I always

                                                                         hear echoes and reverses

when I am listening to language. It’s

                                              the field of my consciousness.

- Charles Bernstein

 I think with the poem not thr-

                                     ou-

      g-

h

                                                  it.

- Charles Bernstein

I saw time but it didn’t return my gaze.

- Charles Bernstein

I left my purpose in my other pants.

- Charles Bernstein

I believe in my disbelief, have faith in my reason.

- Charles Bernstein

   The taste of madeleine ain’t

             what it used to be.

- Charles Bernstein

I want to be understood,

                      just not by you.

- Charles Bernstein

To unthink my mind as broken

- Geffrey Davis

Some — the luckiest — 

          arrived at, then clung to, that point in love where

to be understood entirely stops being the main thing,

or a thing at all, even.

- Carl Phillips

When I think of desire,

it is in the same way that I do

God: as parable, any steep

and blue water, things that are always   

there, they only wait

to be sounded.

- Carl Phillips

Less the rescue.

More, always, the ache   

toward it.

- Carl Phillips

They said it would hurt, and it does.

- Carl Phillips

courage mattering so much less than not spooking easily

- carl phillips

And yet so much,

still, to wish for. To have loved

differently, less deeply, more

reliably. I call that hope,

not regret. 

- Carl Phillips

Is it okay to be human, and fall away

from oblation and memory, if we forget,

and can't sometimes help it and sometimes

it is all that we want?

- Carl Phillips