Category: poetry

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Then — Poem by Lesley Wheeler

Then

If my son is a lantern spilling light and warmth
throug the rose panes of his skin

if combustion is a chemical reaction involving oxygen
and if its byproducts are heat and carbon dioxide

if we also exhale heat and carbon dioxide
if we are fire, converting the molecules around us

if the flames banked all day leap in me at night
and if I am too tired to rise and write

if I carry the spark in me, conserving it,
but its bright engine keeps changing the fuel of my life

into ashes, ashes–if the first conflagration is over
and the long deep burn is underway

if I feed with my breath, if I burn hotter,
if I smother it, if I keep changing air into spirit

— Lesley Wheeler
from Heathen

Note: Interview with the poet coming soon.

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Feed the Hungry Heart on Feb. 22

Reasons you should come to Feeding the Hungry Heart at Prose on Feb. 22 at 7pm:

1) It’s all about the food. $15 gets you a vegetarian buffet of fresh, local food that will rock your socks off. Prose is one of the best restaurants in Boston, and $15 is an amazing deal. Dinner at Prose usually runs more like $40 a person

2) It’s all about the writing. Our featured readers will rock the socks off of anyone who still has them on after sampling the buffet.

3) It’s all about the community. Reaching Productions creates spaces that celebrate and support artists no matter what their level of experience. If you sign up for the open mic, you can expect people to applaud you. And that applause will rock your socks off.

4) It’s all about me! I’m organizing this event solo. As the date gets closer, I get the “what if I throw a party and nobody comes?” jitters. Be a pal and show up just for me. And for the food, writing, and community.

RSVP on Facebook by clicking this link

Or, comment below.

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Yin Work (From Treehouse Chronicles)

“If someone climbs quietly up to the treehouse and peeks at me through the window while I’m working, they may think I’m merely taking a nap. This is a part of the work of solitude, part of being with me. Thinking, considering, observing, pondering–these are the tools of my trade and occasionally they have to be wielded lying down with my cap pulled over my eyes.”
— Peter Lewis, Treehouse Chronicles: One Man’s Dream of a Life Aloft. See the treehouse

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The Sacred

…but the car kept coming up,
      the car in motion
music filling it, and sometimes one other person

who understood the bright altar of the dashboard

– From “The Sacred” by Stephen Dunn, as heard on The Writer’s Almanac

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Psalm for a Lost Summer

From the poem on today’s Writer’s Almanac:

3. For there in Colorado we were captive at a high altitude, required
to write without breath; and if we could not write, our consciences
required us to read, and improve our minds.
4. How shall we write our poems in this strange land?

“Psalm for a Lost Summer” by Maura Stanton, from Immortal Sofa. © University of Illinois Press, 2008.

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Spy Pond Haiku

The pond at dusk
Voices carry over the water
Stillness

Human and goose words
Dramatic sky reaching
colors of my mother’s scarf

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Alison Townsend in Mudlark: Demeter and Persephone

One of my favorite myths. From Demeter Faces Facts (second poem down)

Without even meaning to, she’s gone underground,

the face whose curve you shaped with your own hand,
fugitive, a sullen stranger’s you’ll never touch the same way

again. Still, you keep brushing and braiding, separating
the strands and binding them together again, as if they were

a rope by which you could hold her, tethering her to your body
as she was once anchored and fed, your blood hers. Before

she got big enough to cross the street without looking back
to catch your eye. When you were still everything she needed.

— Alison Townsend

The poems here don’t always inspire me with tight, bright language, but lately I’ve been inspired by writers whose work is less than perfect. Some deep inner critic, some just-sprouting bulb of defiance inside me says “if they can do it, why can’t I?”

Seeing a feminine moniker in the masthead also soothes the woman-shaped ire within.

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In the Midst of Madness, Beauty

Lick

The love-struck deer is asking, with his eyes
and tongue, is asking, with black gums and quivering
limbs, to be let in–

grinding against the actual gristle and crystal of salt,
wetted and domed in the forest’s center.
Someone else’s pleasure is always present.

The lick’s a sensate toy, a voyeur, watching him work:
shrinking her body by the second,
using lust, that dominant drug, to disguise aggression.

Apologies to the soaked ground, marked with arcs:
trampled bed, doomed intersection.

Paula Bohince

Reading tonight at Brookline Booksmith. I’m not going. I just get lots of email.