Colie Hoffman

An Invitation (Horace’s Ode i.20) Cheap wine, Maecenas! You’ll drink cheap wine from cheap cups, our local Sabine swill. I pitched the Grecian jar myself, and filled it with wine I made. I laid it in my cellar that day when you entered your theater after a long sickness. Yes, Maecenas, the people saw you and cheered and the echoes filled Rome, your Tiber trembled and the Vatican hills shook. Yes, Maecenas, it’s true–you’ve drank the crushed grapes of Calenia and Caecuba. You’ve had Falernia and Formia–better wine than my cups should ever dirty. ______________________________________________ Micah Towery‘s poetry and translations appear in magazines like Cimarron Review, Paterson Literary Review, Ragazine.cc, and , and an interview with Tom Sleigh will be appearing in an issue of The Writer’s Chronicle soon. He teaches at Trinity Western University and tweets . In past lives he was a baker, church organist, and Coca-Cola delivery [...]

American Typewriter Dusk happened again.……………….I’ve dragged the family to the park……………………………….retaining pond to follow the marvelous…………….Russian satellite across the sky.………………………….They were surprised I think………………………………………at my insistence. The hidden part………………………..of what I want is a night insect…………………………that you can see in shafts of streetlight.………………By this light I have misidentified………………….woodland creatures from three phyla.……………………..Here in the doldrums I stayed in……………………………….on Halloween. Read Faust………………………………picked fights with phantom critics………………..the television the birds.………………………………..Who can blame me? The birds………………………………..the television. All the cities…………………………….I’ve left behind. __________________________________________ Mary McHugh’s poems and reviews have appeared in Copper Nickel, and Smartish Pace, and Matterhorn. She teaches English at Aims College, and she lives and writes in Fort Collins, Colorado with her husband and their tabby cat.

Cycle ______In a past life, I was my teacher Jan, ___________who was Amelia Earhart in hers, and also Lizzie Borden. In this life, I miss my petticoats. Jan misses her leather jacket. _________Jan has no children. When she was Amelia Earhart, she passed from matter into spirit into matter and when you can do that, you can choose whether or not to come back. She chose not. _____________In order to become me, _______Amelia had to walk all the way back from the Bermuda Triangle, _______sick with disappointment _______that she hadn’t quite escaped. I was the trail of blood in her. . . . Then the rage became Lizzie, poor Lizzie—hot all the time. That word ‘spinster’ _______wove a net over her that laced her up tight as her corset and made her eyes bulge and dart. _______she bled and bled, this moon curse that made her even hotter, the spongy [...]

in our bodies now orange blossoms _____over her childhood yard __________a grasshopper’s long arc __________grasshopper’s long arc _____over her childhood yard a shimmering shimmering _____on the motel window __________trickles of sweat __________trickles of sweat _____on the motel window a sickly flicker sickly flicker _____the tv’s radiant breath __________on her naked arm __________on her naked arm _____the tv’s radiant breath goosebumps goosebumps _____her sunburst tattoo __________rayed with wrinkles __________rayed with wrinkles _____her sunburst tattoo still aglow still aglow _____the iris’s purple yearning __________in our bodies now __________in our bodies now _____the iris’s purple yearning the dead fire’s heat NOTES: This poem was originally published in South x Southeast v.13 no.3. “In our bodies now” is in a form I call a ‘floating-leaf’ haiku sequence, due to the drifting, swaying repetition of the lines. Each three-line grouping is written to stand alone as a haiku, but each new line also contributes to [...]

“The artist is a receptacle of emotions come from no matter where: from the sky, the earth, a piece of paper, a passing figure, a cobweb. This is why one must not discriminate between things. There is no rank among them. One must take one’s good where one finds it.” Picasso wrote this well before Mary Ruefle started publishing books, but if his words could be an egg, Ruefle’s Selected Poems would hatch right out of it. Her speakers—obsessed both with beauty and with their inability to “attain a balance/ between important and unimportant things”— over and over fuse the world’s grandest abstractions and minutest details in efforts to find meaning somewhere in the middle. Naturally, with so many things to include, Ruefle’s poems jump around a lot from one place/time/feeling/speaker to another. In “Timberland,” we go from “Paul’s Fish Fry in Bennington, Vermont” to “the delta/ of the Pearl [...]

Oh, love. Why is it always the hardest topic for writers to talk about, yet one we want to talk about the most? We still write about it, of course, in our many oblique ways—but, like religion or politics, part of us wants to just avoid it altogether. Something with the power to make us feel both so vulnerable and so high inevitably keeps us wary of expressing our emotions. But at the same time, it’s impossible to avoid: You can’t talk about being human for very long without talking about love. These past few months in India, I’ve found the same is true of awe. No one wants to appear childlike and vulnerable to others, but everyone (everyone who seeks out new experiences, anyway) wants to feel that way—along with love, awe is the one of the emotions people seek most deeply. And for writers, whose job is to [...]

NOTE: This is the third in a series of posts by Colie Hoffman about her experience while a writer-in-residence at Sangam House, India. When I was in grad school, my friend Dave and I used to lift weights at the gym. The undergrad demographics at our university skewed largely male, so naturally, the weight room was populated almost exclusively by beefy, college-age boys. I was usually the only woman there, and Dave, a compact, physically efficient-looking sort of guy no taller than 5’7,” was the only man his size. Technically, we went together so we could help each other work out—but really, we went together for mutual protection. Alone, we’d get stared at. Together, neither of us had to be the only one getting stared at. Or, maybe it felt safer to get stared at together. Or, maybe we just noticed it less. As a foreign woman in India, you [...]

Before I left for India, my doctor tried to talk me into a a $1500 rabies vaccine by convincing me that packs of stray dogs would be pouncing on my every step and probably even attack me in my sleep. He practically insisted I buy a Hazmat suit to ward off mosquitoes. My mother, on the other hand, just said, “Gosh honey, that’s far.” My friend, who had actually visited India, warned me to watch out for motorbike guys who would feel me up on the street. We all have our ways of dealing with the unknown, I guess. Apparently cartographers used to write “Here be dragons” on sections of uncharted territory, especially oceans, where they drew pictures of giant sea serpents. One ancient Roman map cautioned travelers about the presence of dog-headed beings. Another 15th-century map warns of men with horns. I know my mom, doctor, and friend were [...]

NOTE: This is the first of a series of posts by Colie Hoffman about her experience while a writer-in-residence at Sangam House, India. It’s only been two weeks since I arrived in India, but already I feel totally at home here. The tiny village where I’m living—beautiful unto itself, with its stone paths and red mud houses—is surrounded by expansive grasslands, palm trees, and wooded dirt roads. I eat delicious, fresh vegetarian meals twice a day, someone takes care of the cooking and laundry, and I get to enjoy the company of six other writers. And while all this is magical, it’s really just a sideshow to the main attraction: For 10 straight weeks, I have all the free time in the world to write, write, write. This paradise is Sangam House, a relatively new international writers’ residency program (in its third year) based in South India. The first two [...]