Tag Archives: poetry

Poetry: Kingston, Jamaica. 3am. Passa Passa Dance Party

books poetry lit November 2, 2014 Leave a comment

One good thing about music / when it hits / you feel no pain
—Bob Marley, Trenchtown Rock

When her body is a compass
bearing South, and she is crouched
bare-toed and feckless above steaming pavement
poised to give birth to drum or bass,
Red Bull triggered at the wrist,
hips a bouquet of cackling fingers,
lips two hummingbirds aimed for flight,
the Glock-Nined baby brother
she nursed from croup
with lavender oil and Cat’s Claw bark,
for whom she turned a fist of nothing
into school fees and uniform,
and whom she will bury
in St. Andrew Parish Church Cemetery
once the sun fully rises,
feels more like a brilliant toothache
her tongue worries,
than a tumid and wild devastation.

-Idrissa Simmonds, Crab Creek Review

Poetry: Ithaka

books poetry lit October 30, 2014 Leave a comment

Dear Penelope, do you now sleep among the catacombs?

Scarves of white drift over the Aegean – an altar of bottomless blue.

I have gone to the edge of the world and still cannot find you.

Even the olive trees raise their spangled limbs skyward in longing.

Mother Earth slides her abacus beads, conjures storms quick as curses.

When lightning struck, did the boat protect or beckon the bolt?

Island flowers shut their eyes only when the stars disrobe – hope and sorrow held
within the same root.

She imagines him bright-toothed & swarthy, but her husband is just sunburned & homesick.

So many suitors holding her skeins – she’s woven a trail for her waylaid mariner, long
as his beard and her undoing.

In twenty years she has never asked, What shall I wish for myself?

Odysseus wonders, Do I have the right to return?

Maids cast offerings to the sea: red rose petals and grape leaves, love and wine all that remain.


** The line What shall I wish for myself? is a reworking Mary Oliver’s line What shall I wish for, for myself ?

-Kelly Cressio-Moeller, just published in Thrush Poetry Journal

Poetry: Tear It Down

books poetry lit October 27, 2014 Leave a comment 
We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of racoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within the body.

-Jack Gilbert

Poetry: Dear Mucha

books poetry lit October 25, 2014 Leave a comment

It is raining in Manhattan. I am sitting in a chair overlooking 14th street and I realize you were right. I told you that people are taller than buildings. I told you that there are many green places in the city. Look at Central Park, for instance.

In the morning pink light falls across hardwood floor, spreading out like a thousand peonies, and I imagine that it is a greeting from you. But it is nighttime now, and raining so it makes no difference if I tell you a few real things. Today I saw a billboard advertising cigarettes and in a fit of frenzy went home and burned dinner.

And could you love me if I was pretty enough to be painted on your billboards? I would let my hair down long enough to collect pools of curls at my waist. I would pose naked in front of your tall landscapes and reach out with both arms pulling this city into my body.

And Mucha, the weather is all over this house.

I thought of such things while walking to a shop to buy cigarettes. In Manhattan, the streets smell like a wet cement and baked bread. It feels like the whole city is yawning. I, too, am tired of this body.

Yours, Catherine

-Catherine Bresner in Burnt District

Video of the Day – Gorgeous, Dreamy “Ambien”

books poetry lit October 22, 2014 Leave a comment

‘Ambien’ by Sarah Sloat from Nic Sebastian on Vimeo.

Poetry: Mornings

books poetry lit October 17, 2014 Leave a comment

She would have cooked
his breakfast, eggs sunny-side up,
runny the way he liked them,
strong boiled coffee poured
and waiting, better than the diner.
But before the train screaming
through tunnels, his windowless office,
the idiots he had to “sir,”
he needed a space without her
or his children, so he dressed
in a crack of light from the bathroom,
held his shoes by two fingers,
and left them sleeping. That walk

to the diner was his time

Read more at Burnt District

-Susan Aizenberg

Thank you to Linebreak for publishing one of my poems!

books poetry lit October 15, 2014 Comments: 2

linebreak poem claire hellar

Lovely followers, I’m so excited to say that Linebreak, one of my very favorite poetry publications, picked up one of my poems, “Kitchen Ode”! Please read below and share on Facebook/Twitter if so inclined! (There are handy links at the bottom of the page)

Read or listen to “Kitchen Ode”  on Linebreak

Poetry: Boat

books poetry lit October 14, 2014 Leave a comment

My son sleeps
the way a boat
comes free—

ropes thrown back
on deck, and the soft hands
of the water all around.

-Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Star 82 Review

Poetry: Orderly Dispersal

books poetry lit October 13, 2014 Leave a comment

I’m asking you now in my calmest voice, my voice of patience and maintenance and strength, to rise slowly from your seats and turn to face the nearest aisle. The person in front of you is moving deliberately and efficiently. Put your trust in that person’s control of his or her impulses to rush or push or trample the persons between him or her and the ultimate goal of the exit just as you exercise your power over your own impulses to act in the same way.

Listen to the tone of calm in my voice. Do not worry. Relax the muscles in your shoulders. Lift your feet one at a time, move each a few inches forward and put it back down with plenty of clearance for the shoes and feet of the person in front of you who is proceeding in the same measured way out of the row of seats to the aisle and on toward the ultimate goal of the exit.

Read more

-Jesse Minkert, Paper Nautilus

 

Poetry: What Happens Happens in the Body

books poetry lit October 11, 2014 Leave a comment

You are not a windchime. You feel this
when it’s ten below and the window
falls out of the storm door and though
there is another door behind that one—

because this is the way with storm doors:
they protect—soon enough you have to
replace the strip of framing, you have to
admit you threw out when it fell out

in July as if it were never important.
It was. It was always coming for you,
this or that bit of significant plastic
dislodged by one predictable destructive

action. Cue sharp ice forming on a super-
efficient furnace exhaust: it’s exactly what
they kept saying about the sublime: how
it happens in the body and it hurts.

-Sarah Barber, Word Riot