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!
creative writing
Live Feed from the SW Florida Eagle Cam
Live Feed from the SW Florida Eagle Cam
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!
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
“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.
7 Poems Up at Underfoot Poetry!
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.
Prologue to My Birth
Prologue to My Birth
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
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
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.
Alabaster
Alabaster
I am a pink rose petal’s pale glow
black ash tamped in furrows
between the breaths of the living
& the droning of the dead
the dawn’s blush unfurling over sand dunes
& seagulls soaring on thermal spirits
of iodine salt & shellfish
& sometimes scattering in the wind
I can’t find where everything else ends & I begin
Now rising from the morning hush this cloud of me
speaks to the red tail hawk perched on a streetlamp
& tells her I’m fine because I’m still not sure
how to talk about not being fine
I am an instar trying to be
the clearest version of myself to sculpt
a final skin of lucent crystal
so that when you come to see my cinder eyes
glinting diamond dust I will be
the embered dusk bleeding into the sea
& you will know the truth of me
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
“Alabaster,” having first appeared in print in Sixfold magazine, winter 2014, is included in my new chapbook, This Being Done,
available now at Finishing Line Press until April 27, 2018, for pre-publication order. The number of orders received during this period will determine the print-run scheduled for release on June 22, 2018. I’m grateful for your timely orders to help my work take flight! RESERVE YOUR COPY HERE TODAY!
Lupercalia
Lupercalia
We probe into the distant wintry
rest of white oaks & umbrella pines
moonlit with longing to thrill
in the feral hesitant glints
that crack the black tourmaline cold
our eyes pursuing their penumbrae
until the brink of blindness reaching
for our bloodline of lost
infidel selves still bound
to the night’s crystalline tenors
As our illicit newborn brothers were
abandoned to the Tiber & delivered
keening for milk to their mongrel lives
we too were borne by a savage river
to a mother waiting on the Palatine shore
“Lupercalia” appears in my chapbook, This Being Done, which will be available for pre-sale purchase at Finishing Line Press, starting next week! Stay tuned for more announcements, including the order link on the Finishing Line Press website as soon as it goes live!
New poem up at Hellscape!
Thank you to editor Rhodes Thompson for publishing my poem, “Ars Wormetica,” in the inaugural issue of Hellscape, the literary brainchild of Grad Students in George Mason University’s MFA program. It’s an honor to be included!
Letter from the Other Side of Halfway
For Robert Okaji
Dear Bob: In one of my former incarnations
as a starving, family-less, twenty-something Grad
Student, well before the advent of emails & texting,
when handwritten sentiments on stationery were still
in vogue, I certainly sent my share of “Dear Bob Letters.”
The recipients thereof, on the whole a far cry from being
remotely “Bob-like,” included a number of real posers,
some of whom now strut & crow on Facebook like
the ancient, hoary roosters (read: cocks) they clearly are.
As for the others (more of them than you might imagine),
they’re all dead, several by their own hands, even—a stone-
cold statistic (the seeming synchronicity of which is tough
to ignore) I frequently grapple with, sorting through conjured,
a posteriori details & associated, surreal imagery by day, &
chasing after egotistical ghosts in my über-symbolic dreams
by night, always with the conviction that some message for me
yet lurks in the dry lakebeds & sunless recesses of the Nether,
a realm to which the tips of my toes & then some are no strangers.
The only window-treatment manning the threshold between
me & my secrets is a translucent-pink swath of chiffon,
which I’m afraid doesn’t leave much to the imagination—
so consider yourself warned, amico mio! Against the current
backdrop of imbecilic plutocrats, psychopaths on trains,
& every other persuasion under the sun, hardly to be tempered
by the incidental, decent soul, it would not take a discerning
eye long to know me better than I know myself, which is just
about the only thing I know anymore…
In my attempts to locate myself, I often look to nature—
these days, it’s among the imposing Sequoias we boast here
in the Northwest, along with the showy cottonwoods, as fertile
as they are indiscriminate, stripping off their seed-fluff every
chance they get, a prospect that doesn’t seem to bother
the scrub jays deigning to my level for a squawk now & then
before ascending to a higher branch. Whatever folks might say
about birds of a feather, well, after a number of my earnest stints
shadowing local hens— their distinct way of wearing those vibrant
petticoats tucked underneath their brown slickers, & their biting
commentary having seemed uniquely suited to the cold & rain—
I’ve yet to locate my flock, & the search has turned southeastward:
Taking a tip from the meadowlark, I veer for the high desert,
my flight path crossing the sagebrush-dotted, volcanic earth,
hoping I’ll soon look down & see you floating
in a sea of ten gallon hats, just beyond the convection
columns braced against the electric blue sky.
I don’t suppose your self-claimed exile looks anything
like I’ve imagined? It’s not with a small twinge of jealousy
that I seek consolation in your brand of solitude on the other
side of that horizon line; as exile, it would seem to me,
involves the condition of having at some point belonged
somewhere. Having spent a lifetime “standing out in my field,”
I’m not very handy at extrapolating any other kind of belonging,
& feel I ought to find out what I’ve been missing, here,
on my side of halfway.
So, I’ll be headed out past the Cascades & the swaggering
sage grouses of the eastern uplands, reaching for that horizon—
green seeping to red, “clouds feathering in” no further from us
than one step beyond our any given station—where you can be
sure I’ll always be no more than a step away from you, & ever
your honest friend, Stephanie.
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
“Letter from the Other Side of Halfway” was first drafted during the May 2017 Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, and though it has since undergone a few revisions, the sentiments it contains—and the friendship that continues to inspire them—have endured, for which I am immeasurably grateful.
Matthew in the Fountain
August 1999, age 14 months
In the spray’s scattering
of afternoon rays
you pass before the sun
a toddling pointed-toe satellite
eclipsing all
but its faint red ghost
Summer haloes you in sun-white down
mottling the concrete’s cool glisten
like a memory from the womb
Watching the world swim into focus
in your smart brown eyes
your round cheeks
flushing with the kisses of angels
showering from the sky I realize
in a shutter’s split-second
I’ve traversed eternity
My child you burst open my heart like the sun
bursts infinitely open each fountain drop
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
This poem appears in my chapbook, THIS BEING DONE, forthcoming with Finishing Line Press, someday (I’ve been hearing that they’re experiencing some delays…). The little cherub featured above, in one of the only decent photos I’ve ever taken in my life (in that the subject isn’t my own thumb, or some stranger’s butt), is my son, Matthew, who’s now 19 (oy!), and whose prowess as a photographer did not come from me. I’ve previously shared an example of his amazing work on the blog HERE.
My poem,”Tempted,” is up at Figroot Press…
My poem, “Tempted,” is now live at Figroot Press!
Many thanks to editor Tamara Franks for including this quirky (now, no-longer-lonely) piece — a sestina in the voice of a siren, page 19! — in Figroot’s first special themed issue, For My Lover, She is Fair: a Sappho Tribute, available for free download in pdf or purchase in print HERE!
SLHARPERPOETRY 