and address the latter. By the way, I helped that woman, too. I reached out to her directly and got her a welfare check. If I’d been in the same part of the county as her, I would have been there for her in person. That’s a lot better than telling her she’s a terrible person and getting at least a dozen other poets to do the same.

Was I creating a demon when my poetry mentor breached my trust seventeen years ago with his words and his body and his insistence and his intrusion? When he made me talk about the ways in which my father abused me and became aroused when I did so. While he had me pinned down with his body. While he talked real nice, real childlike. While he continued despite no and stop and no and no and no. That was not a demon. That was a man. And a poet. A beloved one at that. I didn’t create that man any more than I create demons.

More recently, was I creating demons when a poet told me my comment about mentors not taking advantage of their students, which stems from my own experience, didn’t need to be said because it was already implied in the statement that students shouldn’t sleep with their mentors? That, in other words, we should all just be following the programming we’ve been given, which is to place responsibility on victims for not being or becoming victims. Look at my paragraph above. What part of that looks like a mentor trying to sleep with me? What part of that could I have avoided under the circumstances? Was I creating demons when that poet interrupted me in front of a group of poets to make his assertion? How about when he turned my gender into a joke and literally wanted to tell it as a joke on his joke podcast. How about when he asked how my life partner felt about my having sex with whoever I wanted and continuing to ask me that inappropriate bullshit question even as I kept repeating the word asexual, emphasizing the first syllable in the hope he’d understand not only his error but the violation intrinsic in his question. Is that evidence of my demon-making. (Note to everyone: Just because someone uses language for their gender and sexuality doesn’t make it your right to ask personal questions about either, especially not when first meeting them.)

Was I creating a demon when a friend of the poet in the paragraph above, one who’d been supportive of me, my work, and everything I’ve discussed about poets and poetry—up until it involved someone he personally knows—sent me a message in response to my asking not to be invalidated in which he says I am marshaling evidence, finding demons, distracting from real communication, seeing a glitch as a serious issue—thereby invalidating my concern about that issue—calling me a wrecking ball, making it clear none of the poets in the group, my former friends, like me, not even the one who appears to like me, saying this very personal issue around my story of sexual assault should have been mediated in the group and as a group—as if my experience and my trauma should be on trial and the most painful parts of my life should be made freely available to the group? Then, when in order to drive the point home about what a terrible person he thinks I am, he says, I think you’re a great writer. That opinion is somehow impersonal and won’t change. Or when he ends by saying he knows his own mind and I am welcome in it anytime I welcome that.

And that was from a friend, a dear one, who in one paragraph tried to invalidate everything I’ve ever seen or experienced and to get me to see myself as nothing, as worthless, as a monster. He reminds me of my father. He reminds me of my father’s best friend. He reminds me of Ruthie’s father and her brothers. He reminds me of Shawn Green and Greg Kullich and Jack Ladd and Matt Rawlinson and my trigonometry teacher, Steven Knight. He reminds me of my nephew. And of my old friend Jared.

The life partner says I tend to be drawn to creative people, and they tend to be drawn to me. I need more boundaries around that, clearly: who gets access to me and when and where and how. In this case, I’m at a bit of a loss. I’d been close friends with this person for years, the one who reduced me to creating demons. It feels like another example of someone being with me all the way until I talk about someone they know personally. That happened around the assault seventeen years ago as well.

Ironically, the group I created where this rift occurred was supposed to be a safe space, a place for creativity to flourish, and a place for peer support around mental-health issues. That’s something I need in my life and know others need as well. Instead, my biomarkers have been negatively affected, I feel like I was attacked when being vulnerable, I feel like my story was submerged under the weight of those who don’t want to hear it, and I feel like this last email was designed to destabilize my mood and be health- and even life-threatening. One in five is the statistic for those living with bipolar, not even bipolar coupled with trauma. Knowing my past and what I’ve survived, I can’t reconcile how this poet, this friend, would choose to do the maximum amount of harm possible, including attacking my sanity, my motives, my perceptions, and my worth as a human being.

I’m at a loss. With regard to my relationships. With regard to poetry. With regard to this country. All I can do is honor my commitment to speak out and keep speaking out about issues and injustices at all levels. I am not on this Earth to remain silent. The moment I let someone silence me is the moment I stop living.

Dissolving and Emerging

My severe hypothyroidism is taking a toll. For the past two weeks, gobs of hair have been falling out every day. I’ve been in bed since Friday. I need to have blood work done to see if the new dose of thyroid-replacement medication is improving things at all, but I didn’t have the energy to call the lab to schedule an appointment because the required opening up the cabinet where I put the lab paperwork, pulling it out of a stack of papers, finding the phone number, dialing the phone, and talking to someone. Too much. Also too much: doing my immunoglobulin infusions, the ones that keep me alive; preparing for the support group I’m facilitating that starts this week; hydrating; exercising; bathing; eating.

In this hypothyroid state, which has been creeping up on me since last fall, I’ve also been thinking a great deal about poetry and what I’m doing as a poet. A hypothyroid state isn’t the best one to be in when having these thoughts, but anyone who’s been hypothyroid knows these are the kinds of thoughts one has when hypothyroid.

Here’s my conclusion. Poetry is, at its worst, a discriminatory and harmful system. I’ve experienced discrimination and harm firsthand. But the system being what it is doesn’t make it one I can walk away from. I’m a poet. Being a poet isn’t something I chose or can unchoose. It’s a way of being.

When I was close to death in 2022, writing an imitation poem after Richard Siken is what brought me back to life and what allowed me to continue living. There was no question for me then that I was bound to poetry, to being a poet. It doesn’t matter that it was a Richard Siken poem. It could have been any poem, imitation or otherwise. I time-traveled in that poem. I found my way into and through time itself, not because I’m special or any given poet is special. What’s special is poems: who we are in them, who we aren’t, what we see, what’s beyond seeing. That dissolving when we need to dissolve. That emerging when we need to emerge. That liminal space between dissolving and emerging where we can live more expansively.

I came back to poetry. I can’t leave it again. I think my presence makes poetry better, not worse. I’ve written about what happened to me in poetry and beyond. I see issues at the systemic level and call attention to them. Because I’m older, I have a longer memory than a lot of poets do, which gives me insights others may not have. I make choices about where to send my work and who to associate with accordingly, which is necessary when poems enter the world of poetry, that less-than-optimal system that can and does do damage.

I’m neither a sycophant nor the poetry police. I call things like I see them. I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad about the unexamined biases that exist in poetry or the ways in which they may be contributing to those biases or at least not helping alleviate them. I do think we should all pay more attention to the institutions and organizations we support, the people we defend, and how we talk about those who are exploited and otherwise victimized within the system. But I know I can’t change anyone or the system as a whole. I can only control how I navigate it and who I am within it.

I suspect things would be different if poets didn’t have jobs to worry about or tenure or getting published or securing money for their projects or any of the other pressures that keep the system humming along without much change over the past several decades. I’m not fettered by any of that. I just read and write poetry.

I still remember Carolyn Kizer telling a group of poets that another famous poet tried to rape her. It was at a dinner before a reading she was giving. I also remember how the other poets at the table responded, which was to react in a flustered way and quickly change the subject. That was nearly thirty years ago, when I was just starting to write poetry. But what happened to her occurred decades earlier.

Poetry has had systemic issues that affect individual poets for a long time. These issues didn’t start yesterday, and they won’t end tomorrow. That’s why I’m not going to stop writing poetry or talking about what I’ve experienced and seen in the poetry community. Carolyn Kizer was talking to me that day in 1997. She was warning me. I heard her. I try to hear everyone who speaks.

Kafka-Kunitz

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

—

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? … we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kafka

It turns out that the word happiness is just not a useful word anymore because we apply it to too many different things. — Daniel Kahneman

Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you’re thinking about it. — Daniel Kahneman

We do not attend to the same things when we think about life and we actually live. — Daniel Kahneman

We have very little idea of how little we know. We’re not designed to know how little we know. — Daniel Kahneman

Whatever work you’re trying to do now to benefit the world, sink into that. Get a full taste of that. — His Holiness the Karmapa

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we / protested / but not enough, we opposed them but not / enough. — Ilya Kaminsky

Know this: / yours is the name that slid first to my lips / when the light became enormous / and the anxious voices flared / like starlings — Gina Keicher

Gary Snyder / is a haiku / far away — Jack Kerouac

It is just simple attention that allows us to truly listen to the sound of the bird, to see deeply the glory of the autumn leaf, to touch the heart of another and be touched. — Jack Kornfield

The closer you get to real matter, rock, air, firewood, boy, the more spiritual the world is. — Jack Kerouac

The windmills of / Oklahoma look / In every direction — Jack Keroac

As life goes on, time isn’t the largest thing to think of, / it’s the smallest. — Suji Kwock Kim

Into the dirty waters of our dead / the ash that was flesh becomes / precious. Hard light drags its claw / through the brine. — Sally Rosen Kindred

If our methods are simply divisive and further traumatizing—without actualizing the justice that we so desperately want to work for—then what are we prioritizing in our quest? Who is being cared for and who has been held accountable? — Amy King

So the hens and geese make us think in terms of help / outside, how they flap and move with fat ease in front of trains, / across the chopping block, to the hungry winters of final leviathans, / even as they land just so on the wires above us ― Amy King

Beyond this is a precise amnesia / a membrane of forgetfulness / I keep my promises / I do not tell this story / Not even to myself — Janice King

and for her, / whose face / I held in my hands / a few hours, whom I gave back / only to keep holding the space where she was — Galway Kinnell

You live / under the Sign / of the Bear, who flounders through chaos / in his starry blubber: / poor fool, / poor forked branch / of applewood, you will feel all your bones / break / over the holy waters you will never drink — Galway Kinnell

And the breeze wound through my mouth and empty sockets / so my lungs would sigh and my dead tongue mutter. — Carolyn Kizer

My knees were hung with tin triangular medals / to cure all forms of hysterical disease. — Carolyn Kizer

O what a bright day it was! / This empty body danced on the river bank. — Carolyn Kizer

When he found my torso, he called it his canoe, / and, using my arms as paddles, / he rowed me up and down the scummy river. — Carolyn Kizer

Half the world wants to be like Thoreau worrying about the noise of traffic on the way up to Boston; the other half use up their lives being part of that noise. I like the second half. — Franz Kline

I am a pond but / when a frog gets intimate / I keep my mouth shut. — Bill Knott

Tate is a poet; Hass (or at least in this instance) is a conveyor-belt. — Bill Knott

The mud we go through / In the mornings / To say we are here, / On the literal edge / Where we don’t know / The draft and heat / Of summertime again. — Noelle Kocot

Everything could be taken from me, except my ability to create. — Jesse Krimes

If I dreamt I set a field on fire, was it a field of plastic? / This green smoke settles on the skin and burns like ice, like stone. — Andrew Kozma

I stumbled along my own blockades / believing friends would come / with food in baskets thinking / there were barriers against blackness — Lisa C. Krueger

The poem on the page is only a shadow of the poem in the mind. And the poem in the mind is only a shadow of the poetry and the mystery of the things in this world. — Stanley Kunitz

Grandfather was giddy / With parturition and slick / “God help me,” I thought / “Letting fast river talk me / Into metempsychosis” / Water flowed one way / The dead the other. — Stephen Kuusisto

It may seem surprising that the world of poetry should be as infected with ableism as it is. Poetry is by its nature an enemy of the normalizing. Its innate antagonism to the normative in favor of the individualizing truths of human experience should make it open its arms wide to the complex sensoria and angle of vision of disability life. And yet it doesn’t. — Stephen Kuusisto