Category Archives: couplets

Valentine’s Week: Lisa Barnett, ‘Evolution: A Love Song’

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What’s evolution but a whole lot of sex,
the slippery, mutating mix of Y and X?
Man laddered up out of the ooze and the muck,
ascending rung by rung and fuck by fuck—
DNA colliding and combining;
brains and bodies gladly realigning.

Now let us in our turn embrace the dance
and give our separate genes a moment’s chance
to alter, rearrange, exchange, reshuffle
and triumph in the rude ancestral scuffle.
What’s evolution? Just a whole lot of sex,
the slippery, mutating mix of Y and X.

*****

Lisa Barnett writes: “This poem is a testament to the powers of revision. It had a long gestation (or should I say evolution); it was begun in early 2021 and completed in January 2026. For a long time it was just a two-line fragment…then a failed triolet…and ultimately evolved into pentameter couplets.  At some point I was reading Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” which partly inspired the 2nd stanza. My husband is always partial to my poems about sex, and this was no exception.”

 Lisa Barnett’s poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, Measure, New Verse Review, Snakeskin (including this poem), and elsewhere. She is the author of two chapbooks: The Peacock Room (Somers Rocks Press) and Love Recidivus (Finishing Line Press). She lives in Haverford, Pennsylvania with her husband.  

Photo: from Snakeskin, February 2026

Midge Goldberg, ‘Words My Mother Didn’t Know’

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Starting with the obvious:
iPad, cell phone, cannabis,

Mitochondrial DNA—
but science changes every day—

sushi, pad thai, jasmine rice,
almost any kind of spice,

zipline, snowboard, kayaking,
tongue or belly-button ring.

Then, things she’d heard of, so she knew,
but not imagined one could do:

Go to Iceland, make French bread,
care what anybody said,

watch a sunrise, touch a bug,
want to give your child a hug.

*****

Midge Goldberg writes: “Often I’ll find myself in situations or places that my parents never would have encountered or dreamed of. That got me thinking of even words that they would not have known. I started writing the funnier couplets, then all of a sudden the poem took a darker turn that I hadn’t expected. Writing in rhyme and meter does that for me sometimes, leads me to a more complicated poem than I had originally imagined.”

‘Words My Mother Didn’t Know’ was originally published in Light, and nominated by them for a Pushcart Prize.

Midge Goldberg has published three books of her own poetry, including To Be Opened After My Death, a children’s book, and was the editor of Outer Space: 100 Poems, published by Cambridge University Press. She lives in New Hampshire, where her newly expanded tomato garden is now under two feet of snow. She still has the same approximate number of chickens.

Photo: “Untitled” by Leon Fishman is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Couplets or sonnet? Julia Griffin, ‘Five Act Players’

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After Shakespeare

Update: the world—in other words, the brain—
Has stages, yes, but scientists explain
That those old seven are in fact chimeras:
Five’s the true number of our mental eras.
First you’re an infant, puking still and mewling.
Then you turn nine and gripe about your schooling.
At thirty-two, you’re all grown up, so show it
By acting like a soldier, or a poet.
At sixty-six, it’s time for eating chicken
And learning law. If still alive and kickin’
When eighty-three comes round, your life’s adventures
Will shrink to hunting slippers, specs, and dentures.
So that’s the scoop. Of course you’re free to spike it;
We know truth isn’t always as you like it.

“Brain has five ‘eras’, scientists say—with adult mode not starting until early 30s:
Study suggests human brain development has four pivotal ‘turning points’ at around the ages of nine, 32, 66 and 83″
—The Guardian

*****

Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” speech from ‘As You Like It’, updated by current scientific thinking…

Julia Griffin lives in south-east Georgia/ south-east England. She has published in Light (including with Five Act Players in Light’s Poems of the Week), LUPO, Mezzo Cammin, and some other places, though Poetry and The New Yorker indicate that they would rather publish Marcus Bales than her. Much more of her poetry can be found through this link in Light.  

“Steel Dust: Young and Old” by LarimdaME is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Dorothy Parker, ‘The Veteran’

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When I was young and bold and strong,
Oh, right was right, and wrong was wrong!
My plume on high, my flag unfurled,
I rode away to right the world.
“Come out, you dogs, and fight!” said I,
And wept there was but once to die.

But I am old; and good and bad
Are woven in a crazy plaid.
I sit and say, “The world is so;
And he is wise who lets it go.
A battle lost, a battle won–
The difference is small, my son.”

Inertia rides and riddles me;
The which is called Philosophy.

*****

Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967). The source of innumerable witty, caustic poems and quotable squibs. Her philosophical stance is one of Cynicism and Idealism; Socialism, Feminism and Civil Rights; and Literary American Modernism. She was wonderful.

Image: Dorothy Parker

Short poem: Michael R. Burch, ‘Not Elves, Exactly’

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Something there is that likes a wall,
that likes it spiked and likes it tall,

that likes its pikes’ sharp rows of teeth
and doesn’t mind its victims’ grief

(wherever they come from, far or wide)
as long as they fall on the other side.

*****

Michael R. Burch comments: “I wrote ‘Not Elves, Exactly‘ thinking of Trump’s border wall and Robert Frost’s mischievous elves in ‘Mending Wall‘.”

The poem was first published in Snakeskin.

Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into 23 languages, incorporated into three plays and four operas, and set to music, from swamp blues to classical, 78 times by 35 composers. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The HyperTexts.

Photo: “Spiked wall, Lewes” by ♔ Georgie R is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

RHL, ‘The Beat Goes On’

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A pounding beat to drug, enhance, enfold –
iambics are the dance floor of the old.

*****

Published in The Asses of Parnassus, home of “short, witty, formal poems”. Thanks, Brooke Clark!

Illustration: ‘Iambics’ by RHL and ChatGPT

Amit Majmudar, ‘Poem that Almost Rhymed’

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Sometimes I visit bodies where I almost roamed
and the curves are made of clouds I almost dreamed,

a consummation missed by just a touch,
an air-to-air refueling broken off,

the hose retracted and the thirst abandoned
as both planes bank in opposite directions.

I hold my almosts in a contact list
of hands I never held, and never lost,

my store of acorns, little lids on ache,
my unmates boarding, one by one, an ark

that sails them, as it must, away from this life,
where I have these three kids, this house, and this wife,

although it could have been somebody else,
a past I passed on quickening my pulse.

When I pull my present closer by the waist,
almost wears the skin of never was.

*****

Amit Majmudar writes: “Poem That Almost Rhymed operates by slant rhymes, mimicking phonetically the speaker’s romantic near-matches that ended up being near-misses. “Close but no cigar,” as the saying goes: the  speaker reflects on friends who almost made love using words that almost chime in melodiously coupling couplets. Incomplete. The sexual imagery is clear but hopefully sophisticated enough not to seem vulgar–particularly the coitus interruptus implicit in the image of mid-air refueling. The last slant rhyme “waist” almost consummates with “was”–two more letters, and the rhyme would fulfil itself as “waste,” the word that epitomizes the underlying regret of the speaker, who acknowledges his happiness but knows, too, that his happiness could have taken another form, perhaps (sigh) one that would have been an ever-so-slightly better match….”

Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), and the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025). “Poem That Almost Rhymed” was first published in Bad Lilies. Majmudar’s next collection, Things My Grandmother Said, is scheduled for early 2026. 
More information at www.amitmajmudar.com

“Missed Connection [day 111 of 366]” by Wondermonkey2k is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Brooke Clark, ‘High Standards’

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I hate whatever novel everybody’s praising now,
I hate any café that draws a crowd,
I hate the kind of people who are friends with everyone—
they’re always “dropping by,” always “have to run”—
I hate, in truth, popularity and the eager horde it brings.
I prefer to seek out rarer things,
and beauty—beauty like yours—is vanishingly rare—but then,
you’ve shared it with so many other men.

*****

Brooke Clark writes: “I hate all common things,” Callimachus says in the original of this poem, which is the Callimachean aesthetic in a nutshell: the search for the unusual word, the lesser-known version of the famous story, to lend your poetry the interest of the unusual. Like other poets of his time, he was searching for a way to get out of the massive shadow cast by Homer, the Epic Cycle, and the earlier lyric poets. I’ve always found the shift from the literary concerns of the first two thirds of the poem to the personal, romantic concerns at the end fascinating; do literary tendencies become a model for how one conducts one’s personal life? Or were the literary concerns just a metaphor for the personal? In those long-ago days when people criticized poetry on Twitter, I was criticized for repeating the phrase “I hate” when Callimachus uses a different verb for “hate” or “dislike” each time (the Callimachean aesthetic at work). I liked the anaphora, though, and I stuck with it.”

This poem originally appeared in Arion, Boston University’s Journal of Humanities and the Classics.

Brooke Clark is the author of the poetry collection Urbanities and has published work in Arion, Literary Imagination, THINK, The Walrus, LA Review of Books, and other places. He is also the editor of the online epigrams journal The Asses of Parnassus and the book reviews editor at Able Muse.
Twitter: @thatbrookeclark
Bluesky: @brookeclark.bsky.social

Photo: “Getty Museum” by kevin dooley is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Political poem: Michael R. Burch, ‘Not Elves, Exactly’

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after Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”

Something there is that likes a wall,
that likes it spiked and likes it tall,

that likes its pikes’ sharp rows of teeth
and doesn’t mind its victims’ grief

(wherever they come from, far or wide)
as long as they fall on the other side.

*****

Michael R. Burch writes: “Many people misunderstand the most famous phrase in Robert Frost’s poem ‘Mending Wall.’ In the poem Frost’s neighbor quotes his father’s adage that “Good fences make good neighbors” as they work together to repair an unnecessary wall on the border of their properties. Talk about a misunderstanding: this phrase has even been used by politicians to justify apartheid walls and similar barriers! But Frost did not share his neighbor’s belief and compared him to a stone-armed savage who moved in primitive darkness and could not go beyond his father’s saying. Frost’s own belief about such walls was expressed in the poem: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out / And to whom I was like to give offense.” At the end of the poem, Frost considers teasing his neighbor with the idea that mischievous elves are responsible for the wall falling down, but decides to hold his peace. My title questions who builds such walls: ‘Not Elves, Exactly’ but something much darker and more ominous.”

Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into 22 languages, incorporated into three plays and four operas, and set to music, from swamp blues to classical, 61 times by 32 composers. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The HyperTexts.

“The Wall Has Spikes” by Kevan is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Michael R. Burch, ‘Funding Fundamentals’

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“I found out that I was a Christian for revenue only and I could not bear the thought of that, it was so ignoble.” — Mark Twain

Making sense from nonsense is quite sensible! Suppose
you’re running low on moolah, need some cash to paint your toes …
Just invent a new religion; claim it saves lost souls from hell;
have the converts write you checks; take major debit cards as well;
take MasterCard and Visa and good-as-gold Amex;
hell, lend and charge them interest, whether payday loan or flex.
Thus out of perfect nonsense, glittery ores of this great mine,
you’ll earn an easy living and your toes will truly shine!

*****

Originally published by Lighten Up Online. NOTE: A flex loan is a payday loan with a “personal line of credit” that makes it even harder to pay off than traditional payday loans. Caveat emptor.

Michael R. Burch writes: “Living in allegedly ‘Christian America’ where 80% of evangelicals voted for the Antichrist Trump, I am forced to resort to foxhole humor. ‘Funding Fundamentals’ is tongue-in-cheek foxhole humor, but I think we would be better off forming our own religions than donating money to false profits like the bible-hawking Trump and his cronies.”

Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into 22 languages, incorporated into three plays and four operas, and set to music, from swamp blues to classical, 61 times by 32 composers. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The HyperTexts.