Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Tuesday poem #204 : Sarah Fox : You’d Better Harness the Horse




It’s true, that to be better I did, I do, have to harness the horse. Rein in my grieving. The fruits of my trauma, rake them. Jar them. Why are emotional regulation idioms related to horses? Horses, when let to, run-fly to their muscles’ limits. What do they run from, in their imaginations? “I do” such a trigger I wish to fly past the limits of it.




Sarah Fox lives in NE Minneapolis, and is the author of Because Why and The First Flag, both published by Coffee House Press. She is a teacher, astrologer, worker, writer, placenta encapsulator, artist, resister, and a grandmother. Her chapbook INVISIBLE WIFE is newly out from above/ground press.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Tuesday poem #203 : Sara Renee Marshall : As Flight or Equinox



Barely alive (or standing) in the low grass of updates

Fort-nine deaths, feeding a future baby with my present breast

I’m told this is common; I am quiet, smudged grey amid racket

between neighborhood birds and the full tilt of quickening

What is the feeling of a trap without its trappings

The scale of sadness shrinks small as a sentence

Let us now leave tragedy and move to foolishness

where we can better file ourselves

on the planet of passion, bullet-red and apologizing after

Metaphorical light strikes. The mythical warrior can kill or rescue

The horn can gore or the laborer shoulders a wheel

And where in the sky is the mother disguised

as animal or brutalist, as flight or equinox or map

*

In this sequence, I am rooted in the land

Here, a distributor of gold pastures, here, inspector

of ponds. The harvest lover, a guardian of granaries

Still, TV shudders. A faint stream of dust and gas

spiraled arms and a glowing middle. Observed

by radio waves, sloughing solid memory at dawdling speed—

the black scowl of night seemed to rebuke me

My family is a pulse that can quit

Yet where should I go?

I can promise the full melt

of my golden fleece into a song to keep alive by

or lend us to a good wind

The word is a place to wander but never

be abandoned. In the word, not lucky

but sprawled on planks of an actual boat

From the moss, I think this is Washington

*

Note how little I periled

though my real arms tangle before you

Poor Penelope, too witnessed

Poor Jocasta

Yet I planned nothing, and considered nothing

I wake up sick about the beauty of Medea

whose bad fate will never breed a namesake

Blood: does it curdle? Can it spoil before birth?—

a candle guttering to waste in the socket

So often the child is the event, his mother, simple

in her limit, just breathing, just attending graves like a ghost

*

If I’m honest, the main mode of

communication is memory or maybe telepathy

networked with chicken wire

an electric and uneven ground

I speak to the city as a density or lush current

I can visit, step in and step out

If it’s beautiful, I’ve made it so

though I’ve often married a monolithic building

to my imagination, to its gilded cornice and inimitable difference

Something as common as a dwelling goes up while we sleep

We could use a great deal more frankness. For example:

it is both miraculous and mundane to build a person—

I departed on the strength of this outline

I sip a glance at the plants on the sill

and in these final days feel proud like an unglamorous emperor


Sara Renee Marshall comes from the Arizona desert and Colorado's high plains. She holds a degree in Political Science and an MFA in Poetry, both from University of Colorado. She is the author of a chapbook, Affectionately We Call This The House (Brave Men Press). Her writing has appeared in Interrupture, Octopus, jubilat, OmniVerse, Everyday Genius, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Sara is pursuing a PhD at University of Georgia. With Thomas and Rosa Bernadette, Sara lives, teaches, and writes in Athens, Ga.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Tuesday poem #202 : Sarah Dowling : from "Entering Sappho"



Because so soon as I see you—a cold sweat
spreads all over my body—it has stolen

all directions—a cold sweat pours
from my body—a confused buzzing noise

in my ears—a cold sweat floods me—
a cold sweat floods me, and I am

greener than grass—and then I feel like dying—
and a cold sweat gets on me—and close,

half-raised—I lie back down
in the grass—a subtle flame flowing

in my veins—and a man kisses your
knees—a cold sweat floods me—a trembling

seized me entirely—a subtle fire runs
in me, and faltering, a subtle fire starts

running under my skin—a subtle fire,
a tremor through me fully, and that

subtle, short fire is immediately under
my skin—it seems to me—




Sarah Dowling is the author of DOWN (Coach House, 2014) and Security Posture (Snare, 2009), which received the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She has also published a chapbook, Birds & Bees (TrollThread, 2012), and shorter works in numerous literary journals. Sarah's literary criticism appears in American Quarterly, Canadian Literature, GLQ, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Washington Bothell.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday, February 07, 2017

Tuesday poem #201 : CAConrad : Earth poem 8




your rapists were the last
to taste you in this world
their breath and
terror down
your neck
keeps me
up at night
but which
page of the bible says to
burn the faggot after
you force him to give
you your pleasure
each time I drink water dropped from clouds water they burned out of your body I cup my
hands to catch you
in the revenge dream I behead one of them
spell your name on my face with his blood
the other is begging as I choke him
his neck as soft as your neck
I pull him off his knees
check for tattoos
is it him
is it you
I miss you
I love you





CAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of eight books of poetry and essays, the latest ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books) is the winner of the 2015 Believer Magazine Book Award. He is a Pew Fellow and has also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Banff, and Ucross. For his books and details on the documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films, 2016), please visit http://CAConrad.blogspot.com

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan