Art and shiny things…
She thought she was alone.
My father had left her.
She’d hum in the kitchen—
she thought she was alone—
her song the sound
a needle makes lapping
the innermost groove of an LP,
almost a screech—
she thought she was alone
since dad had left her, leaving behind
some burnt down trees.
It cuts through suddenly, expertly, this want to talk to you — like the way you used to open pomegranates. Nothing was wasted, not time, not an extra ruby-seed on the inside. You always said that one does not cut a fruit — you ask them to open, gently, and they would let you in. They knew you would be fair while splitting them. I try to talk to you, cutting through time. It does not open. It says, learn from your mother.
-Sujit Prasad
The bakery’s graffiti either spells HOPE
or NOPE. But hope and results
are different, said Fanny Brawne to her Keats
voiding his unreasonable lung.
Getting off the medicine
completely means light again
blinking to light. Device returned
to its factory settings. The complete black
of before the meteor shower
above the bakery. If you lose the smell
of leather, lemon, or rose,
studies show you will fail at being
Poets.org, Christopher Salerno
rt Gemi on Pixiv
Don’t take it personal’, they said;
but I did, I took it all quite personal—
the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;
the price of grapefruit and stamps,
the wet hair of women in the rain—
And I cursed what hurt me
and I praised what gave me joy,
the most simple-minded of possible responses.
The government reminded me of my father,
with its deafness and its laws,
and the weather reminded me of my mom,
with her tropical squalls.
Tony Hoagland, Poetry Magazine
“My father steps into a field of lost
sensation, sunflowers, a yellow star”
I had the pleasure of interviewing Beth Copeland about her gorgeous poem “Falling Lessons: Erasure One.” The poem is about the loss of her father to Alzheimer’s, and was transformed into the above video for Motionpoems by Ahn Vu (it was also featured on PBS Newshour!)
My daughter can’t understand
why, when I press the button,
the parking garage door doesn’t budge.
The car stuck. The park too far
for her small legs to walk. These things
happen, I say. It’s no one’s fault.
In the apartment courtyard, the tenants are gathered —
one complains he’s missing the Laker game,
one can’t charge her cell phone,
another’s laptop is dead.
The power,
of course, isn’t the problem — we’re each unprepared
for such sudden loss,
rt Bluesaga331
He’s always coming back, our neighbor, never quite here.
His wife, who teaches English, will never leave Seoul,
so he’s present part-year
past-participle— a joke he tells without a face.
We watch
his cat Monkra who looks exactly like our cat, who also wakes him
before sunrise, whining for food. Call him Momo for short,
and we do, no questions. He deals in import-export,
never carries a briefcase, only a pamphlet
of English grammar his wife authored.
He says she doesn’t understand
what I do for a living,
that poetry is for children and nine-tailed foxes
favored in Korean dramas that he and I discuss in secret,
away from our disapproving spouses.
Rosebud Ben-Oni
Coffee and Irony 