Russell Edson Poems

Since the fern can't go to the sink for a drink of
water, I graciously submit myself to the task, bringing two
glasses from the sink.
And so we sit, the fern and I, sipping water together.
...

A man ambushed a stone. Caught it. Made it a prisoner.
Put it in a dark room and stood guard over it for the
rest of his life.
...

A woman prepared a mouse for her husband's dinner,
roasting it with a blueberry in its mouth.

At table he uses a dentist's pick and a surgeon's scalpel,
...

A scientist has a test tube full of sheep. He
wonders if he should try to shrink a pasture
for them.
They are like grains of rice.
...

A man is fighting with a cup of coffee. The rules: he must not
break the cup nor spill its coffee; nor must the cup break the
man's bones or spill his blood.
...

There was a man who didn't know how to sleep; nodding
off every night into a drab, unprofessional sleep. Sleep that
he'd grown so tired of sleeping.
He tried reading The Manual of Sleep, but it just put him
...

On the other side of a mirror there's an inverse world,
where the insane go sane; where bones climb out of the
earth and recede to the first slime of love.
...

An elephant went to bed and pulled a crazy quilt up under
its tusks.

But just as the great gray head began filling with the gray
...

There was once a hog theater where hogs performed
as men, had men been hogs.

One hog said, I will be a hog in a field which has
...

The barber has accidentally taken off an ear. It lies like
something newborn on the floor in a nest of hair.
Oops, says the barber, but it musn't've been a very good
ear, it came off with very little complaint.
...