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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My poem, “Travel by Starlight,” which just so happens to be the inspiration behind my original illustration serving as the banner on this blog (above), is live at Rootstalk Magazine, an online publication published in conjunction with the Center for Prairie Studies at my alma mater, Grinnell College in Grinnell, IA. Thank you so much to editor Mark Baechtel for accepting this piece!
For E9, Born December 31, 2016
1.
Everything
must first have been
a nameless billowing
in the silent house
of before until its voice
yolk-forged could wrest
a pyroclastic mouth
sufficient to speak birth’s
dialect of brokenness
2.
I watched the possibility of you
cradled sixty feet high in a Slash Pine
become a five-day-old
white fluff-bundle of spunk
& open-beaked ferocity You
command the ripping impulse
that strips off the fish’s silver skin
midriff to tail with one swift
grip & flexion exposing
the host’s fleshy glisten
of lipid-pink life to be flaked
& held to your tiny maw’s tip
3.
Before this feeding I think
nothing had yet been born
whose name was Tenderness—
no one to bring this warmth
of tastes & swallows growing ever
heavier in your belly & on your lids
to bear you to your imperative sleep:
Dream Little One in the haven
of your father’s stalwart breast!
Dream of wings outstretched
on the azure’s salt-breath!
“Live Feed from the SW Florida Eagle Cam” was published in The Ibis Head Review in December 2017, and appears in my chapbook, This Being Done, also available on Amazon.com.
I’d like to express my gratitude to Tim Miller for hosting my quirky (some might say, “Harperesque”) poems (along with 2 collaborations with the one and only Robert Okaji!) at his fabulous blog, Underfoot Poetry (<< read them here); to editor Daniel Paul Marshall for his professionalism and the distinct pleasure it has been working with him and getting to know him and his work; and last but not least, to Robert Okaji, for his friendship, mentorship, collaboration, humor and sensitivity, and all-around beautiful, generous soul.
This is neither a beginning
nor the prophecy of an ending
for beginnings & endings are lies
told to the once-living
it is not the exemplifying
of the aberrations the alchemists made
when they dethroned our Divine Queen
& transmuted her golden honey
into their iron pyrite philosophy
that left us to wither
inside our stunned husks
& so this is the emptying
of our errant devotion
to the denial of bodily hunger
the sanctified unbelieving
in fairytales of heavenly salvation
& it is the vital refilling
of infants’ gaping mouths
with earthly fortitude
& here now is the weeping
for our birth-story interred
with our long-dead mothers
who delivered us
& secured our velvety aboriginal flesh
to their warm breasts—
the saline unleashing
to purify our Logos
our will to creation our innate need
to manifest our god-selves
it is the recovering
of the Life that was severed from our psyches
when it was reduced to a Word
& uttered bereft of melody—
the unrepressed singing
Artemis awake from her slumber
beneath her ruined Temple in Ephesus
at last this is the extricating
of shame that made our tongues
untie us from our Mother’s holy earth
& swayed our ears to scorn her winged songs
even as she kept flying back to us
ever thick-limbed & fragrant
with nourishment from lavender blooms
solely that we should swell in our birthing cells
gorged on her royal jelly
This poem is my body
embryonic translucent
distended with new hope
it is my luminous black eyes
grown huge with their memory
of who I am
I’m thinking a lot today about the Divine Mother’s tireless devotion to her children. Happy Mother’s Day!
“Prologue to My Birth” was published in the collection, International Poetry Month 2017, curated by Bonnie McClellan, and appears in my chapbook, This Being Done, available now for order from Finishing Line Press, scheduled to ship in June 2018.
SLHARPERPOETRY 