Also Mark Bibbins' poem "When It Was Always Dark" over at Cortland Review

Michael Dickman's "We Did Not Make Ourselves" from The New Yorker

and Christian Wiman's "We Did Not Make Ourselves"

from The Poetry Foundation on Louise Gluck:

According to Warren, Glück’s “power [is] to distance the lyric ‘I’ as subject and object of attention” and to “impose a discipline of detachment upon urgently subjective material.” Glück’s early books feature personae grappling with the aftermaths of failed love affairs, disastrous family encounters, and existential despair, and her later work continues to explore the agony of the self. In the New York Times, critic William Logan described her work as “the logical outcome of a certain strain of confessional verse—starved of adjectives, thinned to a nervous set of verbs, intense almost past bearing, her poems have been dark, damaged and difficult to avert your gaze from.”

Here is a link to a collection of my favorite poems by Louise Gluck

My Papa's Waltz by Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright 1942 by Hearst Magazines, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

Buy or borrow this book:

Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1961) 

I'm currently trying to get all of Olds' books and this is the one I can't find. I want it so bad. I'm reading The Gold Cell and The Wellspring right now.

Lost in the Forest  (Amy Gerstler...from Nerve Storm)

I'd given up hope.  Hadn't eaten in three

days.  Resigned to being wolf meat

when, unbelievably, I found myself in

a clearing.  Two goats with bells

round their necks stared at me.

Their pupils like coin slots

in piggy banks.  I could have gotten

the truth out of those two,

if goats spoke.  I saw leeks

and radishes planted in rows;

wash billowing on a clothesline...

and the innocuous-looking cottage

in the woods with its lapping tongue

of a welcome mat slurped me in.

In the kitchen, a woman so old her sex

is barely discernible pours a glass

of fraudulent milk.  I'm so hungry

my hand shakes.  But what is this liquid?

"Drink up, sweatheart," she says,

and as I wipe the white mustache

off with the back of my hand:

"Atta girl."  Have I stumbled

into the clutches of St. Somebody?

Who can tell.  "You'll find I prevail here

in my own little kingdom," she says as

she leads me upstairs--her bony grip

on my arm a proclamation of ownership,

as though I've always been hers.

Father Outside  (by Nick Flynn; check out his book Some Ether)

A black river flows down the center

of each page

& on either side the banks

are wrapped in snow.  My father is ink falling

in tiny blossoms, a bottle

wrapped in a paperbag.  I want to believe

that if I get the story right

we will rise, newly formed,

that I will stand over him again

as he sleeps outside under the church halogen

only this time I will know

what to say.  It is night &

it's snowing & starlings

fill the trees above us, so many it seems

the leaves sing.  I can't see them

until they rise together at some hidden signal

& hold the shape of the tree for a moment

before scattering.  I wait for his breath

to lift his blanket

so I know he's alive, letting the story settle

into the shape of this city.  Three girls in the park

begin to sing something holy, a song

with a lost room inside it

as their prayerbook comes unglued

& scatters.  I'll bend

each finger back, until the bottle

falls, until the bone snaps, save him

by destroying his hands.  With the thaw

the river will rise & he will be forced

to higher ground.  No one

will have to tell him.  From my roof I can see

the East River, it looks blackened with oil

but it's onlly the light.  Even now

my father is asleep somewhere.  If I followed

the river north I could still reach him.

That Year (by Sharon Olds)

The year of the mask of blood, my father

hammering on the glass door to get in

was the year they found her body in the hills,

in a shallow grave, naked, white as

mushroom, partially decomposed,

raped, murdered, the girl from my class.

That was the year my mother took us

and hid us so we would not be there

when she told him to leave; so there wasn't another

tying by the wrist to the chair,

or denial of food, not another

forcing of food, the head held back,

down the throat at the restaurant,

the shame of vomited buttermilk

down the sweater with its shame of new breasts.

Thwat was the year

I started to bleed,

crossing over that border in the night,

and in Social Studies, we came at last

to Auschwitz, in my ignorance

I felt as if I recognized it

like my father's face, the face of a guard

turning away--or worse yet

turning toward me.

The symmetrical piles of white bodies,

the round, white breast-shapes of the heaps,

the smell of the smoke, the dogs the wires the

rope the hunger.  This had happened to people,

just a few years ago,

in Germany, the guards were Protestants

like my father and me, but in my dreams,

every night, I was one of those

about to be killed.  It had happened to six million

Jews, to Jesus's family

I was not in--and not everyone

had died, and there was a word for them

I wanted, in my ignorance,

to share some part of, the word survivor.

Father, Son and the Wholly Ghost  (by Joel Dias-Porter, aka DJ Renegade)

We meet only

in the alleys of memory.

Our broken smiles

glitter on the ground.

Although we bear the same name,

identical scars,

you can't remember

what day I was born.

Anger spills

down the side

of my face.

This is what you have taught me:

needles are as hollow as lies,

collapse more families

than veins.

Now a prisoner in death's camp,

you grow thinner every day

until I can count your T-cells

on one hand.

The phone rings,

Mama pleads

Please buy a dark suit to wear.

I tell her

I wear black every day,

all day,

anyway.