There is so little to go on: a pale trembling hand as I stand over you, my finger tracing the words on the page, a foreign language you are learning for a journey without me. You will do fine, I say. You will wrap your tongue around these sounds and be understood, be given what you desire: a loaf of bread,
poem index
occasions
- Anniversary
- Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month
- Autumn
- Birthdays
- Black History Month
- Breakfast
- Breakups
- Chanukah
- Christmas
- Dinner
- Earth Day
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- Halloween
- Hispanic Heritage Month
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- Lunch
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- New Year's
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themes
- Afterlife
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forms
- Abecedarian
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- Ballade
- Blues Poem
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- Renga
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- Tanka
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- Triolet
- Villanelle
schools & movements
- Nuyorican Poetry
- Objectivists
- OULIPO
- Poets of Exile
- Romanticism
- New York School
- New Formalism
- Misty Poets
- Modernism
- Modernismo
- Négritude
- San Francisco Renaissance
- Slam/Spoken Word
- Surrealism
- Symbolists
- Translators
- Victorian
- Metaphysical Poet
- Language Poetry
- Confessional Poetry
- Contemporary
- Cowboy Poetry
- Dark Room Collective
- Concrete Poetry
- Conceptual Poetry
- Augustan
- Beat
- Black Arts
- Black Mountain
- Ethnopoetics
- Fireside Poet
- Harlem Renaissance
- Imagism
- Jazz Poetry
- Kanaka Maoli poetry
- Futurism
- Fugitives
- Poets of World War I
- Flarf
- Formalism
- Acmeism
poet
Emily Fragos


Emily Fragos is the author of Hostage: New & Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2011). She teaches at Columbia University and New York University, and lives in New York City.
by this poet
poem
2004
poem
2015
When someone dies, the clothes are so sad. They have outlived
their usefulness and cannot get warm and full.
You talk to the clothes and explain that he is not coming back
as when he showed up immaculately dressed in slacks and plaid
jacket
and had that beautiful smile on and you’d
poem
2017
although I know you can never be found
although I know that from the highest height
you cannot be seen you are not hiding
from me or are you is it how you look now
or maybe how I look now all these years gone by
places seen people met not knowing at any time
who I was or how others saw
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