Tag: Poetry

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: BONNIE ARNING

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DEATH LONG DISTANCE
By Bonnie Arning

The night you died I tried to find a sign
of your passing. Something obvious:
dry leaves swept up in a dust devil, a spider
the red of your hair. It was you

who taught me to make a bird by hooking my thumbs
and inching apart my fingers. Fitting then,
how your doctor should use that motion
to mimic the tumor as it swooped across your back.

We sent you to die twelve-hundred miles from
your stone bird bath and the chiropractor
who never left his wife for you, hooked
to a mechanical bed scribbling journal entries like,

today I ate an apple and felt my hair sprouts
shift and glow. I should have called—I should have
asked a nurse to hold the phone to your ear
while I sang shantih shantih shantih in a soft voice.

Why didn’t I have the courage to tell you, death
is no betrayal—die when you want to. The chemo,
the injections, the amputated leg: you did it all
for us. Instead of going to your service

I should draw faces on the foam heads
that hold your wigs. I should draw your face
in eyeliner all over my room. Come back—
the trees here are hungry for your ashes.

Yesterday I glimpsed movement in the milk-fire
of your rough-cut healing crystals. Energy
in the palpitating ribbon of distant heat. Wasps
swarm and ride each wave. You—

swarm and ride each wave.


(Today’s poem originally appeared in 2River View, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)


Bonnie Arning is a poet from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Currently she is pursuing an MFA from the University of New Mexico and acts as the managing editor of Blue Mesa Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Cream City Review, Gargoyle and 2River View.

Editor’s Note: My father passed away on February 26, 2012. I had found, and loved, this poem before my father took to his deathbed. Having taken a bereavement leave from this series, upon my return this feels like the right poem for reentry.

Today’s poem reminds me of the many blessings inherent in my father’s passing. That, despite living 2,500 miles away, I was able to be at his bedside in hospice, to coddle and love him on his way out of this world as he did for me, so many years ago, on my way in. That I was able to sing in his ear and tell him, over and over, how loved he was, that “death is no betrayal—die when you want to.”

Bonnie Arning, in her beautiful, simple words and aching truths that emerge from the depths of grief, has shared with the world a poem that allows for communion within a space where communion can feel both critical and unfathomable.

Want to see more by Bonnie Arning?
Blue Mesa Review
2River View

The Jackpot

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The Jackpot

by Letitia Trent

The monogamous are like the very rich. They have to find their poverty. They have to starve themselves enough.
-Adam Philip

We are too flush

our bosky hedge funds
are fecund—
we calculate the slow
growth the return

but let’s try to poormouth
again I’ll be Cinderella
pre-slipper and you
be a cockney starveling

we’ll settle
in the slums together
hold struck matches—
our barren grate

won’t bloom—
against our fingers
where they have purpled
in December

we’ll wolf cold
casseroles of aspic and crackers
afterward still famished

we’ll shake off our
poor white delicates
and glut until surfeited see

how easy
it can be—the slow slide
soft as
a rummage sale t-shirt—

when you have nothing else
to say take me
into your alms
and mean it?

***

Letitia Trent has had work appear in the Denver Quarterly, The Black Warrior Review, Fence, Folio, The Journal, and Blazevox, among others. Her chapbooks are Splice (Blue Hour Press) and The Medical Diaries (Scantily Clad Press). Her first full-length poetry collection, One Perfect Bird, is available from Sundress Publications. She was the 2010 winner of the Alumni Flash Writing Award from the Ohio State University’s The Journal and has been awarded fellowships from The Vermont Studio Center and the MacDowell Colony. She writes film review for the blog Bright Wall in a Dark Room. The above poem is included in One Perfect Bird and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: RICHARD HOFFMAN

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INVENTORY
By Richard Hoffman

What I have given to sorrow,
though I have poured out
all I am again and again,
does not amount to much.

One winter’s snows.
Two loves I could not welcome.
A year of mostly silence.
Another man I might have been.


(Today’s poem originally appeared in AGNI and appears here today with permission from the poet.)


Richard Hoffman is author of the poetry collections, Without Paradise, Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award, and Emblem, as well as the short story collection Interference & Other Stories, and the celebrated memoir, Half the House. He teaches at Emerson College, and currently serves as Chair of PEN New England.

Editor’s Note: After more than two years as the editor of this weekly series, this past Saturday I neglected to feature a poet here for the first time. I was caring for my ill father, and the rest of the world slipped away from me for a few days.

It is difficult to come to terms with sorrow, but the act and art of poetry can function as a medium for shared experience. Today’s poem is both an outlet and an entry point for communion, a masterful confession that can read like an entry in the reader’s own diary.

Want to see more by Richard Hoffman?
Richard Hoffman’s Official Website
Janus Head
“What Good” in Solstice
“Fruit in Season” in Solstice
ThoughtCast

The Itch

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Published by New American Press (2008)

The Itch

by Miriam N. Kotzin

On certain summer afternoons
when shadows stretch across the lawn
and deer come out—five doe, one fawn—
a distant wood thrush pipes his tunes.

The deer have come to graze on grass
and eat some apples from the tree.
There’s fruit enough for them and me—
the wood thrush song like opal glass.

But not all afternoons are filled
with ease. Some days all song is stilled—
by what? Perhaps I do not hear,
attending only to what’s near,
distracted, itching to be thrilled.
But air born song cannot be willed.

***

Miriam N. Kotzin teaches at Drexel University where she also co-directs the Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing. Her work has been appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Shenandoah, Anemone Sidecar, MAYDAY Magazine, Frigg Magazine, and Boulevard. She is the author of the poetry collections Taking Stock; Weights & Measures; and Reclaiming the Dead. “The Itch” was first published in Boulevard, appears in A Handbook of Poetics Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised an Expanded (4th edition), and is in her forthcoming collection The Body’s Bride. It is reprinted here with permission from the author.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: BOBBI LURIE

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SLOWLY
By Bobbi Lurie


(Today’s poem originally appeared in The Medulla Review and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Bobbi Lurie is the author of three poetry collections: Grief Suite, The Book I Never Read, and Letter from the Lawn. Her work has appeared in numerous print and on-line journals, including Gulf Coast, New American Writing, Big Bridge, Otoliths and The American Poetry Review. Dancing Girl Press will be publishing her chapbook, to be let in the back porch, in 2012. Her prose can be found, or is forthcoming, in Noir, Dogzplot, Pure Slush, Wilderness House Literary Review, Melusine, Camroc Press Review and others.

Editor’s Note: I love relationship poetry, and Bobbi Lurie maneuvers throughout the subject with a poet’s delicate, imaginative hand. Her words drift in and out of prose, at times using the form as a structure to house the narrative, and at times straining against the form, creating a tension that mirrors that of the story within.

Want to see more by Bobbi Lurie?
Grief Suite
Counterexample Poetics
Otoliths: “maggots are small minutes in the trash i saw them”
Otoliths: “too much light”
Dogzplot

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: KAT WHITE

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AFTER
By Kat White

After I die,
let it be said
that my pussy tasted
of children’s unspoiled dreams.

May eunuchs charcoal sketch
me and Miles smoking
brown cigarettes and drunk-swaying, broadcast
all night, all over Barcelona TV.

After I am scattered,
let it be said
that I ate joy.

May the universe not regret me:
clumsy, tip-toeing, gripping, self-involved, now stumbling
with thick-treaded boots and wide steps through
the constellations and laughing, knowing
I knew nothing.

I ferociously knew nothing.


(Today’s poem originally appeared in Issue 2 of the Stone Highway Review and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Kat White is an MFA in Creative Writing candidate and Instructor at the University of Memphis. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Phoebe Journal and Photosynthesis Magazine. Her poetry has been published in Blue Collar Review, Axe Factory, Lullwater Review, and Stone Highway Review; she has an upcoming poem in Fade Poetry Journal. Kat is currently at work in Memphis on her nonfiction novel, A Personal Cartography. Contact her at paris_anais@yahoo.com.

Editor’s Note: Kat White is forward-thinking in both her poetic maneuvers and her contemplation. Taking us on a journey from the physical and sexual to the enlightened, she is neither afraid to admit her human flaws nor to laugh at how little one knows in this life. She shines the light of optimism on the way she will be remembered, “After I am scattered, / let it be said / that I ate joy.”

Want to see more by Kat White?
Selection from A Personal Cartography in Phoebe Journal

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: HOWIE GOOD

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ANIMAL LIFE
By Howie Good

1
I didn’t find what I expected, musk or ostrich plumes or ivory, only a room in a forlorn mansion where I paced and muttered through curiously long nights, caravans of the lost forming beneath the windows and a flesh-covered dictionary open on my desk.

2
Somewhere there’s a picture of me with a different face. Why force a giraffe into a flower pot? I keep thinking. I pass a sixth day in bed gnawing my side, but otherwise alone. The gods respond to questions only in the summer when all the windows are open.

3
Along the dark riverbank, moans and shrieks, and nobody with whom to exchange heartbroken glances.



(Today’s poem originally appeared in Issue 2 of the Stone Highway Review and appears here today with permission from the poet.)


Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the new poetry collection, Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to a crisis center, which you can read about here.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is an exploration of the human animal. Of what it is to be civilized, to be domesticated, to be caged. And of the loneliness and singularity inherent in the human condition. The consequences of awareness that other animals do not grapple with. The advanced intelligence that causes one to contemplate the idea that “Somewhere there’s a picture of me with a different face.”

Want to see more by Howie Good?
Buy Howie Good’s Books from Amazon
Apocalypse Mambo
Dreaming in Red on Right Hand Pointing

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: EMILY PETTIT

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GOAT IN THE SNOW
By Emily Pettit

A goat is not a sheep, though I know people
who have made this mistake not meaning
to be flippant. This is not how to start a fire

with sticks.
I do not believe that music comes from a place of silence,
just as life does not begin from a point of stillness.

After passing the farm with the goat
it was important to slow down.
Hello goat. Hello officer. So easy to lose track

when going downhill. It isn’t always easy to become calm
after such an outburst of excitement.
Some people don’t have their animals down.

I myself would not recognize a mongoose,
but I know the word mongoose and I know it refers
to an animal, a mammal. I imagine it to be

long-torsoed and beady-eyed, but I don’t know.
Remember when we were at that place
where the floor tilted? That was a place

where we could close our eyes.
They were closed. They were open.
We were accumulating information.

Sometimes this meant we were filing things
and we hate filing things and so it goes.
Later we were laughing.

If you fumble, you’d better laugh.
I’ve seen a goat chase a llama and it’s hard
to take that seriously. Some things

we will repeat over and over again.
I said, I want to be a fly on the wall.
Someone said, Be a goat in the snow.

We like to think of shipwrecks
as beautiful fuck-ups
and that goats’ eyes are the secret to goats.

I think if I had a soul it would be saying soul.
To move quietly past a fence without hesitation
is what a goat does.


(Today’s poem originally appeared in The Daily Pen American and appears here today with the permission of the poet.)


Emily Pettit is the author of Goat in the Snow (Birds LLC, 2011) and two chapbooks: How (Octopus Books) and What Happened to Limbo (Pilot Books). She is an editor for Notnostrums and Factory Hollow Press, as well as the publisher of Jubilat. She teaches at Flying Object.

Editor’s Note: I recently heard Emily Pettit read at the Readings at Milk&Roses reading series, a PeopleHerd Poetry Cabaret. She read selections from her newly released Goat in the Snow (Birds LLC, 2011) to the clear delight of the audience. When she read the title poem from her book there was audible appreciation of a higher poetic power. Murmurs could be heard, comprised of oohs and ahs and mumblings to neighbors about how very impressed everyone was with Pettit’s work. For her part, Pettit told the tale of how the book was named before the title poem came into existence, and the poem was created as an afterthought. If you have seen Emily read this piece or have read the book, you are probably thinking something to the tune of “Thank god for afterthoughts.” An exceptionally talented up-and-coming poet, Emily Pettit is someone to look out for, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll buy a copy of Goat in the Snow before its first printing inevitably sells out.

Want to see more by Emily Pettit?
Buy Goat in the Snow
GlitterPony
H_NGM_N
jellyfish

Franki Elliot

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Miss in Polish

by Franki Elliot

My grandma can’t tell you my name
but she knows I live in Chicago.

She knows I have a brother,
and he lives in Chicago too.

She adjusts her hospital gown and says,
“You tell them I’m not ready.
I’ll show them.
I’m gonna live another couple years.”

You drove me all the way there,
through washed up towns and stretches of oil refineries.
Wore a nice sweater and shiny shoes even though my family
isn’t the kind you have to impress.

I liked that.
It made me feel safe.
It made me feel like I meant something to someone.

Sitting in the waiting room reading
as strangers whispered grimly into telephones,
you said, “This is the perfect book but man,
is it miserable in here.”

When I go back, the hospital room is freezing and
the doctor stands with a clipboard,
asks her what day is her birthday.

She said she knows there is a four in there somewhere.
I know it because it’s the same birthday as Hitler.
I don’t think she knows that. I hope she doesn’t know that.

And my grandpa has never held my hand
before until today. He has tears quietly running down his
cheeks when he says, “How’s the violin, ponnie?
Still playing?”

***

Franki Elliot is a twenty-something author from Chicago. Originally self published, Piano Rats sold out of it’s first printing quickly and was soon picked up by Curbside Splendor for an October 2011 release. This is her first book. Franki’s favorite artist Shawn Stucky provided the cover art and book design.

http://curbsidesplendor.com/index.php?id=206

www.pianorats.com