Tag: Poetry

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: FIERCE THIS FALLING

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                                       Cover art by Rachel Melis. Cover design by Judith Kerman.


FROM FIERCE THIS FALLING
By Betsy Johnson-Miller


WHAT IF WINTER IS MY BUDDHA

I concentrate

on envy,
for those who are free

of winter
are surely at peace.

Holding onto winter
like a hot coal, intent
on throwing it at someone else,

I am not about
to have compassion
for winter—even if each
winter has its own suffering—

I am not about to discover
my winter and then—
with all my heart—give
myself over to it.

“Are you awake?” my husband asks.

“No. I am winter.”


[AN OWL ON THE DEAD]

An owl on the dead branch one day
perfect feathers. Wild.

I can see the branch from my window

its height—some heaven—where living things are watched
until they die.

My father died a month ago today, his body made light
by fire

so how were his ashes so heavy?

Birds are already hollow
in their bones

so when it is all over their dead are easy
to bear.


A LOST GOSPEL OF EVE

Okay. Naked.

And the guy.

I get the outcome of fall.

All it sorrowed.

We work.

From when the left sky is shining.

To a dark dark.

I don’t mind that.

It’s the turn of his face now.

And his back.

It’s all this earth.

I have a feeling it wants.

Whatever is living.

Inside me.


Today’s poems are from Fierce This Falling, published by Mayapple Press, copyright © 2012 by Betsy Johnson-Miller, and appear here today with permission from the poet.


Fierce This Falling: “Belief” and “disbelief” are the easy answers to spiritual quests. In her latest collection, Fierce This Falling, Betsy Johnson-Miller explores the much tougher road that is “faith”–the dangerous openness to possibility (“Living lately on my knees, it feels perverse / this waiting for crumbs from the universe”). As readers, we bear witness to her wanting, her watching, her waiting; to those precious, small epiphanies of a woman who is “lost on a good road.” Johnson-Miller’s words are at once measured… and fiercely beautiful. -Robert Gray, Contributing Editor, Shelf Awareness


Betsy Johnson-Miller writes and lives in Minnesota. She teaches at the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University, and her work has appeared in Agni (online), Cortland Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Portland magazine, 5 A.M., Mid-American Review, and Salamander.


Editor’s Note: Fierce This Falling is a mediation on faith, marriage, and loss. On what makes us human and what it is to struggle with our most intimate and trying relationships. Within a lyrical realm of her own design, Betsy Johnson-Miller turns inward with a keen and often painfully honest insight. The roots of her quest reach as far back as the creation of mankind and blossom in the beauty and suffering of the moment at hand.


Want to see more by Betsy Johnson-Miller?
Buy Fierce This Falling from Mayapple Press
Rain When You Want Rain from Mayapple Press
“If you are traveling with a live child” on AGNI

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LESLEY WHEELER

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ARCHAEOLOGISTS
By Lesley Wheeler

My temple sweeps are nightly but will go largely unremembered
when the salute comes down from in front of you and covers
your heart
save and continue save and continue save


Today’s poem previously appeared in ILK journal and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Lesley Wheeler is a writer living in Kansas City. She is a co-editor of Strange Cage and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poetry has appeared in ILK, and Sawbuck Poetry, and translation work in the Washington Square Review. Poet CA Conrad says of her, “She is not small sticks, but flares up from them, beautifully!”

Editor’s Note: In a few words Lesely Wheeler is able to traverse time, reaching from antiquity to modernity. Today’s poem prepares us to enter the world of archaeologists—those students of human activity of the past—then takes us within the walls of temples and into the realm of the heart. But the methodology the poet proposes for commemorating her experience evokes not the past, but this very moment in history when she instructs, incants, or pleads, “save and continue save and continue save.”

Want to see more by and about Lesley Wheeler?
Strange Cage
Sawbuck Poetry
KRUI’s Lit Show reading

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ESZTER TAKACS

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CARRIE BRADSHAW SPEAKS THIS WAY
By Eszter Takacs

I must have been lazy like tepid water.
I have become a chaise lounge in the hallway
asking what will happen if the big one comes,
if it will destroy my relationship with the past. Will it?

Four beautiful women play ping-pong in my ears
and someday I will turn to watch them suffocate
into their boyfriends’ arms like leer jets,
the way they get caught between two peaks

because the pilots forgot, were lost in the snow already
before their feet even hit the ground.
My mother was my cellmate in my first life.
In this one, my mother is my mother in a cell,

her hands divided into quadrants,
an example of what melodramatic could never mean.
Her and I have become friends at the gym
where we use our eyes to signal that we are the same.

Four women talk about boyfriends like they were diets,
like we haven’t been to the same dream a hundred times.
My mother wishes they would exchange hairstyles with her,
that they would hand her gold flecks under the covers.



Today’s poem previously appeared in ILK journal and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Eszter Takacs is a Hungarian-born poet who has spent most of her life living in Los Angeles and a little bit of it living in Maryland, Hungary, and France. She is currently a first-year MFA candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. She paints, plays the flute, tinkers with digital cameras and knows more than you expect a poet to know about cars after spending the past six years working in the automotive industry. One day she hopes to live in a city like Paris. Or just Paris. She has a photo blog that really needs to be updated more often. Her poems have appeared in elimae, ILK Poetry, The Dirty Napkin, Mixed Fruit, Birdfeast, Utter, and elsewhere.

Editor’s Note: If words are glistening malleable threads then Eszter Takacs is a spider. At home within them, manipulating them, and anchoring her creation to the world which surrounds it. In today’s poem Takacs draws on popular culture, mother-daughter relations, and a kind of existentialism that straddles the spheres of the feminine and the personal. I mean it as a compliment to the poet’s talent and unique vision when I say: What a tangled web she weaves.

Want to see more by and about Eszter Takacs?
ethula.tumblr.com – Eszter Takacs’ photo blog
Ilk Journal Issue Five
elimae

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: EMMALEA RUSSO

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from HINTERLAND + HEX
By Emmalea Russo

barefoot
+ hovering above

false dandelion
like a mother

say: women in
your family
are witches





the garden is winter-still at lunchtime          i fill the hours with something like hiding



         make order
from what was
bracken
                  glean
sheaf after sheaf
send them to the
clearing behind
the house which
is filling up fast





a neighbor painted her red barn white          how what’s under will seep through



between
mountain
garden                                                                                                                + wild field



metal fence
deer-proofed
hoof resistant





say:           we are small inside the fenced-in green          even deer think so



a weed isn’t

          “supposed to be there”

but what we dig out space for

          is

i’m not convinced        but you are

begin :                 to paint seeds

(summer’s over)           on canvas

someone says



couldn’t anyone
paint a seed
isn’t it a circle



i say

yep.



Today’s poem previously appeared in ILK journal and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Emmalea Russo is a poet and visual artist. Recent work has appeared in ILK Journal and Wicked Alice and is forthcoming in Ambush Review and Yew Journal. She lives in New York City.

Editor’s Note: I was first drawn to today’s poem by Emmalea Russo’s invocation of women witches. Those women who are cloaked in the magical and the incantatory, who suffered historically at the hands of Christianity, patriarchy, and empire, and who have been avenged and reclaimed by feminism and the Feminine in modernity. But after reading and re-reading today’s piece, after allowing its seeds to sprout in realms both conscious and subconscious, I now know that the poet sums up the experience of this poem best when she writes, “how what’s under will seep through.”

Want to see more by and about Emmalea Russo?
Wicked Alice
Vinyl Poetry
em:me magazine (Editor: Emmalea Russo)

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: KAT DIXON

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THE STREETS MAY TURN TO PAPER SUDDENLY
By Kat Dixon

I am neither shadow nor wife. I have no hand for painting
flowers nor how they fill any room or bedspread or plate

of meats for guests who come to fill my house and how
that happens. How unlucky to have a secret, women, how

unlucky it is to have. I have one broken finger
still but am no wife. Check through these windows at my

winter leaves: they are green with life. This pill-by-pill makes one
book and cowers. And so we are at home together, after hours.



Today’s poem previously appeared in ILK journal and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Kat Dixon is the author of the poem-book Temporary Yes (Artistically Declined Press 2012). She lives in Atlanta, where she is currently completing her MA in American Studies. For more information, visit www.isthiskatdixon.com.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is rife with mysteries and darkness hidden just beneath its surface. I am fascinated by the two sides of the coin the poet offers—that one is either shadow or wife—and by the notion that a broken finger might be akin to wifely status. The cryptic and Gothic nature of the content of the poem is corroborated by its form, by the sing-song quality that invokes for readers a nursery rhyme—that same marriage of dark and light belonging to the Brothers Grimm and Mother Goose.

Want to see more by and about Kat Dixon?
Purchase Temporary Yes from Artistically Declined Press
Kat Dixon’s Official Website

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JUSTIN BELOTE

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ELEGY WITH NO ONE SPEAKING
By Justin Belote

Now that all the wasps are gone
and the hive is a silent town,
I can sleep out under this elm again.

*

I would like to explain how a house
someone has just been found hanging in
becomes different, as if the rooms widen and gape
yet hold less air. Outside
the gardenias darken in late afternoon
and sag in the rain. The light
landing on their petals is somehow unlike the light that lands
on the dead, but I don’t know why.
And above the white flowers a spider
can continue breathing quietly
and never know the difference.
its web, strung in a dogwood, waits for flies.

*

In 1981 my parents graduated from college.
Everything on the east coast
seemed quieter and heavier and naked.
All through August it was ninety and raining and I think
if my father had then stood perfectly still
before a tunnel full of wet leaves
and looked far into that darkness, he would never speak
again. But what I need to know is
when I’m fifty, will I remember how it felt
to be twenty-three and lonely in Boston?
Will I think of that park bench
and how all summer I counted the lights going out
in the apartments that surrounded me. The Charles
river to my back, dark and blind.

*

And, now, in this kitchen with its white curtains
and sink I watch an ant crawl on the table,
then up the window, and all I can be certain of is that
if I lean close enough to anything and close my eyes,
I can smell the dead. By winter
the snow will quiet everything
and teeth will blacken in their skulls
like mirrors that reflect the night. A night
that nobody owns, where the stars are a voiceless
closet that I could walk into thirty years from now,
folding a hanger carefully, and never walk out of.
And if you were to find me then
and turn and leave without ever looking up,
you would not notice the sky
and the black hole that opened and yawned over everything
as if it is a cold house that even silence
cannot escape.


Today’s poem previously appeared in The Cortland Review and appears here today with permission from the press and the poet.


Justin Belote is currently a MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University. Some of his favorite poets are Larry Levis, Li-Young Lee, Ilya Kaminsky, Virginia Slachman, and Georg Trakl. He has been published in Adroit Journal and The Cortland Review, and has a poem appearing in Meade Magazine shortly.

Editor’s Note: I think if you were to type the word “lyric” into the search box in the upper right corner of this page the results would yield hundreds of entries in this Saturday Poetry Series. Why? Because I love the lyric. I am a defender of the lyric. Viva la lírica! Long live this tradition with tendrilic roots stretching back back to the first musical utterances of man and with gardenias blooming on the lips of poets like Justin Belote.

What do I love about the lyric? “I would like to explain how a house / someone has just been found hanging in / becomes different, as if the rooms widen and gape / yet hold less air. Outside / the gardenias darken in late afternoon / and sag in the rain. The light / landing on their petals is somehow unlike the light that lands / on the dead, but I don’t know why.” Need I say more?

Want to see more by and about Justin Belote?
Hear Justin Belote read today’s poem aloud at The Cortland Review
Justin Belote’s Official Blog
Some poems by Justin, featured on his blog

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: SABRINA HAYEEM-LADANI

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By Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani:


BATHROOM AT EAT-IN DELI ON 52ND STREET

He leaned against the porcelain sink
while I reached for him in the dark,
one hand on the cruddy tile wall, the other
at the root of it. A novice, I didn’t fall to my knees
as I had been told it was done, but instead
bended over at the hip, marionette puppet
with her jaw agape. I don’t remember asking myself
if I had wanted to do it—choice was not a language
my mouth had learned, but still I took him in
again and again. Took in everything
I itched to become, raced to the tower
of some blazing city, curled myself
around its lighthouses, morphed
like a strange creature keeping itself alive.
Then suddenly—
taste of copper, salty tip
blooming on my tongue,
alchemy of sweat and spit.
I took and took, labored
over what was broken, loved
what had been cast aside.
And in the taking,
there was reparation,
the shards of glass
finding each other
after the breaking.



HURRICANE IRENE

1.

I wake the morning of, run my hands
over the still water of my lover’s skin.
He tells me the story of how when he was a child
in the Philippines, the monsoon pulled him into the air
by his feet, lifted his miniature frame like a paper bird.
All I can do is turn into him, wonder
if the weight of my own body is enough to hold him.
But I am older now, and understand that gravity, not burden,
is necessary to love. Instead, I place wooden beads around his neck,
kiss his temple, send him out into the storm.

2.

All night the wind is a wolf.
The tree outside my window
knocks three times, scrapes her fingers
on the glass and waits. Come morning,
the stagnant air hovers like a fly stopped
above grass. The end or the eye of the storm?
It’s all relative they say.

3.

Irene, you left sixteen inches of water in my father’s wood shop, making him leave my mother alone with you while he went to pump the basement dry, caress the machines back to life and I imagine that instead of water, the basement is filled with all the whiskey and beer he has ever drunk in his life, and he is standing there waist-high in it, pumping the liquid onto the street, pumping for his life until there is nothing left but the machines, into which he places the engines he had removed the night before and they are humming again, and he is sawing wood and building new things, and the chips are flying and he is covered in sawdust and he can’t build fast enough, he can’t keep up with this newly found hunger to create which is now driving him and there is no more whiskey and there is only my father, his machines, his humming.

4.

The day after the storm mother calls
three times in one hour. When I finally answer,
her voice is an old 45 crackling before the next song.
Last night the pots and pans fell to the ground, she says.
Your father slept through the whole thing.



Today’s poems appear here with permission from the poet.


Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani: A native New Yorker, Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani has been a poet and performer for more than 15 years. She was an invited author at the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica and is a former member of the louderARTS Project. Her work was published in the anthology, Parse (FriendlyFire Press), and she was most recently published in the anthology So Much Things To Say: One Hundred Poems of Calabash (Akashic Books). Sabrina is an original member of the Hot Poets Collective, a group of diverse poets who have been writing and performing together since April 2011. They recently published their first collection, Of Fire, Of Iron.

Editor’s Note: In reading Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani’s poems I am reminded of the work of Ocean Vuong, one of my favorite poets of all time. And it is no wonder; these two are both graduates of louderARTS, a force to be reckoned with and an endeavor that has gifted us with some of the most talented poets of our day.

Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani’s poetry takes my breath away. Not with a soft exhale, but with a force that is at once violent and blooming. Her grip is as solid on the lyric as on the sexual and the narrative, and she maneuvers effortlessly between these realms with the skill of a true artist. This innate talent is coupled with moments where finely-tuned language and imagery exist as pure delight for the reader: “choice was not a language / my mouth had learned;” “But I am older now, and understand that gravity, not burden, / is necessary to love.”

Want to see more by Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani?
louderARTS Project
The Hot Poets Collective

American Cliché

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American Cliché

by Seth Michelson

His body skinny but for the horns
of cancer bulging from his chest
like thorns jutting from the trunk
of this older man, a lifelong rose-
lover. So he waters and whispers to them
each morning, his broken body
bent to the earth, joyful duty, as it blooms
into pink white red fireworks.
After cooing to them, he jumps
into his golden cage, motors to work,
beep-beep!, a two-hour commute
he keeps to religiously. He has to
or he’ll forfeit: the job,
health insurance, chemotherapy,
yet he leaves for work happy,
sun-lit from within, the silent prayer
of roses lingering on his lips,
a sweet perfume, smear of nectar
on the hummingbird’s miraculous beak-tip.
Like this he smiles, stuck
in traffic, engines and neighbors overheating,
while he hopes, quietly, for his roses
to be consumed: for a deer or three
to descend the hills, drift
into his backyard, trampling
its false limits with soft hooves
as, noses down, they collect fallen petals,
each a miniature silken feast, communion
wafers on famished tongues: a god
dissolving into mouths
hungry to taste and see that the earth is good,
even strewn as it is with shards, with
shattered beauty everywhere.

***

Seth Michelson is the author of the chapbooks Maestro of Brutal Splendor (Jeanne Duval Editions, 2005), Kaddish for My Unborn Son (Pudding House Publications, 2009), and House in a Hurricane (Big Table Publishing, 2010), and he translated Tamara Kamenszain’s internationally acclaimed book of poetry El Ghetto (Point of Contact, 2011). He currently resides in Los Angeles. The above poem is from Michelson’s collection Eyes Like Broken Windows and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: KILIAN MCDONNELL

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ON HEARING THINGS MALE
By Kilian McDonnell

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth . . . a wind from God swept over the face of the waters . . . Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. Genesis 1:1-3

Did the author of Genesis hear Yahweh’s voice
like the rumble of thunder over Mount Zion?
And did the man say to himself, as though spitting
against the wind, this boom must be male?
Male ears hear things male. Even medieval giants
decreed, Whatever is received, is received
according to the mode of the receiver. And if
Yahweh drops her hairbrush in the desert,
who can hear it? And write it in the book?


(Today’s poem appears in God Drops and Loses Things, and appears here today with permission from Liturgical Press and the poet.)


Kilian McDonnell, osb, born in Great Falls, Montana in 1921, has been a monk/priest of St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville, MN since 1945. He began writing poetry seriously at the age of 75. He will be 91 in September of 2012. His poems have appeared in America, Minnesota Monthly, Theology Today, American Benedictine Review, ISTI Bulletin, Christian Century, and The National Catholic Reporter. In 2000 Park Press—of Waite Park, Minnesota—published some 30 poems in a promotional volume entitled Adam on the Lam. In 2003 St. John’s University Press published his first book of poetry, Swift, Lord, You Are Not, which also contained a personal essay, “Poet: Can You Start at Seventy-Five?” His second book of poetry, Yahweh’s Other Shoe (St.John’s University Press, 2006) was a finalist in the Minnesota Book Award for poetry. In 2009 he published God Drops and Loses Things, and in 2011 Wrestling With God. For the larger portion of his life Kilian McDonnell has been active as a professional theologian and a university professor. He has taught in the graduate school of theology of St. John’s University and has written, edited, and been published in numerous theological publications and works.

Editor’s Note: During the writer’s residency I recently participated in, “Believing in Writing,” at The Collegeville Institute in Collegeville, MN, I submitted a number of poems from my current project to be workshopped. I am writing a book of poetry that explores and contemplates the feminine in biblical literature. During the workshop, one of my fellow writers asked if my poems are an homage to Father Kilian McDonnell. I had never read “Father Kilian,” as the man lovingly referred to him, and so he pulled all four of his poetry books off the shelf and suggested that I take a look.

I began with Yahweh’s Other Shoe, and within twenty-four hours I had read all four of Father Kilian’s books. I could not believe what I had read. Of all of the poets I know of who are contemplating Judaism in their work, who are contemplating the Torah, who are writing or exploring midrashic literature, I found that I have more in common as a poet with a ninety-year-old Catholic Priest than any other poet I’ve read. I returned my borrowed books to the Collegeville Institute and walked over to the Liturgical Press to buy all four for myself.

Father Kilian truly inspires me. To come into poetry so late in life is impressive in and of itself. But to be a male, a Catholic male, a Catholic priest no less, and be asking questions about the role of women in biblical literature takes an admirable amount of courage and humility. Today’s poem asks one of the most essential questions about the inception of the sublimated role of women in Judeo-Christianity, and I thank Father Kilian for his talent, for his bravery, and for sharing his own questions with the world.

Want to see more by and about Kilian McDonnell?
Purchase Kilian McDonnell’s poetry books from Liturgical Press

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ANYA SILVER, PART DEUX

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STRAWBERRIES IN SNOW
By Anya Silver

Belief comes too easily to the ill.
Miracles fall from their lips like gems,
are worn like secret amulets. A woman,
I’m told, brushed her steps of snow
and found the very thing she craved
to eat, strawberries fresh as summer,
dimpled sweet and red beneath the rime.
Pink climbed back to her ailing cheeks,
the way new blood makes the body sing.
And yet, no one talks of her sister,
who also searched, found nothing there.
She swept and swept until she fell.
I’ve been so good, she wept, the wind
remorseless over earth that wouldn’t bear.


(Today’s poem previously appeared in the Belleview Literary Review and appears here today with permission from the poet.)


Anya Silver’s book of poetry, The Ninety-Third Name of God, was published by LSU press. She teaches at Mercer University and lives in Macon, Georgia with her husband and son.

Editor’s Note: Last week I featured Anya Silver’s “French Toast” on this series. It is one of the most successful love poems I have ever read, and it was the poem that needed to be shared on that particular Saturday. But I accidentally stumbled upon “French Toast” after securing today’s poem, and so I want to treat you to another entry by this very talented poet.

Today’s poem contemplates faith, that intersection between humanity and the unknown with which so many of us struggle. It asks the logical questions that one asks when facing illness and death with little more than hope to go on.

Want to see more by and about Anya Silver?
Buy The Ninety-Third Name of God on Amazon
Anya Silver Featured as Image Journal’s Artist of the Month: October 2010
Poetry Daily