Tag Archives: poetry

Tell Clare that I love her

books poetry lit August 22, 2015 Leave a comment

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

Poem: Disciple

books poetry lit August 21, 2015 Leave a comment

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.

Poetry: A Moral Color

books poetry lit August 18, 2015 Leave a comment

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

Poetry: Hanoi Sundays

books poetry lit July 22, 2015 Leave a comment

Let’s be tourists. Let’s eat banana fritters wrapped in old homework, crouch
on red plastic stools under the banyan spiky with joss sticks. Let’s walk

to our lake, have a cà phê đá and count turtles. Our spoons’ll scrape and clink the condensed
milk chorus of men forever on lunch breaks. Let’s forget colonialism and believe

the compliments. Let’s not argue too much when they overcharge us.
During the underwater afternoon hours let’s speed

read more at Linebreak

-Kelly Morse

The Bird and the Cloud and the Too-Small Girl

books poetry lit July 1, 2015 Leave a comment

The bird who turned white from trying to love a cloud

so hard she almost misted him into dust

How one day the bird flew to the cloud and said,

“Finally, after years of waiting,

I can’t tell if I love you because you are a cloud

or if I love you because you are made of water

read more

Kallie Falandays, Nightblock

Poem: ‘Not Monet’s Giverny’

books poetry lit July 1, 2015 Leave a comment

In our snow globe of good-byes we leave
cities burning, arguments still on fire.

We do not touch but force ourselves

into pockets and gloves.
Winter stumbles on: questions

without answers.
Glass bridge of exits, cracked runway lights

flared blue and gold.

We travel through forlorn gates
the size of breadbaskets

do not stop for sweets or tea.

read more

Susan Rich, Sweet Lit

Poetry: The Stunt Double

books poetry lit June 27, 2015 Leave a comment

Like a stone switched with a jewel,
in another world I’m thrown into the sky.
The day ends with my voice
still sleeping upside down in my body.
I need an x-ray to remember my life.
I sit in my car until whatever it is
returns to me, until going home stops
feeling like a crash scene.

read more

-Jeffrey Morgan, The Journal

Poetry: Silk Road

books poetry lit June 25, 2015 Leave a comment

The stage is blank now. Ribbons swirling, smoke
illuminated from beneath by red
lamps focused on the emptiness, oak boards
laid down into a pattern which affords
a place to leap and land: the colored thread
of narrative in dance has disappeared.

Those arms, like crane wings catching air, once sheared
the curtained wind as if to fly, their lines
as straight as quills, or intricate cleft braids
whose interwoven motion still cascades
like water falling through the wreathed designs
we only dreamed could be performed.

read more

W.F. Lantry

Poetry: Collect Call by Ash Bowen

books poetry lit June 23, 2015 Leave a comment

Somewhere out there, an operator plugged in
the wire of your voice to the switchboard

of Arkansas where I am
happy to accept the charges—an act so antique
I think of Sputnik beeping

overhead, lovers petting in Buicks
and glowing with the green of radium dials.

But what you’ve called to say is lost
in the line’s wreckage of crackle and static.

read more at Condofire

Poetry: ‘Being here’ by Vincent O’Sullivan

books poetry lit June 21, 2015 Leave a comment

It has to be a thin world surely if you ask for
an emblem at every turn, if you cannot see bees
arcing and mining the soft decaying galaxies
of the laden apricot tree without wanting
symbols – which of course are manifold – symbols
of so much else? What’s amiss with simply the huddle
and glut of bees, with those fuzzed globes
by the hundred and the clipped out sky
beyond them and the leaves that are black
if you angle the sun directly behind them,
being themselves, for themselves?

read at Tuesday Poem