After Rapture I am found kneeling beneath the last _____blasted tree. Winter on my shoulders and a sparrow’s red skull lodged _____in my mouth. I have cut my hair to feed the fire. Remnants of a city _____dusting my lips. No nations left to die for or hide in. Only this voice— _____woven through the cracks of a halved piano: that sound a doe makes when the arrowhead _____replaces the day with an answer to the ribs’ quiet hollows. I reach _____for the charred branch and push. Blood dots the dust beneath me. My wet face titled _____skyward. I push until he starts to crown, my name already dripping from his lips. He writhes _____through me, scraping for that precious shard of light, where the wolves _____have already gathered— their half-moon fangs brightening the hour. But I push _____anyway. I open. I wound. And you— dear reader, you will call [...]

TY: I want to ask about line breaks, which can do a lot of work in free verse poems. What principles or rules or guidelines do you use when deciding when to break lines? CW: I try to rely on composition as much or more than instinct. First of all, I aim to compose in…

I thought things were wrong: it manifested in me buying and wearing Ulysses blue eyeshadow. It didn’t suit me. One day I stared into the mirror at the caked crystal of smudged me and said ‘You look like a whore’. I was cheap, cheeky, comehithersome—but clientless. Makeup remover in hand, I finally admitted that you had left without me. That you weren’t coming back. That the rocket we’d saved so hard for belonged to you alone. On the moon, water tastes like oysters and makes you orgasm when drunk and vegetables are as small as the teeniest seashells yet pack a bomb of good—one mouthful lasts a week. The sky is a new colour, a colour called star, it is a secret worth keeping. The ground is sponge. You bounce everywhere. You, you dance through life like a Premier danseur noble a luck-soaked Latvian superstar, strong, unbound, dramatic. All this [...]

THE ICE :“What are you dreaming of?” :“The ice.” :“But you are on the ice.” :“I am thinking of the ice I will be on.” :“We are standing on the ice right now, facing each other. We are on the ice touching lips, we are squinting out at sails that move as if on a track.” :“I only know that we have not fallen through.” :“What are you dreaming of?” :“The ice.” :“But you just dreamt of ice.” :“That was a different ice. This time we are indoors. The light is blue in that underwater way. The sadness is dimmed, and at the end of the day, you are fetching.” “What are we looking for?” :“I can’t remember.” :“What are you dreaming of?” :“The ice.” :“But we are indoors. Blue light, et cetera.” :“No, we are standing at the edge where the ice breaks against the sand, triumphant.” :“Breaks what?” [...]

Contrapuntal By Christopher Kondrich Parlor Press, 2012 ISBN 978-1602353671 Music, for being such a well-diffused cultural product, can be challenging to adequately write about. Like many creative disciplines, it commands its own lexicon and sits atop a tall barrier of entry. But this shouldn’t preclude anyone who wants to get hip-deep; we’ve all experienced music to some degree and should attempt to verbalize our reactions to its influence. Then you have folks like Christopher Kondrich, a poet who is clearly comfortable writing through the influence of music in his latest collection, Contrapuntal. The first instinct one might have with a book titled after the musical theoretical concept of counterpoint (two or more melodies moving with respect to each other), is to look for counterpoint’s influence on the book’s metrical and sonic aspects. Such an approach would not be a mistake, but Contrapuntal is more than a book of poems informed [...]

1. What makes a work of art satisfying? What is the difference between a poem we call mawkish, or overly sentimental, and a poem that carries the right amount of sentimentality and wit? How do we judge or evaluate these questions of taste? Aside from all the contentious feelings that immediately crop up when considering questions of taste – questions of taste are elitist, say, or only matters relevant to a leisured bourgeoisie – how do we evaluate a work of art? What criteria do we invoke? Is there such criteria? Charles Wegner writes, “Fundamentally, human beings are capable of aesthetic satisfaction because they are intelligent, imaginative, active, and percipient beings, not because they are educated, ‘cultured,’ leisured, or ‘artistic.’ If we can at least hesitantly agree with this proposition, then we might ask, What is it about a poem, a work of art, or a piece of music, that [...]

(after the monoprint by Michael Donnelly) Stars empty themselves – no show tonight. The Bowl opens its mouth and your teeth shudder. The ground contracts with cold: you’re trembling. Your head falls against the steel cables the lights go off in Government house. Far above you the Arts Centre spire extends its white finger into the night: gulls circle crying holy holy holy Down here a Leunig festival of weeping alone in the dark while Government house is sleeping. Stars get nailed to the night sky. You take the silence for an answer. This poem was written for The Disappearing, an app that (literally) explores poetry and place, which you Cathy Altmann is a Melbourne poet, teacher and musician. Her poetry has been published on Melbourne’s trains and in numerous journals and anthologies and is now a part of The Red Room Company’s Disappearing App. Cathy has read and played [...]

What Night Knows After Gaugin’s Le Cheval Blanc Some women ride horses. Some women are horses. Some horses are wolves who have lost their teeth and are ridden by women. Some wolves are horses ridden wild with dreams. Some women are dreams in the shape of horses free of the ghost of wolves. Some ghosts are women, their bent air a kind of riding. Some women ride dreams and bend the air, freeing the ghosts and the wolves, and the horses. ___________________________________________________________ Lauren K. Alleyne is a native of Trinidad and Tobago. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Cornell University, and is currently the Poet-in-Residence and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Dubuque. Alleyne is a Cave Canem graduate, whose work has been awarded prizes such as the 2010 Small Axe Literary prize, the 2003 Atlantic Monthly Student Poetry Prize, the Robert [...]

Life’s a Beach Life is waves. Waves create a craving for Dr. Pepper, something sweet to cut salty somersaults that get water in yr inner ear, and deft kelp evasion, and hours and hours coaxing friends further in but they never want to go out as far as you– past the point of wave-beaten, past the point of even being subject to waves, where the huddled ocean cups you and blows like soup. Some diagnoses require a different type of medicine, like shots of expensive silver tequila reminiscent of beach sand or smooth pie crust like a desert island which may just be the proven psychological tide of butter, but what’s the difference? Life is waves. In terms of spectral dynamics, and guitar riffs, and ambulance sirens and your “type” of guy, which is basically any pipe cleaner over 6’2– who all eventually say move on– and especially with tattoo [...]

The Eggshell Parade brings you a reading and interview from poet Kelli Russell Agodon.

Now that we have mapped the Ocean it is just so much more difficult for the boats to disappear. Even so, our phones died in tandem that first night, we smashed the bottle neck open against the sun spoiled steel of the barge. And the wine poured freely as all of those rivers, now redirected, might swarm to one arcane place. Today I would notice that this swing bridge to nowhere was not dismantled; that the asphalt tearing pines were left to tower the valley. Their spiny fingers leaning in and covering invisible mouths, as if to promise a secret well kept. Only then, I had never dreamed of being hidden by the cover of another body so completely – the freeway above seemed to silence itself. We will never go missing in the city but your hand on my leg felt close enough to a great endeavour that it [...]

Ornithology Lesson First thing we should do/if we see each other again is to make/a cage of our bodies —Nick Flynn, forgetting something 1. You find me pirouetting slow in a tent before an exaltation of men, dim lights, the scent of refuse and popcorn and tobacco spit, the clink of coins changing hands, the lure of something both sordid and sanctified. 2. You follow me everywhere. Where do you sleep? I show you my thatch of straw. What do you eat? I serve you cave crickets and potato bugs. How do you bathe? We stand outside for an entire rain leaping into puddles. Why are the feathers on your throat red? I say that is only for my mate to know. How would your mate know? My mate would not have to ask. 3. Weary of your eyes, I introduce you to Python Woman. Her grip, you mention, is [...]

There are certain (uncertain) propositions that every poet must eventually encounter, if only to embrace or abandon. They are not propositions so much as ways of being, lifestyles; and, like the way one walks, or talks, or just stands in the rain, they are ineluctably intimate parts of ourselves, hence not propositions so much as self-images. What kind of poet do you want to be (I imagine a Bellovian unctuous trickster asking)? What kind of poet are you? “Oh, she’s an angry poet,” they say, or, “The woman is far too sentimental for my tastes.” These are cursory judgments, but some kind of truths are lodged in even the most mawkish and unhelpful of sentiments. So let’s begin at the beginning. A poem is a stance, a temperament, a philosophy, an ontologically practical, (if impractical), modus operandi. A vision – not necessarily metaphysical, but a way of looking at things [...]

You sit down to write a report entitled, “How is it possible for one person to kill another?” An hour later you wander off into the streets, leaving a blank page pocked with dark nothings. You see people cover coughs, remove glasses, wave goodbyes, adjust headsets, thumb mobiles, stub out cigarettes and arrange hair in ways that suggest intimate worlds and private moments. Almost every action unaware, an unnoticed use of the hands. You wonder how many more steps in the direction of unconsciousness would be required for one of those pairs of hands to be raised against another. You fall into the hole between the hand and the heart and stay there because it is easier than answering such questions. Australian born Richard James Allen has published nine books as a poet, fiction, performance writer and editor, most recently The Kamikaze Mind (Brandl & Schlesinger). His writing has appeared [...]

Massachusetts writers hold a great position of influence in American writing. Some of this is just a matter of timing: Massachusetts had a kind of head start in fostering talent, and such advantages inevitably become influence (“whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance”). But perhaps it’s better not to speak of “influence”; instead, I would claim that Bradstreet divined in the landscape images and structures of being that other American writers would discover and explore. After pondering the act of contemplation, Bradstreet retells the first murder. Cain is depicted as the definitively anti-Christ figure, a cursed newborn enthroned in the lap of Eve (contra images of the theotokos): Here sits our grandame in retired place, And in her lap her bloody Cain new-born; The weeping imp oft looks her in the face, Bewails his unknown hap and fate forlorn; Stanza 15 tells the story [...]