Allen Braden Poems

In order to develop something akin to miracle,
he acquired a taste for the peeling billboards
that used to promise sweetness to every man
...

Everything necessary to maintain
every foundation ever built so far
is found simply by fondling the latch,
...

For her it all began on the streets of San Francisco
where The White Angel was doling out slabs of bread,
mugs of coffee and pearl barley stew. Each man's
...

Unless beauty's a nest of mice staking claim
to upholstery abandoned, the anonymous
tuft snagged on barbed wire or a tom named
...

Not far from where a coyote led me
over the sparsely timbered hillside,
I found a feather held in the sagebrush
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Proud and skinny tow-head
stretching for sunshine,
slender arrow of gold
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In his bleary memory she poses
like an immaculate mannequin,
her eyes pimentos, joints frozen
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Maybe I shouldn't even attempt this,
remaking a made thing as others have.
It was a day you would have pronounced
...

Magic stairs, you said, new to language then. Steps appear
and disappear. Because you are now thirteen, I wait
for you to vanish. What I mean: for some teenager
...

If a magpie alights on a snowdrift, is it only
half a bird? The answer the difference between
night/day. Bonus: a silhouette of said magpie
...