Live Nude Poems

The Crow Funeral If you see one in progress as you’re passing by, stop and take off your hat to honor the crow funeral. Unlike the rabbits or the trout, the crows hold funerals for their fallen. Not to mourn but to warn their brethren that this, too, could happen to them. Come look! Come see how your brother or sister has come to their end. Their caws not the wails of grief aimed at the heavens of which they have no concept but a call to the others to come and see what is horribly possible and maybe to gather a posse that will enact revenge on a perpetrator. They know of no afterlife, only today and tomorrow so danger cannot exist to them beyond what they have seen. They accept you there, seeing your manner and expression and knowing you mean no harm. As they gather not one of them thinks, “I’m glad it’s not me” but instead cries out to the others, “Be careful. This could happen to you.” They ruffle their wings in unison and you stand there awed

Only for Jill Always, I try to write the poem with the secret and fail the poem which will reveal itself only to you and bring you elated to tell me that you have found that mystery you are certain but I fail and the mystery remains unknown though, darling, that is why every wrong word I write is yours filled with error, yes, but stumbling along with love Jeff Weddle is the author of several poetry collections and one collection of short fiction, as well as the Welty Prize winning Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of The Outsider and Loujon Press. He is associate professor of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama. 

the dark core of everything as a boy i remember watching my mother peel potatoes w/ a knife the way she held the blade the way her thin wrist turned & how she took just the right amount of flesh off & dug out spots of rot saving the most pathetic potatoes & how clean they all looked in the colander beneath the faucet & then decades later i remember how she got sick but still insisted on cooking & burned a pot on the stove after she passed out on the floor in the den & how i wished it was simple that i could’ve taken a knife shaved away the tumor cut out all of those terrible multiplying dark eyes until everything was clean again rob plath writes like a velociraptor is behind his back. he loves cats & the moon. find more of his work at robplath.com  

Fall and the Second Law of Thermodynamics It is the season of apples, crisp and tart. I transform them into crumbles, pies, and    comfort. They soften, lose their texture, sink into sugary union with the flour. September lifts the hazy skies of Missouri summer. Contours become clearer. The woods fill with yellow wildflowers; the species are easy to confuse. Does it matter for a poem whether this is  an ashy sunflower or a tickseed coreopsis? Confusion is easier than clarity. The second law of thermodynamics requires natureto fall from order into disorder. Atomic arrangements disintegrate. Ink dropped into a glass of water disperses, forms a cloud, spreads until the liquid is pale blue. Bubbles burst, unable to sustain surface tension. Organisms die. Autumn is the season of disordering. Of decay. Leaves fall; highly organized matter turns to soil. Returns to soil. Death is but an increase in entropy. If you look at it like that, there is nothing to fear. Agnes Vojta grew up in

Sisyphus Poets can't get enough of the boulder. Camus, who may as well have been a poet, said he loved that man in the frozen multiverse can choose to assert private meaning & justify the absurdity of existence, laughing back at the deathless gods, a savory bit of payback. My students call him Syphilis. Stop. I say, You're ruining the mood. Back to the rock: Gluck’s icy, but she rolls it easily. Homer’s is for Ajax to hurl, a ton weight. A millstone only Apollo can save Hector from, for now. I draw mine in dry erase on the wall by the window. Erudite vandalism? More small crimes for daily inspiration! Thinking less of Camus than reading D’aulaires, laughing when I read the husband/wife team wrote of the wily king on his return to the beloved, Fooled him again! Anything to be alive! To bask in the climb like Alex Honnold on the staggering face of El Capitan, smiling, granite-minded, all long handed limberness. Utterly prepared for the fab

9 / 12 After the sky fell on the City, swelling its canyons, the talus slopes of smoke and carnage, the names of missing spoken as pleas into camcorders that swish pan to passing sirens, in the quiet towns and muted cities, tv screens blink images against our staring eyes. At Fort Stewart we clean weapons and watch CNN, fingertip smell of gun oil as hand reaches up, rubbing chin in thought, looking into this widescreen scry glass, any news of who did this to the staggering city predicting our future. "100 percent accountability" releasing us, I pass the parade field, sunset making a shadow over ground where a grove of crape myrtles, each named for a soldier, will soon grow, knowing safety can be counted, the months of it limited by news we will receive, that it's finite like grains in a bullet. Across the world, a desert moon none of us has seen yet rises over Sadr City....Now, years and all of our deaths later, I can look up, see it, feel it, its beau