Free Poetry

If you're like me, and despite efforts to have a Christmas not hijacked by consumerism you are still squirming over holiday spending, free poetry is just the thing to cheer you up. H_ngm_n Books has a plethora of free chapbooks for PDF download, featuring poets such as Sarah Certa, Nick Sturm, Jenny Sadre-Orafai, Wendy Xu, Nate Slawson, and more. Thanks, H_ngm_n!

Valparaiso Rising

Very happy to have a new poem "Search Party, Called Off" in the Fall/Winter 2014-2015 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Thanks to Edward Byrne and staff.

Glad to be in the company of my secret poetry crush Frannie Lindsay, and other luminaries such as Chana Bloch, Barbara Crooker, Adam Tavel, Stephen Massimilla, and Laura Foley, among others. Featured poet is Jeff Mock.

cover of Fall/Winter 2014-15 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review

Voice III

The Cry Bone's Connected to the Why Bone                       Jenny Browne

Cold front blasts a train through
the bedroom, one long roar
above late talk of distant war.

Numbers and names I don't recognize
climb, drift, pile higher.
There are exactly twenty-seven

bones beneath the skin of a hand.
There are not as many words
for snow as I was once told.

It's almost morning.
If you're not with us, you're dew.
If you're dew, you disappear.

If you're me this week you see
a baby learn she has hands,
the bilateral little declaration

of a common axis, grip and find.
Put your hand in the air if you've heard
the one about the hokey pokey man.

He may die but you can't bury him.
And if the whole self was never in?
Keep moving        keep moving

towards a voice you still recognize.
If you're not with us, you're a fist
and if you're a fist, you can't reach

that collection of wishbones
rattling on
the quietest shelf in the room. 

********************************************

The Wounded Angel, 1903                   Amanda Auchter

     after Hugo Simberg

                             Walk the treeline, higher

than before, where the frost covers each rootbed. Dig
         for the rotten fruit, lay it in your hand. Touch

         the red berried hips of the branch's cradle. Dusk,

and the sky irons. Listen: a bird-stir and the build
of God in your breath. In the garden,

         the wind knocks you into blind

slumber. Each torn wing folds into

                             the arms that rescue it. Two children

wait for the earth to grow

         back into you, bring your sorrows

                                                    to the shore. There,

they reed-wash your halo, tie onion blooms
to your wrist. There is nothing they miss—

how the current moves through you,

                      sweeps mud into your throat, brightens
each bruised eye. Look away from this, your river-

         locked voice, the threat of the far bank.

********************************************

 The criticism, no matter how virulent, has long since ceased to bother me, but the price of this is that the praise is equally meaningless. The positive and the negative are not so much self-cancelling as drowned out by that carping, hectoring internal voice that goads me on and slaps me down all day every day.  ~Will Self

 ********************************************

The Shout                               Simon Armitage

We went out
into the school yard together, me and the boy
whose name and face

I don't remember. We were testing the range
of the human voice:
he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

He called from over the park — I lifted an arm.
Out of bounds,
he yelled from the end of the road,

from the foot of the hill,
from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell's Farm —
I lifted an arm.

He left town, went on to be twenty years dead
with a gunshot hole
in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.

Boy with the name and face I don't remember,
you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.

********************************************

Already the Heart                        A. V. Christie

The spinal cord blossoms
like bright, bruised magnolia
into the brainstem.
         And already the heart
in its depth — who could assail it?
Bathed in my voice, all branching
and dreaming. The flowering
and fading — said the poet —
come to us both at once.
Here is your best self,
and the least, two sparrows
alight in the one tree
of your body.

********************************************

Reminder: Reading on Sunday

Voice II

The Dead                                         Jason Schneiderman

do not speak.

That is what

makes them

dead. They

have left us

words, notes,

letters, but

you can only

read them

in your voice,

from your

place in this

world. You

may try

to speak for

the dead, but

listen. That’s

your voice.

*******************************************

On Angels                             Czeslaw Milosz

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seems.

Shorts is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice -- no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightening.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draw near
another one


do what you can.

*******************************************

Voice, Distant, Still Assembling                  Mark Irwin

Walking farther there, I am glad we
              age slowly, discovering now in memory
      similar frontiers of a physical world, visiting
as though for the first time
              ruins of a once great city, yet novel               

in the crumbling light. We trip 

and stumble, unaware, youthful in the obscurity
      of shadow, a kind of spring
in itself. Itself, where I touch places, gone, often
              confused to find a new home
not torn and built of green, but of a crumbling

orange, and there, there, as though walking
              through fire, taking pleasure in the fleeting
walls and lingering agoras, I glimpse
      ghost bodies and caress the flesh
              boats of their past as I walk toward
      what could be mountains or oceans, till finally
I am swimming through the lit window of a name. 

*******************************************

White Apples                           Donald Hall

when my father had been dead a week

I woke

with his voice in my ear

                                     I sat up in bed

and held my breath

and stared at the pale closed door

white apples and the taste of stone

if he called again

I would put on my coat and galoshes.

*******************************************

Trapeze                                                                           Larissa Szporluk

To float you must float from within.
You must not feel attached

as you brush past the body you loved,
an arm past an arm, an almost weightless vapor.

Don't ask questions anymore. Don't hear
his seismic voice. Fractures thread the floor;

time will energize their creep
until you're craving through his ceiling.

It's all a matter of containment,
held-in breath, the hidden table. Keep in mind

that dreaming up means waking down,
so keep your swing in limbo. Don't aim high:

Where air turns thin, the ear tears open
with a secret's restless heat,

surrending its recess — the details of explosion
fizzling in a tree, remembered now and then,

but not so well, by something on and off,
like fireflies—when pressure mounts behind it.