Category Archives: books poetry lit

My Daughter the Sea

books poetry lit April 7, 2014 Leave a comment
“I am saltwater and undercurrents
and not nearly oceanic enough.
I break on these cliff-faces like waves
but I bend where the water would roar.
If I have a daughter I will tell her
to look past the role models presented
by society and take the sea into
her small round fists.
I will take her to the beach and show her
the depths and I will say, learn
to be unafraid like this. Be
what your mother could not.
Give support to the boats that will come
but have always the storm coiled
in your stomach. Show the endless
stretch of your carelessness to those
who are careless with you.
Seawater baby, sleep dreaming
of the Atlantic swell. Be the lapping waves
and the Great White Shark beneath them.
When you are hurt cry yourself
back into your skin. May the saltwater
always replenish your self-belief;
know that your landlocked mother
will always have arms to fit you into.
my daughter the sea | elisabeth hewer

Gulls, Too

books poetry lit April 5, 2014 Leave a comment

Gulls sensing the fisherman
pulling the

fish from the nets.
This is how I mourned you.
Swimming to the cave, letting the birds
near me.

-Lisa Hiton, Cellpoems

Reading of Ilya Kaminksy’s “Maestro”

books poetry lit April 3, 2014 Leave a comment

Have you followed me on Soundcloud? I’ve begun a process of reading favorite poems (mostly from contemporary poets) there. Recently I did a reading of Ilya Kaminsky, whom I had the great honor of seeing in person at a reading in LA.  Kaminsky is a Russian immigrant whose poems deal often with the traumas of his native land, and he’s attained success incredibly early in life because his work absolutely bleeds power and music. I read “Maestro”, the third poem in his Dancing in Odessa collection, which he signed for me.

This is a Song About Fixing Quiet

books poetry lit April 1, 2014 Leave a comment

Gorgeous. Gorgeous gorgeous spoken word poem from Alex Henery.

S H R I K E from Alex Henery on Vimeo.

Book Love

books poetry lit March 29, 2014 Leave a comment

Books & Tea Cup #3via Jaime Morrow

Canticle of Waitresses, Waiting

books poetry lit March 23, 2014 Leave a comment

This is how we herded by the waitress station,

waiting, as the town, turned down to one by snow,

settled like a gown that smothered all that ailed us.

.

How we first heard about the hostages

on Facebook, and then the town knelt down to zero,

still as snow once it resolves itself to ground.

.

How the sidewalk still needed seeding with rock salt.

How even when a person stands still, they can slip.

.

How we counted the seeds of our blessings.

How our blessings rebounded off the booths like buckshot.

.

How we each sometimes rebound into being

a country of one self.

How we other times are one self of a city.

.

How only below zero can we remember

September as that country where we save daylight

like fat over our muscles.

.

How a woman ran at the chained gym doors

to save her daughter.

How she dropped on the unseeded walk.

How we’ll remember her legs as

a fleet of hummingbirds skidding through snow.

.

How sometimes, to give something a shot means kill it.

How other times it means just close your eyes.

–Saara Myrene Raappana, via Augury Books

Quotidian: Neil Gaiman

books poetry lit, quotidian March 22, 2014 Comments: 2

readbooksneilgaiman

 

via rocketrictic

Love Song

books poetry lit March 16, 2014 Leave a comment

Love, please don’t lift me up to any­where
Now that I think about it. I don’t lift
Up eas­ily. I’m not “han­dle with care.”
I like ground, grass and grav­ity, a gift

Hallmark should hus­tle. Who is it who’s fly­ing
Where the eagles cry (Do eagles cry?); and who
Wants Joe Cocker if they don’t plan on tying
One on, hot-boxed, until all birds look blue?

To be together is so over­rated—
That’s not my style. Fragile is fine enough
To frac­ture, like an old, disintegrated

Leaf pulled from a worn note­book, per­fo­rated
To sep­a­rate. The eagle’s wing is fluff.
The sky’s not high. Nothing’s exaggerated.

-Erica Dawson, Birmingham Poetry Review

Ode to Orange

books poetry lit March 11, 2014 Leave a comment

“It is not, in my view, a very good
novel,” asserted Anthony Burgess, ink-
slinger of A Clockwork Orange, whose pages
pon­tif­i­cate our need for the free­dom to choose
evil. Is there any doubt Tony chose
the wrong wave­length, the wrong
pro­duce? And besides, who wouldn’t,
given a choice, rather read about
Protestantism sewing itself into
Irish flags, an itty-bitty ant trudg­ing around
the rind of a cer­tain cit­rus to demon­strate
the uni­verse is finite and for­ever, ched­dar
man­u­fac­tur­ing, or the manic Orange Bowl
help­ing to end the Depression? Oh, I sing paeans
for marigolds, Titan’s clouds, 10,000 male
Julias released, the insides of man­gos, hum­mocks
cov­ered in daylilies, apri­cot sher­bet
on a Thursday, leaves on their last legs, Kenya—
where they call the color chungwa—on the globe
my Grandpa Guido gave me. Give me
sea pens, zest, cock-of-the-rocks, jack-
o’-lanterns with blaz­ing eyes. Last October, Lisa,
the sar­cas­tic love-of-my-life, got gold­fish
and con­ferred the monikers
“Lime” and “Plum”; the inno­cent things
were belly-up and toilet-bowl
bound the next week. Don’t we give
our pre­cious atten­tions to stuff bend­ing us
blue? And don’t we slump on the sofa, wait­ing out
our lit­tle lives in a world as jaded and bruised
as we can stand it? Well, let my sun­rays mix
with san­guine, let ten times more life taste
like peach meat, let mir­rors reflect and release
that nanome­ter tint to things hold­ing in
that hue like a breath, because the Lord, bored
with cre­ation, bel­lowed “Let there be
orange!” and then there was—filling the sky
that first night, dot­ting trees the third day—
and it was good, so damn good
it could never, thank Heaven, be damned.

-Matt Zambito, Birmingham Poetry Review

Where Love Resides

books poetry lit March 7, 2014 Leave a comment

They fall into exhaustion rather than into gentle sleep,
each limb heavy with the ash of its bonfires burned completely down,
not curled but sprawled, claiming all the space of their bed,

two bodies that attempted fusion, both straining to push into
what is impenetrable in the other, wanting the only way they know
to try, to perhaps break through the inherent loneliness of skin.

Now, very late, leg over leg, arm across chest, they breathe deep as newborns,
as if drawing from the stuffy air replenishment after their struggle.  No dreams
tonight.  Instead, only thick flesh, cooling back into their separate selves.

What will they say when they stir back into the world,
conscious, suddenly, of their edges as morning sun floods their sheets?
What will their first words be upon waking?

They each will arrive in the new day alone, surprised, as they were at their own births,
and at death, and as after each sleep, utterly bound in the locked rooms
of their bodies. Will they recognize their loneliness?  Will they speak of it?

For this is the most fragile moment, with mussed hair and sour breath,
when wild abandon has dispersed and the habitual seeing returns
in the glaring light of every day.  Who can they tell?

If love resides anywhere, it is here: in the waking face, the tender hand that reaches
to touch that face.  It is in the gestures they choose to give, and in their decision,
whether or not they will speak, one to the other, of their true need.

-Joanne Esser, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review