Yes, my friends, this is a thing that’s happening IRL!
Please join me in expressing my heartfelt thanks to The Iowa Review editors Lynne Nugent and Jen Frantz for selecting my poems, “Pelvic Organ Prolapse” (photo included below) and “The Shape of Unsayable,” for publication in TIR’s issue 54.1 (spring 2024). I’ll post an update when the link to order copies of this issue is available.
The 2023 issue of Caesura: objects in the mirror is a print publication of Poetry Center San Jose.
Thank you all for reading!
The Hole
twinge
above your right brow
in a mirror that dusky spot
the hole
acute scalene deep
about an inch in height
just above your right eyeball
loosened from its socket
oozing blood
from cracks around your lids
a clear view
to the back of your skull—
the bone is floodlit like a surgical theater
accentuating the osseous fabric’s
orderly interweaving of dark
green lettuce leaves
with your head’s sealed fissures
it makes no sense
but to accept it—
your neighbor who constantly drops by
unannounced needs you again
to watch her kids tomorrow afternoon
“for just a few hours”
sure not a problem
she’ll be inviting you to her wedding this summer
“third time’s the charm”
how nice
a flash
on the porcelain screen
(where your brain should be)
previews the upcoming afternoon—
gazebo with picnic tables
at the breezy confluence
of the Columbia & Willamette rivers
daylight encasing you in the naked
mole-rat’s skin you’d mistaken
for a modest-pink sundress
siphoning the cash bar’s cut-rate Riesling
as you try to make small-talk without thinking
about the cool tingle of exposed bone
above your right brow
flora slick in plasma creeping out—
which puts extra strain on the wobbly eyeball…
My poem, “Dear Autocorrect,” was published last month on Five South’s weekly humor column, One for the Road. I’m grateful to editor Kristen Simental and the Five South team for featuring this piece (accompanied by a lovely introduction and original artwork, no less!). I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed, uh, letting it write itself! 😉
Special thanks also goes to Jazz Jaeschke for initially sponsoring (and inspiring!) this poem during my husband Robert Okaji’s September 2021 fundraiser for Brick Street Poetry.
Photo by Treimehr at Morguefile.com
My poems “Come High Water” (80) and “Testament” (83) are now live in the Blades issue of Moss Puppy Magazine. I’d like to thank Founder and Editor in Chief Melissa Martini for selecting my work to be included in this inspiring collection of passion and artistry.
I’m pleased to share that my poem “I Unstop Myself”is now live at Monstering Magazine. Thank you to editor Kristen Tollan for selecting my little tribute to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself for publication alongside so many other inspiring women/women identifying voices.
Thanks for spreading the word, Bob! Slippery Elm LJ is truly top-notch!
Slippery Elm Literary Journal’s 2019 issue is now live in the Slippery Elm online archives. My poem “This Oak” appeared in the print issue. If you have a chance, take a look at SELJ‘s offerings and/or consider submitting a few poems or entering the 2021 Slippery Elm Prize competition, now open for submissions. Many thanks to the journal’s editorial team, and especially EIC Dave Essinger, whose professionalism and personal kindness place SELJ at the top of the ladder in the world of literary journals.
Though it is Written
that grace comes only by the way
of a primordial breath,
you know it to be no less
manifest for its taking of alternate routes,
as surely it finds you by the grasping-
of-an-implement way;
by the miraculous-
proximity-of-your-notebook-
with-Munch’s-iconic-Scream-
embossed-in-gold-on-the-cover-
to-your-waiting-for-this-morning’s-
nine-grained-slice-to-toast way;
as well as the letting-
your-hand-part-the-pages-
with-a-wake-of-coffee-stains-
because-you-opt-today-
to-imbibe-your-reflux-inducing-libation-
over-not-doing-so’s-throbbing-promise-
of-a-4:00-pm-migraine way;
not to mention the way
you habitually open
the blinds to another barely-lit dawn,
that grants you a glimpse of a Northern Flicker
scrabbling for purchase on the finch feeder
in a flapping blaze of belly, feathers,
& beaked seeds flung in ceremonious
presumption of some nearby female’s interest;
or the way you finally steal a breath—
which you need to steal
before your face re-stones itself
in the memory of those children
who were murdered
in yesterday’s mass shooting
in a Texas church,
for how else can you still hope?—
which delivers you to the way
your twelve-year-old Red Heeler
recruits what measure of her
brown-eyed vigilance she can muster
to shepherd this whole
bed-headed-faux-cheetah-printed-
heartsick-kitchen-calamity of you
past the counter-top-mounds of clutter,
through the ice age shadow
of your perdition,
& back to your beginning
when you were god,
& you were the word with god,
& you were the way.
“Though it is Written” first appeared (in slightly different form) in The Winnow Magazine in November 2019. When I first wrote this piece, I couldn’t imagine a more agonizing circumstance than that which had brought about the particular tragedy weighing so heavily on me at the time. Then came the year 2020. Though I haven’t yet processed some of the things we’ve collectively experienced and emerged from (with varying degrees of scarring) enough to approach them poetically, what I do know is that the way I once devised for myself to keep finding hope still applies.
Happy New Year 2021, my friends. I wish you all the ways that guide you in the year ahead to soul-sustaining beauty, light, and love.
Had you been capable of opening
your eyes you’d have seen
that the obvious upside
to my unique coalescence
of scaly-headed tail caprid skull
leonine belly & three belching maws
was my reliable prescience
to forewarn of cataclysm but
you never ceased to make monstrosity
your sticking point
Even your Lycean forbears’ stories
of the diaspora— of how my children’s
fetal cells drifted from my womb endured
the eons amidst the vessel & sinew landscapes
of aliens & were ultimately delivered
to their new craggy homeland beyond
the blood-brain cordon to spawn a nation
of discrete selves as rare & fierce as their maker—
have failed it seems to inspire
your affection…
Was the transgression of my seething
once upon a time beneath your collective
hunkering in the basalt’s depths
so heinous as to name me Anathema
so aberrant as to exonerate
your assassin’s sullying of Pegasus?
Though murder carapaces your shuddering
heads from my ash cloud’s descent
yet know this: your lost-wax fairytales
have no more tempered the face of who I am
than cast the specter from the dark
hell-fire you dream: that yet I am
“Chimera” was first published in Isacoustic* in May 2018. Thank you to editor and poet Barton Smock for selecting this piece for inclusion in Isacoustic* vol. the fourth.
I’m caught in a quagmire
of dirty dishes, dog-hair-
strewn & stained floors,
& generally ineffectual
functions of utility, where
the minutes are consumed,
one after the other, by my
heart’s double-time ticking
moving time backward. This
body frozen in the here & now
is not the same me as all the atoms
I am, retracing their steps to find
the self I was in that past life—
the one who recognized
younger-you from a photo—
whose every cell sears me
with lightning, as wildfire smoke
wells up like a tidal wave from
the seed of being & time,
exclaiming, He’s the One!
Sometimes, maybe once in a lifetime, a poem changes your life for the better… Robert Okaji’s “Letter to Harper…” was that poem for me!
Dear Stephanie: No one connects here, and no matter
how resolutely we trudge forward, ignoring spinal fusions
and attacking hearts, the line skips lightly ahead, mocking us,
I think, in that way only the ineffable may claim. Looking
out, I see a lone wren, clouds filtering the stars, and strands
of barbed wire looped like question marks around cedar
stumps, punctuating the day’s greeting. No answers there,
only more inquiries blanching under the sun. But this
is my febrile landscape, not your lush green headed by
gray. Nothing matters, or, everything’s imperative.
In this gnarled season I can’t tell which, although
the vulture ripping into a squirrel carcass on my
suburban front lawn tells me something ain’t quite
right. Full or empty, the glass is still a glass, despite
my propensity for seeking more, whether cava or beer
or yes, enlightenment. I…
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