“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!
Cephalopod
I know how you tried to befuddle me
with that ten-legged head of yours—
how you thought you’d streak by
& ink me blind, but I see
how it is: I mean, once your penetrating-
obsidian eyes shone the ocean alive,
that cute little stunt of tucking back
your longest tentacles, as if you could
pass for being one of the girls, almost
like innocuous, trifling, bipedal me,
was glaringly obvious. I know your beak
was really poised from the start to strike—
to take my breath into your breath,
& crack open my sternum, & feast
on the still-thudding muscle inside me—
because motoring between my mere
two legs, primed to be torpedoed
with your mantle, until I tauten
like a caecum gorged on tiger prawns,
is the same jet-propulsion as yours
worked in reverse…
“Cephalopod” recently languished on a short list for an inordinate amount of time — poor guy — before ultimately being rejected, so I’ve just decided to share him!
My poem, “Psychedelic,” is enjoying some lovely company during this week’s installment of Poetry Wednesday at Prometheus Dreaming! Thank you to editor David van den Berg for selecting this piece.
Pressing into the Depths
of an old-growth oak grove on your search for virgin peat having naturally preemptively considered the human calcaneus poised on its subcutaneous fat pad (the sturdy lovechild as it were of evolution & bipedal ambulation); you go whole-soled knowing nature engenders no freaks & that the point of weight-bearing actually is to sink-spring to life your very own rooted upward mobility—to elapse your mossy quiet’s once upon a time into cantilevered boom to mushroom & split your bark like a seething green superhero (who leaves you in tatters) harden yourself new gnarls to gather lichens & ever after phosphoresce the midnight fog like a moonbeam striking your cast-off glass slipper
“Pressing into the Depths” was published in the November 2018 peaceCenterbooks anthology, The Larger Geometry: poems for peace, edited by d ellis phelps.
No muse per se whispers
infusions into my burning ear
not that it would be in my nature
to entice some demigoddess to swell
with lust hover about my head
& grace me with facility in the arts
such that I might woo hearts into believing
in my sanctity (as if I’d ever assent
to some covetous little bitch’s attempts
to trademark my own voluptuous
intellect with her dousings of silvery
moonbeams & purple pixie dust)
which isn’t to say that no one ever garners my tribute
No of course not for there’s always been a certain monsieur:
Arnos namesake of the Neoliths’ river to move to flow
mounting pulse to culminating flutter
his flux of rapture & cruelty
rising like a god in me
“Tribute” was published in the Fall 2017 edition of Harbinger Asylum. Thank you to editor Dustin Pickering and guest-editor Z. M. Wise for selecting this piece.
Steph, poet, & Sydney, cattle dog extraordinaire!
Thank you so much to editor D. Ellis Phelps of Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press for hosting my poems, “Risen” and “Instead,” at formidableWoman, and for making me feel like a celebrity with her warm, insightful introduction!
Browse D.’s wonderful site here: Formidable Woman Sanctuary
Also, check out these terrific submissions opportunities here: Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press
“Instead” appears in my new chapbook, This Being Done, which will be available for pre-publication order TOMORROW, February 26, 2018, through April 27, 2018, at Finishing Line Press. I will post the link to order as soon as it goes live! Stay tuned for further announcements throughout the next couple of months!
My poem, “How to Be a Malacologist,” is live at Panoply.
Thanks so much to editor Jeff Santuososso for including my work in this terrific collection, and for your genuine and tireless support of poetry and poets.
To think that we see
them so often yet so rarely consider
how those piebald songbirds so at home
on a snow-scape in their portable parkas
are made of the exact same stuff we use
to fill up our electric sky & shocking
watermelon nylon winter coats which must be
designed expressly for us to go out there looking
ridiculous not to mention callous (clothed as it were
in outright exploitation)—is the thing I’m pondering
as I observe through the window a little house finch
all feathery & poofed with his flushed cheeks
flitting over the snowy patio pecking among the abandoned
bench-feet for invisible if not entirely non-existent
morsels & hawking an air of self-possession that is obvious
even to me in my current incapacitated state
As for whether the red-crowned
retina specialist who conducted my examination
was young &/or fetching the prospect was relatively murky
(the simultaneity of his brisk entrance with the climax
of my dilation expertly flourished by his robust clasping of my
hand had inspired my conjecture that he might’ve been both)
& you’d better believe all bets were off the very moment
the white-cloaked smeary hulk of him ambushed my defenseless
retinas with an impossibly aggressive radiant device
thus affording me the pivotal elucidation:
that a). the anomaly on my fundus autofluourescence images
is simply an unremarkable patch of variegated pigmentation
b). it was only natural to expect that the definition
of such a lexical wonder as variegated would elude the layperson
& c). I am indeed obliged by gratuitous pigeonholing
to take categorical offense
Not that I’m usually so bold
as to co-opt medical jargon but I’m pretty certain
variegated is the only word that could aptly
account for what’s right now comprising
the better part of my visual experience
as embodied by this polka-dotty
aberration also known as a scone
I resorted to purchasing in the hospital café
thus affording myself the pivotal illusion:
that a). I’m quite absorbed in an earnest task
while waiting here in the lobby for my ride
b). I wouldn’t otherwise be averting
my freakish black gaze from passersby
& c). I’m the kind of person
who always smiles at everyone as if to say
I accept you for who you are no matter what…
From its orange piquancy
I’ve gathered that the scone’s dark splotches must
be cranberries—however vainly their vaguely moist
sweet-tang serves to redeem their crumbly substrate’s
alleged alimentary function
Still the finch remains
staunchly committed to my functional blindness
as if by sheer force of his impending command
its concomitant scone-silage would transcend
the glass & sift to the frozen ground
It may not surprise you to learn that I wrote this poem in January 2017, while brooding over a certain sociopolitical debacle. This is its first exposure to the light of day…
born a bastard
i was cast
on a doorstep of nobles & founded
in a mold of changing hands
& intrigue…
As a child I so loved looking from the outside in
at frozen images portraying quaint examples
of how time took longer
for folks in the olden days…
What cause did I provision for my own death
to be ordered & carried out? Which of my features
amounted to monstrosity? My prescience to forewarn your
Lycian forebears of cataclysmic storms & volcanic eruptions? (…)
SLHARPERPOETRY 