Tag: poems

Discipline

MPJ 
When you swing swift, open palm, to pinken
my upturned ass, I brace for the soft sting.
I take a sharp breath, then the ache stills me.
Your hands remind me to whom I belong.
 
You grasp my long hair, pull taut to tame me,
snare a whimper until I gasp your name.
Give me this reverie, animal urged
to break free. Break me. I beg, please, don’t stop.
 
I lose count and collapse, still obeisant
in your embrace. You caress where you’ve bruised,
where you’ve used skin to mark me your canvas.
You coax me back from the brink of spent sense,
 
Call me good girl, your leather-leashed darling.
I promise, I’ll be a good girl this time.

Prompt: Submissive Poetics

What do sexual submission and poetic form have in common? Restraints!

Write an erotic poem that is informed by formal rules. Use precise meter, repeating rhyme schemes, or received forms. In what ways might your obedience to a form or set of rules (or your break from them, you poetic brat!) mirror the erotic moment depicted? How might being forced into particular decisions (or positions) allow you freedom to explore? A multiple-orgasm villanelle? A sestina for your seven-person orgy, each line ending with the name of a new lover? An ode to your partner’s armpit sweat? An elegy for a vibrator that’s run out of batteries? In sex and poetry and poetry about sex, the possibilities seem endless.

Evelyn Berry is a trans, Southern writer, editor, and educator. She’s the author of Grief Slut (Sundress Publications, 2024) and recipient of a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

Mother Lode

MPJ 
the first mistake was thinking              I 
was self made
not spat out               from my host rock.

I emerged with the same family traits.
same waving hands,                 like hers     
all along—  
                      that volcano of gestures
from a greater ring,           winking heat
along the Pacific.


I had assumed                     island status.
let myself drown               aspiring to be 
a stone that         makes      its        mark  
but I was smashed against. 
   
Forever marked                    
                                    by where I came. 

crossing that ocean  
did not change a thing. still earthbound,       

I was always         a     stone's      throw
from home,

my mother's                    spitting image.

Prompt

We often think of ourselves as autonomous entities with the landscape as our backdrop, but how might land formations speak to and reflect how we move in the world?

Look at a map of your geographical area (physical or Google) as specific or broad as your imagination fancies. Take notes in point form about land formations (eg. bodies of water, mountains, prairie, etc.) and the actions associated with it. Perhaps the map’s shape is suggestive or tell a story about influence the elements such as wind/water current or tectonics. What are the primary features and how do they move? Hone in on action words and vivid descriptions. Consider your findings as metaphors for the way you move in the world. Allow the associations you make to “tell a story” that will generate your first draft.

Jessica Lee McMillan (she/her) is a civil servant with an English MA and Creative Writing Certificate from SFU’s Writer’s Studio. Read her in The Humber Literary Review, Funicular Magazine, Pinhole Poetry, Rose Garden Press, Crab Creek Review and others. She lives in New Westminster, BC.

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.