Richie Hofmann | The Common

Opulence

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

The night river calms me with its slow dirty movements.
I walk home briskly, in a black baseball cap.
I work at the fringes of the day. I write poetry in bed
and criticism in the bath.
Among my friends here, I have a man
who calls me love names
in four languages. Once, in a moment, I thought I wanted to die
of his pleasure, but that was a wound
speaking. The history of this place
abounds with wounds.
Mobs of vandals have ransacked the villas.
A very rich man on his deathbed
from a corrupt family who loves the arts
was fed a medicine of powdered pearls.

January 2021 Poetry Feature

January 28, 2021 Poetry

By SUPHIL LEE PARK, RICHIE HOFMANN, KAREN SKOLFIELD, CLIFF FORSHAW, T.J MCLEMORE

Contents:

Suphil Lee Park | Hua Tou

Richie Hofmann | City of Violent Wind

Karen Skolfield | Gettsyburg Relics for Sale

Cliff Forshaw | Parthenon Bas-Relief

T.J. McLemore | Sunday, October 23, 4004 BCE

Philosophical Flowers

April 16, 2019 Issue 17, Issue 17 Poetry, Poetry

By RICHIE HOFMANN

The streets are named for German poets
in my huge provincial Midwestern city.
Dust whirls up from the tires of passing cars,
lifting a veil over me, like Romantic longing. On Goethe, I want nothing
more than to reach down and feel a lover’s big skull
in my hands. On Schiller, lust subsides, among the wrought iron
doors and grand steps, lined with hundreds of dollars of candles.
Inside, patricians mingle in the high-minded friendships
I desire for myself. About this, as so much else,
the flowers in the window-boxes on Schiller are philosophical.
Their arguments are convoluted, but concern the beauty of simplicity, freedom from need,
and, even more often, the depredations of time.
One fat peony speaks as if she were the Sybil:
“Live with your century but do not be its creature.”