national poetry month 2012

Thanks to everyone who participated!

Here are this year's poets with links to their poems.

Abba Belgrave

Ryan Collins

Rio Cortez

Rachelle Cruz

Aaron DeLee

Alex Dimitrov

Gregory Donovan

Thomas Dooley

Farnoosh Fathi

Brian Francis

Brent Goodman

Paul Hlava

Jennifer L. Knox

Dorothea Lasky

Timothy Liu

Shane Michael Manieri

Ryan Doyle May

Stephen S. Mills

Jerome Murphy

Rebecca Myers

Ekoko Omadeke

Alison Roh Park

Jessica Ratigan

Curtis Rogers

Dan Rosenberg

Nicole Sealy

Bianca Stone

Phillip B. Williams

Keith Wilson

a poem by rachelle cruz

What My Father Read


  Hayward, California


Without reason, he collected
books and didn't read them.
But his daughter did.  She read
about falling angels, the lashings
on a girl's back, crime driven
by passion, a yellow shirt
stained with black tea, the men
who lived like brothers
on Cannery Row.  Alice tumbling
down a rabbit hole,
King Solomon choosing between
feuding mothers and deciding
to split the child in half,
the incantation of Genesis,
Joseph and his journey of dreams.

Her father washed his hands
exactly five times before dinner,
plucking pinchfuls of rice from
the family plate with his fingers.
After dinner, he scrubbed his mouth
with a lemon, did exactly three
loads of dirty laundry, ignoring
the daughter's stained underwear
from a first year on her cycle,
the grass-stained jeans which meant
she was still a girl.  The father
scrubbed Palmolive on his fingertips
and in the darkening dusk, hung
the wet clothes on a cherry tree,
the ants crawling on the shiny
bark, latching on.

Rachelle Cruz is from Hayward, California.  She is the author of the chapbook, Self-Portrait as Rumor and Blood (Dancing Girl Press, 2012).  Her work has appeared in Muzzle Magazine, Splinter Generation, KCET's Departures Series, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, among others.  She hosts “The Blood-Jet Writing Hour” Radio Show on Blog Talk Radio.  An Emerging Voices Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow and a VONA writer, she lives and writes in Riverside, California.  

3 poems by keith wilson

a brief history of rope


call me double-dutch:
if i don't hold fast
impossible to know if what you see
becomes my see, or trace. guy
or twine, who chose to chase
the unryhme of orange?

is what you see as black somehow brown
when mine is crayola
flesh? are bandaids colorblind,
is that why they mismatch?

is your red
not what i red,
or if i stand to reason
full of gravitas

will sanity be another woven thing
knelt like a whale in the back of a trunk?








--





daedelus at sea world


the bovine slowness
of fleshen

great and foam-slow and white spray
of an

apprentice
gasp between

notes









--




i did not kiss the animal

-after rio cortez

with my absence, i cited you,
delivered wandering from the desert
if-not-romantically,
biblically

i did not put a gun against the head
of an animal breathing
rags of insulted air,

i did not smash the blood
accidentally
with my life, my try of life,
and see in its brown eyes
the saucer of myself, scared
and soft
and desperate

afterwards, i did not press the metal
against my lap
to feel its worth.
i did not kiss the animal.



Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem Fellow currently living in Chicago.

a poem by ryan collins

Words I Say


I say come over you say I can’t I’m busy maybe another time 
I say how ‘bout tomorrow you say how about it 

I say quinoa you say mirepoix no soup for you
I say someone’s in the kitchen you say fix me a sandwich 

I say salt you say no thanks I’m watching my cholesterol 
I say are you feeling okay you say yes when I’m asleep 

I say happy birthday you say yeah right leaving the room
I say please you say you say thank you too much please stop  






Ryan Collins is the author of a chapbook, Complicated Weather (Rock Town Press) & an e-chapbook, Handshake Trouble (Gold Wake Press). Some of his recent work has appeared in Leveler, H_NGM_N, Jellyfish, LOCUSPOINT, Handsome, The Hover Project & the Hell Yes Press cassette anthology 21 Love Poems. He lives in the Illinois Quad Cities & teaches in the Iowa Quad Cities.

a poem by aaron delee

Ball and Socket


In a retrospective review: criteria
required the presence of the both of us,
always.  Fraught with ambiguity there
was uncertainty in understanding what
to do when isolated.  Then festered
our malaise; a tender point made counted
as a cut; one which never would be sewn
up with catgut.  And it was asked
that we toughen ourselves for such
intensive companionship; like cartilage,
we could snap but never really break—
may we minimize this joint destruction.



Aaron DeLee is an MFA candidate at Northwestern University.  He received his BA in Creative Writing from Loyola University of Chicago.  He helps edit poetry and write reviews for TriQuarterly Online, and his work has appeared in various journals.  In his free-time, you might find him running along Chicago's lakeshore path.

a poem by timothy liu

The Lovers 


You are the angry valentine
And the envelope I cut
My tongue across while sealing
Its flap shut. You are
The bumpy rash spreading
Across my shoulder at four a.m.
And the tab of Claritin
Dissolving in my blood—
A forgotten dream
That nags at me off and on
Throughout the day,
A pyramid of crystal
Goblets stacked on top
Of one another downstairs
At the Crate and Barrel
A stone's throw from where
You work because you
Needed to get away.
If only I had a magnum
Of Dom Perignon, I'd
Pour ebullient waterfalls
To rival the fountains
At Versailles. You won't
Be going home to your wife
Tonight, not while an elephant
Charges across the floor
With gleaming tusks
Where herds of panicked
Post-holiday shoppers duck
Behind those see-through
Plastic curtains with mermaids
Undulating through them
While you crouch low in some
Out-of-the-way corner with
A Blackberry at your ear
Listening to my voice—you
Who never much liked talking
Without being able to see
My face, o my Chevalier,
My hillside of flat stones
Piled high on the outskirts
Of Châteauneuf-du-Pape,
My hot plate of used corks
Glued together from all the meals
We've shared, the teapot
Whistling whenever you found
Your way to my table,
I of such little faith
In your love for me, in love
With me while spinsters
Plump the nuptial bed
With the plucked feathers
Of outsized swans—pillows
I'll never get the chance
To lay my head upon
Or dream upon, won't you
Forgive me of my greed,
My wayward imaginings
Of a life other than the one
We are given only once,
Your voice pounding
In my ear, in consort
With my heart as if we
Were post-coital lovers
Conversing in the dark
While shadows flit about
The honeymoon suite,
Its air perfumed with roses
In a cut-glass vase identical
To the one my mother
Kept in her childhood home—
Dragons swirling on a silk
Drawstring bag drawn shut
With tassels made of gold—
Fifteen beads of lapis lazuli
Dangling on her wrist her man
Never asked about, not once,
In all their years of marriage—
Such passions fully spent.

Timothy Liu is the author of eight books of poems, most recently Bending the Mind Around the Dream's Blown Fuse. He lives with his husband in Manhattan.

a poem by curtis rogers

Cool-Looking Wallet Just Lying There in the Street


We can only have "so
much to spray"
for so long. A lotus

is none of
our business.
It hasn’t been

ourselves lately. Not
a general point-
blanking, or chutney

before we hit
the ground. You’re glue—
we you’re-glue

you. An omnibus sub-
merges in thimbles
of rosewater. This

is our game.
You play the part
of S/M. We are

symmetrically
as Busby Berkeley.
We are a quiz

at the end of this
bronze age. Brouhaha
in yes-or-no answers.

You kiss our brother.
Smell the sea-weed
in his hair. It’s only fair.

Curtis Rogers is an MFA candidate at NYU. He lives in Washington Heights, and co-curates the Emerging Writers Series at KGB Bar. 

a poem by rio cortez

Darius 


1.

I don’t remember my name
Everybody calls me Hootie.

Before, we took their Rucker and it rang
across the steepled skyline of Holy City.

Today, I go nicknamed into the locker
room at Calaway Golf Club

and hear my voice pour warped
through the wall-mounted speaker box.

Ain’t it yours? Didn’t I
swallow it whole once

and now it renews from the mount
like a head dipped under water.

What other tool could usher me from this land
of pink-cheeked-other-Ruckers


2.

I buy my very first camel
suede jacket and in the beginning

I borrowed size 8 cowboy boots
and we would cover R.E.M. songs

in our integrated dorm room.
I know what I am

in this turquoise bolo tie
I don’t even have to name it.



Rio Cortez is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, where she received the Lucy Grealy Prize in Poetry. She is a Cave Canem fellow and MFA candidate at NYU. Her work has appeared in Clementine, Cratelit, Tidal Basin Review & upcoming in Sugar House Review.  Born & raised in Salt Lake City, she loves & lives in Queens, NY.

a poem by rebecca myers

Heaven for Girls


The Scrabble dictionary reveals a heaven made up
of smaller words. Inside my father’s heaven
even: everything keeled
level, curtain flattened free
of rise. Shouldn’t even angels cast their eyes
to the ceiling? The suit at speed dating
tells me he buys and sells
futures. (Inside his heaven have.) "I once predicted
a car crash," I say. When my first period came
I was ten and in the Planetarium, clutching
a bag of glow stars underneath a Styrofoam Moon,
balanced in the dark precarious, a bird on antlers
shattering a windshield.
A man's recorded voice taught me
topography.  Later, in the bathroom,
I plugged myself with tissue, passed from the known world
to the next.

Rebecca Myers's chapbook of poems, Greener, was released from Finishing Line Press in 2009. She has four poems in the Winter 2011 issue of Cream City Review, and a poem forthcoming in the Southern Poetry Anthology: Georgia. She lives in Athens, GA with poet/fiancee Dan Rosenberg, and works full time as a travel consultant.

a poem by dan rosenberg

Beached


What perfect
and speckled battlements—

a thumbprint
is a window

to the child.

A dapple.
What potential—

just lift this
overturned pail

thick with sand.

*

Boring like to make
a hole—in the sun

and hiding
from it, these

glasses darken my vision—

in pursuit
of paradise I’m still.



"Beached" originally appeared in American Letters & Commentary



Dan Rosenberg’s first book, The Crushing Organ, won the 2011 American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and is forthcoming from Dream Horse Press. His poems have appeared recently in several magazines, including Pleiades, American Letters & Commentary, Subtropics, and Third Coast.  A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is currently a co-editor at Transom and a Ph.D. student at UGA in Athens, GA.

a poem by abba belgrave

He argues for time travel


Consider the fact that I would walk backwards
through time to torture Freud for penis envy
and save more women from hysterics. Joan
perhaps if I were feeling Catholic. I’m not sure
we need the unconscious or the Surrealists or
any subsector of that decentered universe learned
from Saussure who screwed the whole world
over with absence and presence and difference
not to mention the French are known for
smoking and slapping in cafés all that fucking
and no fight: La vie en rose ce n’est pas difficile.

Baby I’m a brown girl dragged across the sea. I
would kill. You would let me.



Abba Belgrave was born in Trinidad and Tobago but lives in Brooklyn with neither cat nor dog nor bicycle and is currently cursing allergy season. An MFA candidate at New York University, she holds a BA in Political Science from Hunter College and her work previously appeared in the Argos Book anthology Why I Am Not A Painter.

a poem by alex dimitrov

The Composer’s Lover


We had an hour without music.
A nerve brightly turning in a closed room of the mind—

the heart’s black pool, a word that expired into the air
and woke everything.

Your bed slid under an invisible knife.
What happened to us after meeting, when the right note claimed

Manhattan’s May morning like an elegy
already moving through the living?

Today, we are among them. Here to unsettle each other,
to undress beside the piano—elegant and unmistakably his.

Once it has you, there is a mouth
that never releases. A faint circle in a field of rust

hanging on the wall. We are not there.
We are in our bodies.

Like teeth marks in a shirt you once saw falling off him.
The delicate taste of blood that passed between us

before lust, before anyone could forgive us.



"The Composer's Lover" originally appeared in The Kenyon Review.



Alex Dimitrov’s first book of poems, Begging for It, will be out in early 2013. He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize for younger poets from The American Poetry Review and the founder of Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York City. His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Yale Review, Slate, Tin House, and Boston Review. He works at the Academy of American Poets, teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and frequently writes for Poets & Writers.

two poems by bianca stone

Excerpts from The Monsieur Fragments



I found a white hair on your head
now I can feel the rain coming
I feel it in my left knee
behind the charcoal briquettes, monsieur
the ageless current of a storm
beginning
we are not alive in the imaginary
structures of living
no longer one-man missioning
around the cerulean earth
in a dark pod you imagine yourself
dressed entirely in tinfoil
the apartment shudders down romantically
cats know how to handle heat
which sends us into a small
panic and the hours mean hardly
anything when our love is stored
in a cool dry place

--

I have turned again 

to the dung beetle

mooring across the field 

turned again to the great Russian novel

at dawn I was convinced 

I had given up a promising life as a tap dancer 

we do not hold each other 

and think of the assassin constructing 

in the human ego

we listen briefly to the man shouting 

on the street outside the window

and think we are safe

Bianca Stone is the author of several chapbooks, including I Want To Open The Mouth God Gave You Beautiful Mutant (Factory Hollow Press); and illustrator of Antigonick, a collaboration with Anne Carson (New Directions).  Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2011, Conduit, and Tin House. She lives in Brooklyn. 

a poem by jennifer l. knox

I Hate to Break This to You But


Her horoscope said there was something
important she needed to attend to—a change
her life kind of thing—and if she didn’t
deal with it between now and April 2012,
she would have a much harder time dealing
with it 30 years from now when the issues
resurfaced again. "What could it be?" she
wondered so hard her big face turned red
and began to sweat. She started making a list
of things it could be, but the sulfur fumes
from the plant blowing in through the broken
window crossed her eyes and scrambled her
letters. She filled one Big Gulp plastic cup with
gin for herself, and one for her life-sized stuffed
dolphin that took up the entire couch. She slid
down the crumbling wall to the floor with a thud
that finally jarred loose her bad back tooth
and flooded her mouth with the salty taste of blood.
She spit a long red glob into a brimming ashtray,
wiped her mouth, swished some gin around and felt
a tingling where her molar was, like tiny redhot
bells, hot angel bells, but what was the song
they were playing? “Whatever could it be,
Mister Flippers?”

"I Hate to Break This to You But" originally appeared in Lumberyard.

Jennifer L. Knox’s latest book of poems, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, is available from Bloof Books. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and four times in The Best American Poetry series. She is working on her first novel.

a poem by ekoko omadeke

M Turning 30

You groaned you could put a baby in me

the night we mimicked Chocolate Candles II.

And I didn’t question the logic of a womb with shelves. 

Infants placed and returned like vases to watermarks. 

You should know making babies is a form of ceramics.

It takes the work of hands around a wheel.

It takes a man on his knees, softening his lover’s clay 

until she can pickle a body inside her own.

We skimmed magazines for caramel colored

babies that could be half mine and yours;

broke out scissors and littered 

your bed with a sheen of make believe.

I named them Darius and Yvette. The twins: 

Pleasure and Terror—born five minutes apart.

It was your birthday, your breath on my neck 

as you entered me from behind.  Or the number 

of women you mined and broke that made me shudder. 

A lace scroll of underwear arched its back against 

the rug. You taught our paper spawn to grow 

flowers. I taught them which flowers to cook.

Ekoko Pauline Omadeke is a Cave Canem fellow and graduate of New York University's MFA in Creative Writing program. Her work has been published in Ars Poetica and No, Dear Magazine. She is the founder and former curator of the Southern Writers Reading Series at Happy Ending Lounge. She spent a year teaching creative writing to 2nd graders through The Community Word Project's Teaching Artist Training and Internship Program. She misses the rural two lane roads of Virginia. But not enough to leave Brooklyn where she lives and writes.

a poem by jerome murphy

So Far


When heart’s fire is catching some
combustible brush, what sudden

fuss of rain is so ready, dousing flame
in a squall whose seaborne gust

exaggerates the fan of the butterfly wing,
having already wrestled off coast

with a storm from the lash
of some far lover’s eye,

wet with joy, in that country
where we’d overlook anything.



Jerome Ellison Murphy is a New York-based freelance writer, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. His work is featured on the ceiling as you lie awake at 3 a.m.

a poem by alison roh park

Lovesong


I say you make me feel young again
meaning I will throw water in a man’s face

when he calls you a dyke. I say
you make me feel free again as if it were familiar

meaning I will let the men drag me away from you
by my arms and torso. I say to be whole

again is to remember the feel of this man’s right hand
wrapped into my hair, his left a small boulder

against my temple, my cheek. When I hear you
call my name I shake my body loose, rise and walk

amongst the overturned chairs and broken glass
to where you wait for me. There is blood

on your jacket and on my face and we run
as if there is a sunset outside of this dark place

as if we can take this cab to a place
where we can feel clean again.




Alison Roh Park is a Kundiman fellow, Pushcart-nominated writer and winner of the 2011 Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship. Her work has appeared in several publications, including Mythium Literary Magazine and The NuyorAsian Anthology. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing, and resides in her native Queens, New York with Kush.

a poem by dorothea lasky

The Amethyst


All my life
It was a lie
To try to go towards bliss
But death is the ultimate blissfulness
To be a candy or a corpse
The world holds you on it's tongue
And no one can save you
Not even your own children or your friends
So have a seat with the home of the dead
They will eat your colors
Until you are blank
The best thing to happen to you
The greatest happiness
To be an animal who is smoke
And beyond the mouth
That tears your bones from one another
To be a mound of meat
At the table of the living



Dorothea Lasky is the author of AWE, Black Life, and the forthcoming Thunderbird, all from Wave Books. She currently lives in New York City and can be found online at www.birdinsnow.com.

Photo by Jessica Flynn.

a poem by phillip b. williams

Séance


I thought I could taste without eye contact,
could speak you inside, remember my name
from muscle memory, could cease gagging
on your stem to speak a word, spell it out
on my gums. I thought I could spit out
a story, deflower the reed and sing:
I practiced humming while mouthing water.
I mouthed storms, hail pelting holes inside me.
I practiced not barking when you called me
bitch.
Without hands laid upon it, there was rise.
My face caught in your lap, sweat coruscant
against an evening’s shadowy lilt—wraiths
haunted my gum wail; my throat, lucent girl.
She will make you speak in Tongues, reel her skull.
Jaw unhinged, you between her teeth, she culls.


"Séance" first appeared in Reverie.

Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois native. Recently, he won Bloom's inaugural chapbook competition in poetry for his manuscript Bruised Gospels. He is a Cave Canem graduate and received a Bread Loaf work study scholarship in 2011. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, The Southern Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Blackbird and others. Phillip is currently poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry.

Photo by Aaron R. White.

two poems by jessica ratigan

Coda


How sea-foam melts
snow as waves wash
ashore. Why water

like glass, and rose-lit sky?
Absence of disaster—

the wind, the missed.
How I can hardly tell
where sky ends, sea begins:

the horizon a strange mirror.
The clouds. The surge. The ship.

What of the wreck, the sun,
the wind, the weight?
A chorus of voices

whips over the water—
almost a reconstruction.

How meekly the sand makes
sucking sounds. The surge.
The ship. The breakers. The missed.


--


A Way To Mark Time


We watch workers, dogs, accidents, taxis,
by the chemical-frothed East River
and this lump of moon, fumes rising

from the city. We could count cedar waxwings
above the Newtown Creek come morning
all the workers, dogs, accidents, taxis

revved up, ready for day. But you say            
you want the old wounds gone.
Forget this lump of moon, fumes

from the rainbow canal, the city’s
bottom, dredge of the river.
Workers, dogs, accidents, taxis

busy on the bridge above us.          
And I pour the wine into tin cups,
a lump of  moon reflected, no fumes

just fruit, for a second. A place
of mixed lineage, of histories, fictions,
workers, dogs, accidents, taxis,
a lump of moon, fumes rising from the city.



Jessica Ratigan received her MFA from New York University’s creative writing program in 2007. Her work has appeared in The Greensboro Review, Blackbird, and Hunger Mountain. Ratigan currently lives in Hampton, Virginia, where she teaches English and creative writing at Hampton High School.

two poems by paul hlava

Gloria Moves In


The woman I live with eats
in our bed.  She leaves crumbs
beside her plate, an apple core
on the couch in the living room.
Everyday I find myself
picking up bread crusts,
carrot shavings, wiping clean
the rings on the countertop.
When I am finished eating
I wipe the table onto my plate.
I wash each dish in the sink.
I save the leftovers, even the bookends
of the loaf of rye.  I put magazines
back in the wicker basket
by the door.  I hang the winter coats
draped on the bedframe.  I turn off
the light when I leave the room.
My days are a series of impersonal tasks.
Everything I open I close.


--



Gloria’s Shrug


I built a room of her silence.
Inside I was alone.
The multi-colored macaws
that flapped above the rafters
were a florescent lightbulb
that burnt out when I looked up.
I imagined a birthday cake
and built a table to hold it.
I filled her bookshelves with
the records I loved.
I taped photos of myself
inside the picture frames.
Plastic shutters blocked the sunlight.
The past vibrated in the floor.
Who was I to know anyone,
a stranger to myself?
Mice chewed the cuffs of my pants
as I dug through a dream
with the femur of a cow.
Inside I was alone.  The creases
were wet from their thin black lips.
I pinned my silhouette against the wall.




A graduate of NYU’s creative writing program, Paul Hlava has been published in Gulf Coast, Agriculture Reader, Rattle, Juked, Paperbag Magazine, among others.  He is a grammar teacher and poet living in Brooklyn.

a poem by farnoosh fathi

Aubade 


Like a totem of birds, every last one
understood
distinct, built with nearly identical
hands;

Hair blew into my mouth when I laughed:
an angle where briefly the gold
mimesis of inedible worms
was hid.

A rifle of Aristophanes,
a butt of Rilke,
the mane of Rintrah,
all kept under the drum pillow,
the bluff grass
while dribbling clouds
roll...

"This mirror deprives the face
of love, of one’s own"—

The earliness of the bird
that told me, in my red-faced
dynamism, a categorical
uprising
sun…

New mobilities, suit up in armor of birds—
stand and test:

"The shield of the heart is the heart"—

Beak—open and close,
open and close,
I count two points of an ungorgeable star—

"Aubade" first appeared in Everyday Genius.

Farnoosh Fathi lives in San Francisco. Her poems have appeared in Everyday Genius, Fence, Poetry and elsewhere.

a poem by brian francis

Lambneck


Broken leashes
make wandering dogs
of us. Mangy, ribs exposed,
heart visible
on the outside We were
eating pages we had to
write and could not send.
My belly is swollen
a corner of myself
to keep you
must carve it
where is your weapon?




Brian Francis is a Cave Canem fellow from New York City. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in Creative Nonfiction and is currently an MFA candidate at NYU.  

a poem by stephen s. mills

The Lies Poets Tell 

            “I dreamed last night— 

             This is false in any poem 

             Last night never happened”

                        -Jack Spicer

Of course, I really mean some night
or many nights or even no night at all.
Like those days when it’s about to storm
and the Midwestern plains are full

of lightning, corn stalks bending
in yellow light and we make love,
land-locked, dreaming of brown
desolate oceans we’ll never reach.

Last night anything could’ve happened—
our whole lives pushed to the breaking
point, our center unable to hold
the weight of another man. Yes, last night

we fought. Dug a tunnel through
a snow bank. Survived. Watched
a Brad Pitt movie. I made dinner.
You laughed. I threw spoons against

the wall. Last night we blew up the world.
Ignited a revolution. Trapped ourselves
in a manmade hell where fire licks
flesh but never singes hair. Last night

is tonight, and the next night, and some
night twenty years from now in a field,
backs against grass, your hand in mine,
our fingernails full of earth.




Stephen S. Mills holds an MFA from Florida State University. His poems have appeared in The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, PANK Literary Magazine, The New York Quarterly, The Antioch Review, The Los Angeles Review, Knockout, Ganymede, Poetic Voices Without Borders 2, Assaracus, New Mexico Poetry Review, Mary, and others. He is also the winner of the 2008 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award. His first book, He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices, is out from Sibling Rivalry Press. Website: http://www.stephensmills.com/

a poem by thomas dooley

Winter Burial


When she died early light
turned the curtains

to gauze. I wilted
spinach for lunch

the hours she spent
zesting lemons

whipping meringue
to peaks. We step

between dunes of ice
she never

liked how snow weighs down
a roof.



Thomas Dooley the artistic director of emotive fruition, a theatre collective where actors collaborate with poets to bring poetry to life on stage. He holds an MFA from New York University, works in creative arts therapy, and is at work on his first book of poems.

a poem by shane michael manieri

He Gave Me Solitude


Clouds roll in once again, reckless, hiding the August sun. The dune grass, like weathered
individuals, blow in the mind. A chill that was not there before, yet always —
I smoke a cigarette, though I think myself a non-smoker. Raindrops begin to pellet the
book of a famous poet. A black crow lands on the fence behind me, and caws, —as if
cawing at me. Tell it. Tell it. Doesn’t it always symbolize something: a black crow
throatily grunting. A child runs up and down the corridor of the hotel balcony above me,
innocently screaming. His father yells something I cannot hear.



Shane Michael Manieri was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. He received a Bachelor of Arts with Honors from The New School University, and is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Summer Writers Institute and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His poems are forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly and Lambda Literary Review. Shane currently lives and writes in New York City.

two poems by brent goodman

Everything I Need to Know I Learned on Television


The definition of light
for example. Or that
I have no time for my
family, let alone prepare
a decent meal. Democracy
is a dangerous American Idol
when eliminating life partners.
TV's favorite cousins are
microwaves, drive-thru windows, Rx
fine print disclaimers. Everyone knows
it's impossible to quit smoking
or depression. A friend who designs
packaging for heat-n-eat dinners
technically answers to Wal-Mart. God
is a channel where we worship the choices
we're expected to make. Right now I'm watching
Life on Discovery narrated by Oprah Winfrey.
I'm hungry for something I don't keep inside
my house. Every commercial break reminds me
it's easier to be happy than I once believed.


--


Museum of Second Chances


On television:
the sky!

My chair-side book pile
tipped into a spill –

the new stray chews
on Buddha’s raised
wooden hand.

Between lives I hope to gain
a fresh perspective on revision.

The heart attack last year
was my first helicopter flight.

Inside my chest
I carried a dark red star
over the trees.



"Everything I Need to Know I Learned on Television" originally appeared in The Nepotist.
"Museum of Second Chances" originally appeared in The Coachella Review.


Brent Goodman lives and works in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where he's a copywriter, assistant editor for the journal Anti-, and an instructor with the Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions. His second poetry collection, Far From Sudden, is forthcoming this Fall from Black Lawrence Press.

a poem by ryan doyle may

Some Feast


I hope you realize everyone
around you has genitalia.

On the subway it’s your
hand avoiding my hand
it’s your hand, flinching
in the fluorescent puke
where my hand waits on
your hand to touch it
here
on the Q train, where
men line the isles like
teeth, loose and dumb
I’m like one of them
a cavity
working up the nerve



Ryan Doyle May’s work has appeared in Bombay Gin, Pax Americana, Esque, Supermachine and others. He is the author of the chapbook the Anatomy of Gray (Corresponding Society Press) and acted as the lead in the short film August, which was selected for the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and lives in Brooklyn.

a poem by nicole sealey

Legendary


You want me to say who I am and all of that?
        Pepper LaBeija, Harlem 1987


LaBeija, my house, is kept gold, swept clean.
Fronts fantasy from top to black bottom.
What I want to be, I be—crew-cut queen,
superman, mother and son—or become.
Catwalk as fierce as the fiercest real bitch,
I am high like fashion. And fame. I am
a man who likes men and a good cross-stitch,
whom homesick kids crowned legendary. Ma’am
of the ball, been walking now two decades
and got more grand prizes than all the rest.
The long and short: I’m a one-man parade,
elaborate drag, from manner to dress.
Within ballrooms I am most opulent.
Inside this house I am most relevant.



"Legendary" originally appeared in Callaloo. Winter 2009: 1075.



Nicole Sealey, an Afro-Latina poet who was born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I., and raised in Central Florida, is a Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, and Squaw Valley alumna. Selected by D.A. Powell for inclusion in Best New Poets 2011 and a finalist for the 2011 Third Coast Poetry Prize, Nicole Sealey’s poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Third Coast, and Callaloo, among others.

a poem by gregory donovan

Happy National Poetry Month!  Throughout April I will be posting a poem-a-day.  Today's poem is by Gregory Donovan.




Taste


When she put her finger inside
his mouth, there was Hispania
and the dusty roads pocked
with droplets of rain before
the wooden wheels came grinding,
the impassable suck of black mud.
When she put her finger inside
herself again, he was there, too,
taking the famous Spanish steps
into the foothills among the azaleas,
they were building the sunlit villa
to which they would always return.
When she put her finger inside
his mouth, there was the temple
and the hands clapping sharply
against the steep stair, bringing back
the call of the quetzal, the star
shining in her dark eye,
the blood running down the stone.
When she put her finger inside
herself again, he was almost
there, but she did not come
that night, nor the next,
and another rung on the ladder
that led to—where?—had broken
as the stars faded, the bright birds
disappeared, the walls fell in,
and she never came to him that way again.
When she put her finger inside
his wounds, he knew them all
once more—she said she found it
hard to believe all they had told her—
yet he knew if she would believe,
in that moment he would be healed
for as long as the mockingbird sang,
as long as the taste nailed him down or
gently wrapped him up and took him away
to a story that wouldn’t die in a war without end.



"Taste" was originally published, in slightly different form, in Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, Volume 22, Issue 2 (Winter/Spring 2010).



Gregory Donovan is the author of the poetry collection Calling His Children Home, winner of the Devins Award, as well as poetry, essays, and fiction published in The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Southern Review, storySouth, 42opus, diode, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University and is Senior Editor of the online journal Blackbird. The poem published here comes from his recently completed poetry collection, Labyrinths in Black and Blue, which soon will be in circulation to publishers.