Tag: poem

“Galaxy” by Lydia Rae Bush

MPJ 
Quite frankly a little tired
of how much stamina I
have for shifting my
paradigms— 

how long I can ride
the edge
of my realm
for overwhelm— 

ah, I know 
how to bask in the sun!

But I am tired of
being the moon
surrounded by
so much night—

tired of pulling the tides,
hoping they’ll create
enough winds to
push the clouds

so that I
can light up
enough sky to
erase the stars. I

love the stars,
always there to help
accomplish all
the sun demands of me.

Author’s Note: I like to explore poems and interpret a speaker’s experience by asking what the speaker is really saying—not by letting their expressions provide context regarding what they’ve not expressed, but by letting their each expression provide context regarding each of their other expressions. Is this speaker switching between metaphors to find the accurate one, or adding metaphors one after the other to create one coherent train, or stacking metaphors on top of each other to create a spectrum you could look down on from above? I pulled from Dan Siegel’s “Window of Tolerance” theory to create this poem.

Lydia Rae Bush is an Early Childhood Educator whose poetry focuses on Embodiment, Social-Emotional Development, and Trauma Recovery. Her work can be found in publications such as Poetry as Promised Magazine, Crab Apple Literary, and FULL MOOD MAG. X/Insta: @LRBPoetry

“The Crone Unfound” by Beth Gordon

MPJ

All that summer we feared the unseen. Jaws in theaters: our canvas rafts like bait for watery monsters. We left them on the sand. Our parents drinking Bloody Marys on the beach house deck while we battled the ocean with nothing but our bodies. Over and over, we tried to swim to France. Over and over, we lost our way. Nobody noticed that we were bruised. Nobody asked why we were trying to escape. Can you see that I don’t know how to tell our story? Something was lost in the salt. Something was lost on the screen: the freckle-faced boy pulled under in a churn of blood. His mother forever changed. We learned that no one could protect us from God.  That we had to save ourselves from stingers: from teeth: from the deception of waves & light. Now I am landlocked & unable to blow wishes across the finite horizon. Searching for answers in the alchemy of nests. Still feeling the ache of what was taken. What was drowned. The mystery of the unreachable shore.

Author’s note: On a literal level this poem is about a formative childhood experience – my brother, parents, grandparents, aunt, uncle, cousins, and I would go to Oak Island, NC every summer. In the context of the Crone poems I’ve been writing since turning 60, this poem is interrogating that memory. What does my 12-year old self have to teach me? What are the things that only she knows? 

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother in Asheville, NC. She is the author of several chapbooks including The Water Cycle (Variant Literature) and How to Keep Things Alive (Split Rock Press). Beth is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art. Find Beth on Twitter, Instagram, and BlueSky @bethgordonpoet.

“some were gone” by Will Davis

MPJ 
meadowsweet from meadow-
lark plummet the rain like hand-

holds medium-dark where light
graces for lastly minutes

made sweat-beautiful
and heat-rich within

these rushed tides at the reed's
bending.

Author’s note: This piece was grown from sounds, especially those distorted by mediums like heat, water, distance, etc. The title is a style of heterograph, as ‘some were’ and ‘summer’ clasped hands in my mind. I wanted to instill a humid artefact, the thought of deep summer, with associations from the landscape of my home.

Will Davis (he/they) is a nurse, poem scribbler and immutable fire escape. Further scribbles through @ByThisWillAlone.

Dramatic (Dear Stranger, I)

MPJ 
       You are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being. —Pedro Almodóvar

Need another word, not irony, for what happened when I fell
in love not-quite-with-you-but- with your poem about falling

in love with the idea of a woman, with a myth, with history,
with wanting to ask do you want to go swimming? to someone

who was never real but maybe also was, or maybe who’s the realest
when we all believe in her. (Clap, clap, goes the idea of Audience. Fairy-wings.)

I wanted to reach through the fourth wall and touch you, but the wall was not
a wall, it was a screen: your lipstick smile on the other side of it. So close

and way-too-far, and when you touched my (real, small, living, human) hand
in the park, just once, by accident, I full-body-unlocked in a way I didn’t know

what else to call except love, but maybe it was more like seeing,
or like the future’s aperture opening up to living-through-it—

me face-to-face with some other me, the one I hadn’t
been, yet. I know it’s boring, but I’m saying you changed me.

I’d still call that love, but love’s the loaded-est of loaded guns,
and all I want this thing to mean is open seas of something soft

or looking at you looking at the sky and thinking closer. Full-volume radio,
every stupid pop song I used to be too-scared to sing along to.

I guess I’ll never know, or care, what kind of love this is except the truest
kind I’ve ever felt: the kind where all the women stay alive

in this weird picture—my hands / your hands in separate oceans, girl-fish
bodies underwater, all the tallest marbled opalescent statues of ourselves:

full-frame visible, longed-for (wanted wanted wanted wanted) by some brief myriad
(who knows how long) (I know: not long) of infinite, enamored strangers’ eyes.

Prompt: Instructions to be Followed, Revised, and/or Ignored

1) Scholar Jay Leyda describes Dickinson’s poems as often having an “omitted center” — I take
this to mean that sometimes her poems are about something that can’t quite be said directly, or
that something important has been left offstage. Write a poem that works this way, in whatever
way you find meaningful. Remember that “success in circuit lies.”

2) Use a uniform stanza length (couplets, tercets, quatrains, etc). Metric choices are up to you. If
you’re going to break your own constraint, you’d better do it for a reason.

3) It is often the case that the I in a poem both does and does not speak for its author. This works
in different ways in different poems. Write a poem in which the I is fairly close to your lived
human self, like the part of an asymptote where the line approaches infinity. Consider subjectivity
as an unsolvable math problem, unless this gets in your way.

4) If you’re bored of your own errors, try creating some new ones. Franco “Bifo” Berardi says
poetry does this, and I like to think he’s right.

5) Say something true, even if it pains you. Otherwise aren’t you just wasting your own time (and
possibly that of your reader)?

6) On the other hand, consider the truth to be found in fiction.

7) Refer to mythology in some way. There are plenty to choose from. Proceed from an abundant
mood. Poetry, like living, thrives in contradiction.

Jo(ely) Fitch is a poet living, thinking, reading, and walking in and around Cincinnati, Ohio. Find her in most of the usual webspace places: @joelyfitch on Twitter/X, @jo_elyly on Instagram, @jo-ely.bsky.social on Bluesky, and joelyfitch.com. Jo coedits Atmospheric Quarterly. 

Dream, with an interior

MPJ1 Comment 
1.

Dream, with a tool. If this is rock, or stone. The stone
becomes hammer.

Rare outings mouth the words. We sing, behind the scaffolding
of facemasks.

I daily walk a slim incline, and steady. The ponderous framework.

A composite of inactivity, and lockdown patterns.

Robert Kroetsch: What is a letter? Sometimes it is a star that fell.

If dismember is actually the opposite 		of remember.


2.

To translate, sound. Rose: the doorbell. Electronic adaptation
of Westminster chimes.

I can barely hear. 		They saw the decades go, between us.

Toys on the shelf. Two towels decorate their floor.

I have been thinking, lately, of Falstaff. Let him come, they say.

Aoife: I am sad for your father. I remember Grampy. A name
they never called him.

To make so fine a point: in this economy?

To kneecap grief. What might that look like.


3.

An event, of saltwater. Rubble. Dreams of flying, falling.

And then, 		she woke. Our bedroom doorknob, rustles.

Prompt

If you’ve a short poem on a particular idea or thread or consideration, attempt to write a third around some of those same ideas. And then write another. And then another. Keep going. Once you move yourself through the expected, obvious material in that direction, then you are forced to see where else you might go. It is one thing to write a poem on the colour blue or the memory of a house, for example, but what might the tenth poem on such look like? What might the fifteenth? This is where your mind begins to move in directions entirely unexpected, even by you. See how far you can take it. See how far you can go.

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). His collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (periodicityjournal.blogspot.com) and Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com). He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Self Portrait as a Leading Man

MPJ 
Less than fur but more than shadow. If I were a boy:
a good start. But I have always been a girl,
even when I wanted
not to be,

wanted to play Harold Hill and lean across the desk
to sing to Marion (in the moonlight, a man
could sing it. In the moonlight…).
Why was it the boys
got all the best 
songs?

Now, with age, I hardly see it, have to tilt my face
to the bathroom spotlight to find it. 
Grown blonde, somehow,
on its own.

Not the harsh practically shimmering gold accusation
it became at age twelve, 
Charlene and I

pinched in her tiny, back-of-the-medicine cabinet
mirror, buttering the top of our lips, 
school paste thick and thicker the bleach
because we couldn’t get it
gone, make it
disappear 
fast

enough. Out out damn spot. Oh, those auditions
for grade school plays. Charlene, Prince John.
Charlene, Lady MacBeth, instead of me
because I didn’t think I’d be allowed
to say damn.

Damn you, mustache, you resistance
to a dainty kind of girlhood,
shoes I couldn’t 
kick the ball in,
dresses frilled
with itch.

I wanted to pitch overhand. I wanted
to sing Dulcinea. I wanted
Danny Zucko’s 
leather jacket

and a pair of black Chuck Taylors that could
run me out of the neighborhood’s
bracket of lawns to the
outskirts,

new houses going up but no walls yet,
foundations only in that
good red clay

my Mama would scrub all day
and never get the stain out.

I wrote this poem from the following prompt in Jessica Jacobs’s and Nickole Brown’s Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a glorious, generous book that I highly recommend:

“An ode is a poem that addresses a particular subject, often in praise. In the poem “Ode to Fat,” Ellen Bass revels in her wife’s boundless breasts and marshy belly. / I adore the acreage / of your thighs and praise the promising / planets of your ass. Standing in front of a full-length mirror, see if you can look at the parts of your body you tend to criticize and resee then as opportunities for celebration. Write a description in which you extol the virtues and strengths of these parts, making them—just for the brief duration of this page—each their own kind of superhero.”


Rhett Iseman Trull‘s first book of poetry, The Real Warnings (Anhinga Press, 2009), received the 2008 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, as well as the Brockman-Campbell Book Award, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and the Oscar Arnold Young Award. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other publications. Her awards include prizes from the Academy of American Poets and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. She received her B.A. from Duke University and her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she was a Randall Jarrell Fellow. She and her husband publish Cave Wall in Greensboro, North Carolina.

A time of splinters

MPJ1 Comment 
Home was always there but,
it would have been nice,
to know where the door was
one day to the next. Which side 
of the house was set
to let me in. I was as stubborn
as any other child in what
I expected. Plaster and lath
was levered away and words
could wander from the rooms
they belonged to. The paths
of water pipes were made
plain between crooked
wood ribs. Drywall stacked
like a blank tarot deck waited
for months while jackhammers
cracked the slab. The kitchen
calendar Mom got at church
Christmas Eve rattled
on a nail bent by the weight
of all those crossed out days.
Wherever fire should have been
was often cold. The furnace,
the hearth. Plaster dust folded
into our daily bread. We ate it for years.

Prompt

Start with an abandoned poem or draft that centers on some aspect of your childhood – the older the better. Look for more recent experiences that echo what you have written and use details from them to flesh out and add layers/dimensions to the what is in your memory.

Lee Potts is the founder and editor-in-chief of Stone Circle Review. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his work has appeared in The Night Heron Barks, Rust + Moth, Whale Road Review, UCity Review, Firmament, and elsewhere. Lee is the author of We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and And Drought Will Follow (Frosted Fire, 2021).

Postmodern Breugel’s Icarus Poem

MPJ 
if his intent
was to confine
the moral
to the edge, to
the puny feet
by which the boy’s
muted entry into
the water is made
known, then, yes:
the eye is masterfully
misdirected to the plot
of land, the farmer’s bright
red sleeve, the slope
beneath
him, his plow;
but the painter’s hand,
whether he intended
so or not,
returned
repeatedly to the pot
of blue, applied
a wash
of brine
to everything:
every eye,
from every height,
conceding
consanguinity with the sea

Prompt: Consider Bruegel’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” and W.H. Auden’s response poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” alongside William Carlos Williams’ response poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Responses to art need not remain any more static than interpretation of the art itself–with this in mind, and using the above touchstones, write your own response to Bruegel’s landscape.

Jennifer A Sutherland is a poet, essayist, and attorney in Baltimore, and the author of the hybrid, book-length poem Bullet Points: a lyric (River River books, 2023). Her work has appeared or will appear in Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, I-70 Review, Cagibi, Appalachian Review, and elsewhere.