Tag: Poetry

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).

Dear words I do not yet have,

MPJ 
I am writing to you from the heart of the empire, so much the heart it does not see itself for what it is. Who speaks for me from here? Am I nobody, or nobody’s mark? One eye bleeding. Grasping for where the wound came from, where the weapon speaks. There in the dark-not-dark he touches everything he loves, looking for danger, touching fleece and fleece, known and known. Underneath each, a soldier.

after Audre Lorde and Amorak Huey

Prompt

Audre Lorde writes in her essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” Write an epistolary poem (a poem in the form of a letter) to the words you do not yet have.

Jeremy Michael Reed has published poems and essays in Still: The Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of English for Westminster College in Missouri.

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.

Elementary

MPJ 
My science fair projects were simple
and miraculous. Father taught me 
to float a needle on water, to transform
the carnation’s white petals 
with the food coloring droppers
my mother pinched to dye frosting.

After school 
I collected rocks.
Identified with schoolwords:
Igneous, Metamorphic, Sedimentary.
A bluegreen stone 
I named Greenie. 

My mother had a pet rock in her childhood. 
Her pet rock had a cardboard house 
to live in.

I asked her over and over—
But what did you want to be? 
I wanted to be a mother.
I don’t know.
I didn’t want 
to be anything. 
Maybe a counselor.
This satisfied me. 

When I graduated high school
my fourth grade teacher mailed me the letter
I wrote to myself. My 10 year old voice 
strange and familiar. Instructions
to the adulthood
she designed—
god	         wife
mother write

The first story I wrote was about a 10 year old girl
who loved rocks. The story named them pebbles.
She traveled to Arizona to look at pebbles.
She found a good pebble
and put it in her pocket.

The story ended in that pocket.
 

Prompt
Write a poem that begins or ends somewhere very small—a corner from your childhood home,
the bottom of a flower vase, a cabinet under the stairs, your shower, a whisper, a child’s sock.
Where does that smallness lead (or guide) you?

Millie Tullis (she/her) is a writer, teacher, folklorist, and researcher. Her work has been published in Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Millie is EIC of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal. Raised in northern Utah, she lives in upstate South Carolina.

After the Last

MPJ1 Comment 
of the birds we kept 
seeds in our pockets
our hands swooping 
to sprinkle dirt

eyes migrated
to uninterrupted sky
found the bare curve
of power lines 

plastic bags
snagged on branches
the rustle of skin 
scattered song

Prompt

Imagine a world where a single species no longer exists, how might this affect you personally, unexpectedly. What would you miss? What have you taken for granted? Write a short poem that outlines this loss and the behaviors your grief might bring to try and bring the species “to life” again.

Jared Beloff is the author of Who Will Cradle Your Head (ELJ Editions, 2023). His work can be found at AGNI, Baltimore Review, and EcoTheo Review. You can find him on his website http://www.jaredbeloff.com. He is a teacher who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters.

The way the rain water pooled on these petals made me think of you

MPJ 
buds open their mouths too soon for a new taste of rain
other flowers blur into brushstrokes this way

petals cling to rain as if this thirst were slakeable
mist nestles in a crevice of petal this way

scent commingles and splits like fingers interlacing 
you lilac the air in every season this way

I pool in the petal sweep of your waist
lick raindrops off the dip of your lips this way

your hand a blossoming of promises tracing
the brief lifespan of lilacs you make me forget this way

Prompt

My poem began with a photo of lilacs after rain that a friend sent with the message that became the title. Find an image or household object that reminds you of someone else. Write a ghazal* that explores the gaps or spaces the object creates and the ways that person occupies or travels those spaces.

*This form tends to appear as couplets with a repeated word or phrase, but you can be as rigid or as flexible as you like. Play around until you feel like the constraints enhance the content. 

Jessica Coles (she/her) is a poet from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where she lives with her family, a tuxedo cat, and a tarantula. Her work has appeared in Moist Poetry Journal, EcoTheo Review, Stone Circle Review, CV2, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. Find her chapbooks at Prairie Vixen Press (https://prairievixenpress.ca)

Self Portrait as Water Cycle Bereaving 

MPJ 
…a single sentence to the seafloor 
	of sky and started to scry 
so hard I laughed aloud,
	laughed a cloud of crickets. 
Cried a crowd of droplets 
	dropped to earth. Ate my worth
in gold. Got told lies in cycles by
	magnetite and meteor. Mired 
myself muddy. Bloodied my hands 
	into hammers. Nailed and nailed 
by nothing but nothing. Noted knots on 
	my knuckles matched notches 
in my throat, coated in cough syrup 
	and caught lyric like barbed hooks 
baited with contrition. Choked. Choked up. 
	Battered my voice into submission, 
a clubbed cod deck-drawn and drowning
	in open air. Open to where clouds 
gather and gasp into the shape of gone. Gone
	into great arrangements of rain,
great downward embraces. Rainheld hands 
	who tickled the peninsula's misty toes. 
The land laughed my voice back. Tides 
	of laughter echoed all along 
this woeful shoreline. Wave-traced, no man
	—I am an island—
nor sound returned to listen, but 
	I had heard my own raised fists,
quotation marks of my voice’s 
	vision, lift as they said…

Prompt

Grief Alphabets & the Alliterative Engine – being bereaved can sap one of language. When I’ve come up, head first, against that great, deadening silence, I’ve found (only after long, difficult periods of trial and error) that language contains the spark of its own re-animation. I’ve also noticed that nature offers Their own recourse. Rhyme and alliteration, like tiny flames, carry thought and meaning through their flickering as it alights from one line to the next. Suddenly, a poem condenses; is created.

Make one column with an alphabetical list of words you associate with grief or the loss you are experiencing. Beside that column, make a parallel list for each letter of features in the natural world that begin with that letter. (For example, the columns for “A” might read “anguished | allium”). Once you have exhausted the alphabet, and/or your energy, revisit the lists together and pick out and elaborate on any patterns or droplets you devised. What anguished allium blossoms may sprout?

Adrian Dallas Frandle (they/he) is a poet and queer fish who writes to the world about its future. They are Poetry Acquisitions Editor for Variant Press. Book of Extraction: Poems with Teeth out now with Kith Books. Read more at adriandallas.com

I’m not hungry but my mouth is bored (distance) (marriage)

MPJ 
which direction are you from here
kidding I know it’s down

I would be a wretched river
so weary of waiting to be traveled to

my darling westward witch
my east my Eden my every

each of us one single individual water
amid all the many waters

nostalgic for spring & source  
before we bend around the first bend

(facing the audience) you know
how long this took us 

you think it’s easy to meander
for a thousand years 

in a ditch made by melting ice
(back to you) join me 

the rocks are slippery
the cold takes the breath

Prompt: Write a poem whose syntax makes you slightly uncomfortable, a poem with an inconsistent but intentional relationship to the sentence, a poem without comma or period but maybe parentheses.

Amorak Huey is the author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress, 2021). Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024).