“Woolly Howl” by Cameren Harper
My poem “Awakening” is now live in issue 17 of the fabulous online journal, Panoply! I’m immensely grateful to editors Jeff Santosuosso, Andrea Walker, and Ryn Holmes for selecting this piece, and for their passion and impeccable professionalism as promoters of poetry and Poet-kind!
Thank you to Editor in Chief Nadia Gerassimenko for nominating my poem “Risen” for a Pushcart Prize and including it in her tour de force (and fun and interactive!) compilation of poetry, short prose, visual art, and other mixed-media creations that is issue 7 of Moonchild Magazine!
View in landscape on a tablet or computer screen to appreciate the full experience.
My poem “Citizen Tree” has found a home amongst some luminous writing in Issue 21 of Whale Road Review. Thank you editor Katie Manning for selecting this piece!
My poems “Letter to Bowers from the Pandemic’s Underbelly” and “Alabaster” are now live in issue 6 of the lovely poetry journal, As Above So Below*. Many thanks to editor Bethany Rivers for including these pieces in such a fantastic collection of poems exploring “liminal spaces.” My poems appear on pages 19 and 55. Oh, and you’ll find four pieces by one of our mutual favorite poets, my husband, Robert Okaji, appearing on both the first and last pages, as well as in between!
*As Above So Below uses the publishing program, issuu, which renders as a beautiful e-magazine. View it on your computer in full-screen mode for the most user-friendly experience.
Thank you to editor Tara Wheeler for selecting my poem, “Trace,” for inclusion in Dust Poetry’s gorgeous Portrait issue. I’m particularly touched by Tara’s heartfelt message of appreciation for the poetry community in her editor’s note for this issue. It means a great deal to me as a contributor to know how much the editor values the artists’ voices her publication represents. This is what it’s all about!
I’m also especially excited by the timing of this issue’s release, because it just so happens that I will be reading this poem to my husband-to-be in our (socially distanced…) marriage ceremony TOMORROW, September 25, 2020!
Answer
what element of the womb’s hush little goat
_____groomed your aptitude to bleat so sidling
your silken haunches up to me?
the way you press your distended
_____pintsized abdomen against my knee
& butt my outstretched hand
with your horn buds begging for the sun-
ripe shoots along the far side of the fence
_____brings me to a robust belief in need…
o bleating babe no I won’t leave
you before the cricket-song’s lull is in full swing
_____though the dusk is rushing in
to replace afternoon’s haze
& twilight’s adamant touch would usher me to the dark
of another sleep sorrowing signifiers for insufficiency
_____like the moon engorging
on the horizon weeps to streak the soft hills silver…
last night I dreamed a familiar dream
of my children when they were still young
in which there was never enough time & never enough help
to rise & feed so many all-too-realistic demands—
_____from the toting of two pajama’d bodies to the car
to park them in a driveway four houses away at the crux
of their convoluted breakfast ritual to rejections
_____in equal parts irrational & resolute of the given
dream-morning’s cereal offerings—
_____& still hope
to make it anywhere on time or at all…
what mother doesn’t dream of baby goats?
hear their cries in her mind as melodies & answer
in harmonic bleats?
hunger for sweet greens just out of reach?
bed down in warm hay beneath the starlight
bleeding through the barn’s worm-worn roof?
Thank you to the SELJ Editing Team for selecting “Answer” as one of ten finalist in SELJ’s 2020 Poetry Prize and including it in the beautiful 2020 issue! I’m grateful to editor Dave Essinger for his impeccable professionalism, and for making me feel like a welcome member of the SELJ community!
Please peruse the Slippery Elm Literary Journal website, and perhaps purchase a copy of this fantastic journal to support Findlay University’s students in editing and publishing. Please also consider entering SELJ’s annual Deanna Tulley Multimedia Prize, now open for submissions!
Many thanks to editor Renée Sigel of Literati Magazine for featuring my poems, “Rewording,” “Titanoboa cerrejonensis,” and “Ghazal of the Lost,” in the publication’s Portfolio Series of previously rejected poems. Yes, a majority of my poems that make it out into the world tend to experience a healthy dose of rejection before seeing the light of day, and I greatly appreciate that Renée saw fit to bring these three stragglers in out of the cold.
While “Ghazal of the Lost” was a cooperative child, Literati Magazine found the formatting of “Rewording” and “Titanoboa cerrejonensis” to be somewhat combative, so I’ll provide the texts as they should appear below:
Rewording
_____Your laugh is the child I never knew,
a promise kept nascent like a crocus
__________beneath a winter of detritus—
_____I never knew a crocus
could reword the daylight
__________with spring’s first mist.
_____How I’d wished the earth’s iron bellows
would recast the sky’s crimson artefacts
__________my lost will had smelted into slag,
_____until living through my bitterest nights
of seismic heartbeats weathered into stalagmites
__________finally tempered my breaths alive!
_____Now, their embers light my way
to the tenderness you well in your eyes:
_____Amassed like snowdrifts
the rising moon velvets in her white hush,
__________it is the naked quiet of us
rewording the daylight
_____into ash branches
__________lustered with dusk’s winter cloak;
_____a crocus sheltered in warm mulch
__________beneath the moonlit ice;
_____your laugh,
__________the child I never knew;
_____a promise kept
__________nascent in winter’s womb.
***
Titanoboa cerrejonensis
_____When this restrictive skin
of self-pity refuses to slough off
_____& relinquish its groaning contents my pain
sends me to my prehistoric depths—
_____sliding through my black encapsulated veins
with questions of utility & necessity forking my tongue
_____into a device primed for maximal receptivity
scouring the fossil record
_____for evidence of fortitude where I find you
fifty-eight million years ago
_____at the height of your dominion
in the Cerrejón Rain Forest in what is now
an arid sweep of Northern Colombia
_____There your legacy swims its secrets
into my stagnant heart transforms my
_____mudstone back into supple blood
& re-designs me in your magnificent image
_____that I may waggle my muscled girth
_into a forty-eight-foot-long series of esses
_____effortlessly conveyed upon the swamp’s
vast network of currents slip out
_____of my twisted anthropic pelvis
& encumbering limbs & vanquish
_____gravity’s inflammatory breath
_in the clutches of my cold unshakable coils
My poem “We Have Seen the Corn” is now live in Issue #27 of Riggwelter Press! I’m grateful to editor Jonathan Kinsman for selecting this piece, and honored to have my work bringing up the rear of this terrific collection of short prose and poetry.
(Switch into full-screen when you open the issuu file, and everything will come into beautiful focus!)
My sonnet, “Because I Said So,” is live at The Literary Nest.
Thank you Pratibha Kelapure for selecting this piece. “Because I Said So” was first drafted during the May 2017 Tupelo Press 30/30 project. I’m grateful to Clyde Long for sponsoring and providing the title for this poem, as it was a joy to compose!
My poem “Turkey Vulture” is live in Eclectica Magazine’s January/February 2020 issue as part of the journal’s recurring Word Poem Challenge feature. I’d like to thank poetry editor Evan Martin Richards for selecting this piece, and express my appreciation for Eclectica Magazine, in general, for being one of the longest-running online journals out there, and doing such great work to promote literature and literary kind!
