A couple of weeks ago Book Riot posted a blog full of their favorite sentences. Inspired by their post, we decided to put together our favorite lines of poetry. These are lines that woke us up, rolled around in our heads, and became fixed in our memories. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we do.
Jill Dehnert | Editor-in-Chief
“There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. / Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, / saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.” – from “Meditation at Lagunitas” by Robert Hass
“When she left / I purred heat for days. Bedridden / with trees in bloom, hating the blood-black / plums, hating the one fat vein that bisects / every leaf.”
– from “Lost Body” by Bonnie Arning former Blue Mesa Review Poetry Editor
“I imagine what they did, / maybe the ability to turn glass into sand, / to hear rustled leaves as words, / something simple, something / humans kill for.”
– from “Magneto Eyes Strange Fruit” by Gary Jackson
Sarah Sheesley | Managing Editor
“…he answered / and climbed inside me like a window” – from “My Brother My Wound” by Natalie Diaz
“sun, / split like spun / glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness” – from “The Fish” by Marianne Moore
“I slept, woke, slept in a fever of dogs.” – from “What Do We Have Here?” by Anne Carson
Lucy Burns | Associate Editor
“I wanted to mould verbs from clacking fragments of justice” – from R’s Boat by Lisa Robertson
“Without permission, slips out the door. A name adores a Freudian slip.” – from “[of a girl, in white]” by Harryette Mullen
“Locate I / love you some- / where in / teeth and / eyes bite / it” – from “The Language” by Robert Creeley
Melisa Garcia | Poetry Editor
“a mirror to the front of me / and an ocean behind, / I lay wedged in the middle of daylight, / paper-doll thin, dreaming,” – from “Photo of a Girl on a Beach” by Carmen Giménez Smith our 2014 Contest Judge for Poetry.
“Salamandra / espiga / hija del fuego / condensación de la sangre / sublimación de la sangre / evaporación de la sangre” – from “Salamandra” by Octavio Paz
“There is another other / in other of every / Another ” – from “All Love is Immigrant” by Ed Bok Lee
Brenna Gomez | Fiction Editor
“You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies, / You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise.” – from “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou
“Stars had closed their eyes or sheathed their knives.” – from “My Brother at 3 A.M” by Natalie Diaz
“my voice, in my mouth.” – from “In the Waiting Room” by Elizabeth Bishop
Micheal Noltemeyer | Nonfiction Editor
“Love is so short, forgetting is so long” – from “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines” by Pablo Neruda
“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” – from “The Old Astronomer to His Pupil” by Sarah Williams
“One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” – from “Birches” by Robert Frost
Diana Filar | Contest Coordinator
“When the blackbird flew out of sight, / It marked the edge / Of one of many circles.” – from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens
“If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth.” – from Bluets by Maggie Nelson.
“I was too young to clean graves / so I waded into the uranium river / carrying the cat who later gave birth / to six headless kittens. / O, Lord, remember, O, do remember me.” – from “Memorial Day, 1972” by Sherman Alexie
Kathryne Lim | Graduate Reader
“The heart asks pleasure first / And then, excuse from pain / And then, those little anodynes / That deaden suffering” – by Emily Dickinson
“I’d be in your mouth, / in that huger dark: / body that stands for the soul. / Word that means you are loved.” – from “Say My Name” by Franz Wright
“…you / carved the word because you craved the world – ” – from “My Sentence” by Dana Levin
