I am beginning a new installation on this blog: Poem Fridays. Every Friday, I will post my favorite poem that I've read that week (and with reading 5-6 books a month for my MFA work + journals, I have quite a lot to choose from). I will also incorporate poetry news & events I've heard about like this:
Betsy Wheeler and Dean Gorman co-edit the newly formed p i • l ot books and p i • l o t online poetry magazine. See them both
here.
My friend Joshua & I are collaborating on a poetry project that involves using a) only the prose poem form and b) a call-response method. It began with Joshua's "Galápagos" and picked up steam from there. We're both loving the collaboration process and look forward to see where it will take us. Here's a teaser of what we've been working on:
Galápagos
This place has taught us something, they say, with the beak-crack of nut and seed, the specific way hunger is solved, but explain to me how this is evidence of your arms, your wrinkled palms, the smooth length of your fingers. Explain to me how these things were never planned, how all of this is adaptive. Think of this tree, how you sprang from it, lips wet, and I will tell you all the things I have never understood, how you and I are a result of some vast accumulation of chance, wing-flap of finch, vibration of throat. Explain to me what role these islands play, how over there you are long-necked or freckled, how I would not know your body’s shape.
Return of Darwin’s the Beagle (my poem)
Birds gather and the morning nests in the anchor ball. For years you’ve walked in circles, squared away the finch with the finch, the mottled tortoise shell. Let’s say when you first left, I was the tree showing promise. Let’s say I was yea high—water break, small shadow. In your absence, I armed myself with longer arms: dirt-struck, tap rooted, wing roost. When you returned, I was in my drought corner, knotted and holed. The you was your likeness—beard, book in hand, but wouldn’t hold again my new outcrop of smaller leaves, my tangled vine. I give you these ugly limbs, a favorite view. Dear, climb my body’s bark and the world is bigger. Come to me with your handkerchief and rush the clouds between us. Bright lagoon, rock bed, ship oar, make a habit of touching me with your fingers. I won’t believe the accidental. I’ve read the desire already in your ship’s white turrets.
And now on to the first installment of Poem Friday:
Bloody Mary by Kristy Bowen
It tastes of copper.
Of danger. Skinned knees
that bleed and burn.
Say it once and you can
always return safely
to your bed. Cool sheets,
summer outside swelling
with fireflies, dizzy
and wanting.
But twice and it turns
taut and bright as barbed wire.
Your mother walks into sunlight
and turns back crying. Heat
squalls beneath her tongue.
Soon your house falls down.
Violets rising in the field
of your skin and you forget
everything. Even tonight.
The moths beating themselves
against the porch light.
The whispers of pale girls,
line by line, their hair,
their words, tangling in the wind.
If you want to send in or a link to a poem to be considered for Poem Fridays, send it
here.
