Plight
Sorrow / is backed up at your border / It is another day in the life of the world / on its head / Sorrow and need / are lined up / and leaning against the line / you have drawn around yourself
-
-
Abecedarian September (or Better Than Carrots)
Ate so many zucchini this summer – my / garden was almost / Bursting with the glut of great, green / Canoes, yes, that huge, and (my / fault) largely forgotten in the shade of their
/ Dark leaves, prickled, palmate, / Enormous enough to conceal the / Fat vegetal weight until I stooped and saw and / Gathered them guiltily in, my kitchen counter / Heaped with these waiting torpedoes, waiting for / Ideas of
/ Just what I would make. -
Mary washes
It’s not written in the book and may just be my own vision / but perhaps every week or ten days until the end / his mother came and washed his tunic, / mended the small tears, / made Jesus wear an old, very soft, shift of his late father’s / while his tunic dried
-
Data centres that I trust
Libraries / librarians / books /
teachers / moms / grandmas /
scientists / laboratories / cells /
crows / forests / oceans / orcas /
research stations / kindergarten
classes / therapy sessions / your
brain / my brain / humanity -
Singing in church
Tone-deaf melody wanderer, / tin fiddle tenor, / soprano like a bandsaw, / rook’s croak smoker / hopping note to / note somewhere / beneath the staves, / alto next to me, her voice like cake
-
Urban garden
She tends tomatoes on her fire escape, / defying concrete with stubborn green hope. / Each morning, water can in hand, / she climbs three flights to meet her miracle.
-
Scratch
I rode with Grandma to church / in her clattery sedan. / guarding a tin of biscuits / I had watched her bake earlier. / We listened to a cassette / of Scourby narrating / the six days of creation / in mid-Atlantic drone.
-
Learning to breathe
Sometimes the world forgets to breathe, / so we quietly breathe for her; / we move the leaf blocking the light / from a tiny sapling of fir; / we hush as movements in the trees / cause rustling and the grass to stir; / allow fauna to roam in peace, / their peaceful footsteps soft and sure.
-
Words which are not
enough—despite our regrets / and longings—mound, swept together / like dead mayflies, brittle / with sorrow nearly / unspeakable. Where is solace / meant to settle, like dew? / A life shatters, its hunger / for wholeness hopefully / drifting toward Mystery,
-
Reading Luci Shaw’s last collection
In the introduction to her final poetry collection, Luci Shaw writes about the slow, winter growth of an amaryllis bulb on her kitchen windowsill. A little further on, she reflects on her own long life: “I can live only one day at a time, and my hope is to live that one day fully and…
-
Soulscape
Fog. Orphaned rocks.Cataclysmic breakage. Suppose you’re driving through flatland,pierced by three hulking islands of grim basalt,harsh as a diagnosis. And what of the heart, wincing, convicted perhaps,a lonely compulsion, exposed? Moving on, into the foothills,behold the brooding, aeonian glacier—all gougeand surge, as ifunderground stealth sheared,then shifted, vulnerable mass, rehoming the stones: erratics,we call them, earthen…
-
‘I knew I’d survive here’
I’m drawn toward poetry that is visceral, descriptive and accessible rather than academic. I was excited to discover this new collection by Vilma Blenman, which accomplishes all three. Like a filmmaker, Blenman pulls the reader into her scenes, so that we feel as though we are experiencing them first-hand. Blenman has lived her adult life…
