Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Tuesday poem #73 : Arielle Greenberg : Pastoral: Baking



You take all the goodliness:
            the flour from the flowering stalk
            the cocoa from the small dark bean
            the eggs from the laying hens
            the sugar cracked from the hard cane
            the salt and its licking

Put them in my bowl
and muddle

Afterward, I am shining with plant life
skin scratched to newness
flush with animal protein
in my throat
and hair
and os
and cheek
and cervix
and eyes

I am tilled and plowed and heated through
and I come out delicious


Three hours later, you muddle again, harder

That’s one of the things I like so much about you


Arielle Greenberg is co-author of Home/Birth: A Poemic; author of My Kafka Century and Given; and co-editor of three anthologies, including Gurlesque. She lives in Maine and teaches out of her home, in the Maine community, and in the Oregon State University-Cascades low residency MFA, and writes a column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Tuesday poem #72 : Tsering Wangmo Dhompa : Home



Rain was sorrow, when it came. Rain was what we waited for.
We imagined he was still drunk, or that he had a second family.
We knew he had skipped out of town when mother
did not rebuke us for singing about rivers. The gardening
tools became indoors what they could not be
in the dirt: bed for the baby, walking stick, and hammer.
Everything is here, we said, stacking empty boxes to build
a house that would still favor us in the morning. His letters promised,
he was on his way. We memorized words that corresponded
to particular stages of the imagined, we held back
from interpreting happiness as something real, like the oracle's trance.
We kept cool. We voted for names for this nation
of three. Lines of sweat ran down our calves at midday.
We looked into the sky, cursing, then begging, for him
to knock on our door. To make it even. We imitated
clouds, followed their path as they slid sideways across the sky
like turtles lazy in a pond. We grew up fast, far from home.


Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the author of three collections of poetry: My rice tastes like the lake, In the Absent Everyday and Rules of the House (all from Apogee Press, Berkeley). My rice tastes like the lake was a finalist for the Northern California Independent Bookseller’s Book of the Year Award for 2012.  Dhompa's first non-fiction book, A Home in Tibet was published by Penguin, India, in September 2013. She lives in San Francisco and is pursuing a PhD degree in Literature at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Tuesday poem #71 : Sarah de Leeuw : Outside, America



i
Once, slugging Kentucky Bourbon
from these impossibly
thin-walled clear plastic

glasses             4:13am in an LA
McDonalds’ parking lot

our knees touched.

Somewhere along
the Drive Thru curve.

Freeways evaporated.

ChevyFordHondaBuick
everything on four wheels
decomposed, a new
thick moss.

Satellites clapped for
every metal becoming fog.


ii
Then, somewhere in the vicinity
of four years and 31 weeks later.

I am alone now watching out
my living room window.

These two Flickers
land in the Engelmann Spruce
across the road.

If it weren’t for the three feet
of snow, they’d have landed
on my lawn, the damp
soil easier to pull insects from.

Watching me from the same
branch, mated for life.


Sarah de Leeuw is a creative writer and human geographer. A two-time recipient of a CBC Literary Prize for Creative Non-Fiction, she is the author of three books including Geographies of a Lover which, in 2013, won the Dorothy Livesay Award, a BC Book Prize granted annually to the best book of poetry by a BC author. With a PhD in cultural-historical geography from Queen’s University, de Leeuw is an associate professor in the Northern Medical Program at UNBC, the Faculty of Medicine at UBC, where she teaches and undertakes research in the areas of medical humanities and health inequalities. She holds an endowed research fellowship through The Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (the first in Northern British Columbia) and in 2007-2008 was a Fulbright Fellow with the University of Arizona. Her literary and academic work appears widely in journals, anthologies and textbooks. She lives in Prince George, British Columbia.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday, August 05, 2014

Tuesday poem #70 : Stan Rogal : WHEN THE NIGHT IS STILL



Siv Cedering Fox

            “But the angel of death is somewhere,
            watering my flowers”

Ever.  Ever.  Ever
between the light light & the dark dark
indeterminate dusk insinuates
          its juggled act of balls & breasts
performs its awed acrobatic
picture a stalked figure caught just so
not another tall cool glass of water
stood unaffected at the echoed edge
rather, a body wrapped ecstatic in pallid leotard
the back arched & (as if in the very throes) 
the head tossed back, the hair let down, the milky neck
exposed to whatever night shade
the tempered chest swollen
     slight; slightly
               barely nippling the fabric
arms are bent stems creeping toward filigree fingers
which unfurl in the shape of wings
a vase of narrow hips bone the sunk belly
the flat ass
the crotch images a narcissus bulb
struggling to surface
within this upset frieze
who would desire to slip its tight skin
is burned at both ends
below, a tattoo of hands grip the calves & root the legs
above, what might be taken for a black glove clapped
across the hungered mouth
          is a shadow leaned liquid from the flowered curtain
pouring itself either
                         into or out of
the petalled lips



Stan Rogal was born in the mythic city of Vancouver and now resides in concrete Toronto. His work has a appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Canada, the US and Europe. He is also the author of 19 books: 4 novels, 4 story and 11 poetry collections, though only a select few are aware of this fact. His latest book is a collection of short stories titled, Obsessions, with Leaping Lion Books. The poem(s) in Dusie are from a collection of poems and prose poems titled, "after words."

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan