poetry blog

Bliss April loves a challenge, choosing to split the slab of winter-hardened earth with the silk tongue of a crocus. She casts the stiffened brooks as her fandango dancers. At first they crack and groan, call her the cruelest of taskmasters but April persists, persuades: the streams ripple, sequined and agile. For April even forgotten [...]

First Thaw This morning was the first time: all the snow that buried us receding, still in drifts piled high, crusted with ice and yet receding, slowly drawing back—abandoned cars revealed, crushed grass, the shattered road ice-slicked, salt-splashed, slush running downstream, breaking up over the drains, dissolving….All this time I thought the whole world lost, [...]

In many of the pieces I’ve turned in for a Creative Writing class, they’ve been returned with red ink underlining the first line, usually with comments like “This needs to have more impact” or “How does this draw in the reader?” Plus, there’s always one class period dedicated entirely to the crafting of the first [...]

THEthe Poetry and are teaming up to share poems across the oceans. This collaboration introduces new audiences to the works of emerging and established poets from America and Australia. Weekly installments of poems, interviews and artworks will celebrate poetic observations from Brooklyn to Sydney and places between. The Red Room Company is a not-for-profit poetry [...]

Pissing What part of life is in the weirdness spreading illimitably around what fits? At face level, as he stood there, glaucous light was caught in the clear plastic shower curtain. This light came from the sun by an obscure but direct path through the airshaft. Look at it! The body of the slender man [...]

A work of art is a problem It’s easy enough to read the thoughts of a newcomer: the one who will come without appointment remembering circles and maps of temperance. Down the avenue of swift and invisible nudes a thin, brittle demon the shade of an autumn leaf is seeking imperfections. Our prophets always speak [...]

To Women Waiting at the Gynecologist -Anarcha’s Ballad Deep inside this cabin, deeper still into the darkness arising like fumes, like odor of woman, broke, harnessed in a body, by the bodies of men who believe me animal, wild, and numb because my body be black, be able, be stank after childbirth, ruined, cast out [...]