Art and shiny things…
I’ve spent a whole lifetime
trying to explain what homesickness feels like
inside my body, but when I open my mouth
I say your name.
Hannah Nahar , One Sentence Poems
This hit me right in the gut – it’s so rare as a third-culture kid to find someone who can put into words what you’ve been feeling your whole life..amazing.
I like the kind of rain
that upsets people
postpones the softball game
stops traffic and the radio
I am the man
Salvation Army shoes
straightening cigarette butts
in front of the laundry mat
personal Jesus t-shirt
Scott Nolan, Puritan Magazine
Let us take the river
path near Fall Hill.
There we will negotiate
an outcrop with its silvered
initials & other bits of graffiti,
all the way to the broken edge
that overlooks the bend,
& hold hands until
we can no longer tell
where the river ends.
-Jon Pineda, via Poets.org
Will we breathe
like ballet
dancers, learn
to bleed song—
toes pointed?
Will you still
learn this dance?
This is me
trying to
lengthen my-
self. To stand
on the thin
ends of my
swollen toes
and fool my-
self into
Marlin M. Jenkins, Puritan Magazine
upon his execution by bolt gun at the Copenhagen Zoo
Because, they said, genetics. Et
cetera. Said
inbreeding. Because
when the steel bolt retracts, the giraffe’s
skull crumpling
in on itself like a cup, blood
from the heart circulates ‘still
in the edible flesh. He felt,
we are told, nothing. Not
the bolt’s cold lobotomy. Not
Not his slack body hauled
to the stage. The Danes
—babies in the arms of their mothers, in one
photograph a dad with his son—have come
hungry to the zoo’s cruel—
they call it—lesson. The lions
beside the stage circle.
-Christopher Kempf
Taken by Dee Henderson
The story of a man without a personality who falls in love with an emotionally vulnerable woman 15 years younger than him as they wander around the country opening safety deposit boxes and finding nothing in particular.
If you thought that was tongue-in-cheek, you’re wrong.
My Christian fiction adventures continue!
*PSA: I love Dee Henderson. But her latest books are rubbish of the first order.
This very short story/prose poem by Marlene Olin (not quite sure what it is except that it’s fantastic) knocked my SOCKS off – read it. It’s so worth it for the end, such power and joy.
The List
When the light turned green, the old man walked into traffic. Perhaps the light was red and he took too long to negotiate the curb or maybe he just wasn’t paying attention. But one minute there was a glimpse of white hair and an airborne fedora, and the next moment there was a thud.
The woman slammed on her brakes and ran into the street.
read more at Blue Five Notebook
Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard
Another one bites the dust! By that I mean, yet another mediocre YA novel I can add to my “one and done” pile.
It started out so well: a very strong voice in the form of first-person protagonist Mare Barrow, a snarky thief struggling to keep herself and her family afloat in a class-driven, oppressive society. The world is what I’d describe as fantasy-lite with a few steampunk elements – people have elemental powers, but it’s recognizably a human world with a quasi-feudal structure, and steampunk comes in with the inclusion of several machines – a bicycle, a robotic-esque war machine, and airships.
Society is divided into two classes: the ruling class “Silvers”, who have all the power and money, and the working class “Reds”, who are mostly servants, tradespeople, and conscripted soldiers. Silvers claim to be gods, and are certainly superhuman – each is born with an ability to control the world around – some can control iron, others fire, water, and other elements, and a few can control people’s minds. Their blood itself runs silver. Reds, on the other hand, have no abilities, and their blood is red. It’s a world in which your fate is ruled by your genetic background and, quite literally, your blood.
Aveyard, like most YA authors, attempts snark, and unlike most, succeeds – Mare’s occasional comebacks and insults are genuinely funny and witty. The plot is fast-paced, the world is reasonably inventive, and the first half is very strong. In the second half, however, the ongoing romance is really phoned in – an epic romance is conceived out of literally about five brief interactions, and then a MAJOR plot point is hung upon it. Some authors suffer from the misconception that you can slap the label “prince” on someone, have him be sympathetic to a heroine twice, and every reader for a thousand miles will think he’s the second coming of Darcy crossed with Edward Cullen. Neither of Mare’s suitors *quite* leap into reality; combine Maven and Cal and you’d have one fully realized male character/romantic interest.
The undercooked romance is followed by a secondary plot point that was both wildly predictable – I saw it coming the entire novel, because this is how young adult novels go – and also extraordinarily poorly conceived and unconvincing. 
You eat Utah,
literal salt of the earth,
briny efflorescence of an ancient shoreline.
Eat the rust-iron pink and shimmer-silver
encrusting the ruptured bedrock
you walked across in summer sun,
infused in every form –
in the soup’s roux, in simple Sunday eggs,
in homemade oatmeal cookies’ savory edge.
read more at Blue Five Notebook (scroll down to the third poem)
-Susan O’Dell Underwood
Blue Five Notebook has done it again with their latest issue – I love them because they always contain works that are unexpected, that twist into your gut with a shiver of delight and surprise. I had the great honor to be published by them a year or so ago.
Under the yonder, I searched for my name in a blue
book. The pages were doors without knobs or keyholes, yet,
because blue comforts the eyes, the tome opened up to me.
Suddenly I had a taste for blue; it depicted the impossible.
For both Greeks & Romans there was no blue in the rainbow,
but here, by sunlight, the most audacious sapphire. And so
I forsook the allure of verdigris, cochineal, & mulberry
& walked to the river where, having polluted the water, the dyers
waited for it to clear. Rather than tinctures, a miraculous
draft of fishes came up with their buckets. But this was
not the end, nor the beginning, of my faraway look away.
-L.S. Klatt, Blackbird
Coffee and Irony 