From Louise Glück:

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises

– All Hallows

From Sandra Lim:

We did not say much to each other but
we grinned,
because this love was so good you sucked the
rib bones

and I licked my fingers like a cat.
Now I’m
omniscient. I’m going to skip past
the hard

parts that go on for a very long time.

– A Walk Round the Park

From N. Scott Momaday:

I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
I am an eagle playing with the wind
I am a cluster of bright beads
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow

– The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee

From Christopher Pearce Cranch:

No more the scarlet maples flash and burn
Their beacon-fires from hilltop and from plain;
The meadow-grasses and the woodland fern
In the bleak woods lie withered once again.

The trees stand bare, and bare each stony scar
Upon the cliffs; half frozen glide the rills;
The steel-blue river like a scimitar
Lies cold and curved between the dusky hills.

– December

From Heather McHugh:

A brilliance takes up residence in flaws—

a brilliance all the unchipped faces of design

refuse. The wine collects its starlets

at a lip’s fault, sunlight where the nicked

glass angles, and affection where the eye

is least correctable, where arrows of

unquivered light are lodged, where someone

else’s eyes have come to be concerned.

– In Praise of Pain

From Nicole Homer:

Let me

say it plain: I loved someone

and I failed at it. Let me say it
another way: I like to call myself wound

but I will answer to knife. Sometimes
I think we have the same name, Notquitelove. I want

to be soft, to say here is my underbelly and I want you
to hold the knife, but I don’t know what I want you to do:

plunge or mercy. I deserve both.

– Underbelly

From Jake Skeets:

Seep willow antler press against
the memory of the first man I saw naked.

His tongue a mosquito whispering
its name a hymn on mesquite,

my cheek. The things we see the other do
collapse words into yucca bone.

The Navajo word for eye
hardens into the word for war.

– Buffalograss