WOW!
The inimitably brilliant, insightful, and sensitive Daniel Paul Marshall has written a gorgeous review of my new chapbook, The Death’s-Head’s Testament! Please take a look, and consider pre-ordering a copy for just $6.50 each!
humanity
Pre-Publication Order Link to Robert Okaji’s New Chapbook
Our favorite poet, Robert Okaji, is truly at his finest in this “luminous” collection! Order his must-read chapbook today!
The publication date for I Have a Bird to Whistle (7 Palinodes) is February 25, and Luminous Press is currently offering copies for $7.50, shipping included, to U.S. addresses, through the 24th. Unfortunately, Luminous doesn’t ship internationally, but I will take care of those orders myself.
Order link for U.S. shipping addresses.
Contact me at aBirdtoWhistle@yahoo.com for orders to be shipped outside the U.S.
Painted Chickens
Painted Chickens
Twenty years ago
I received a birthday gift
from a close college buddy-slash-sometime lover
(What on earth were we thinking?).
Back then, our past was already in the past
& twenty-four was already not young.
He gave me a coffee mug
covered in chickens—
yes, painted chickens—
three plump specimens posed around the outside,
& one that looks like an index finger
with an eye, a comb, a beak, & a wattle,
slapped onto the bottom.
How, I can’t fathom,
but my friend knew that those chickens
with their orange-red, expressionistic bodies
would be a boat-floater for me—
the one time I had slept with him
had been an epic shipwreck,
with a silent drive to the airport in its wake;
on the way, we choked down pancakes,
& I stifled sobs in my coffee,
averting my eyes
from the helpless horror in his.
I then flew off into the wild, wide sky,
bewildered, drowning.
Somehow, for years to come,
his southern gentlemanly charms
still served to allure:
he kept his promise to write
& took pains to catalogue for me
the details of his worldly escapades
& various, accompanying sexual conquests,
always making sure to emphasize
the ways in which they were hot for him,
so as to prove those trysts’ relative rightness.
Then, years later, for my birthday,
came the unexplainably gratifying
chicken cup.
Still burning hot
& feathered in their chili-pepper red,
royal purple & verdant green cloaks,
my static & impossibly happy
aphrodisiac chickens
blush like lovers on a Grecian urn;
clucking, urgent.
My southern gent,
now so long ago flown from this callous coop,
wooed another & had his own brood,
as, in due course, did I,
but the mug, no worse for wear, remains
a spectacular feature—
like a bright birthday piñata
(with its promise of sweet reward)—
of my sacred morning ritual.
These chickens,
still ecstatically surprised,
letting out unabashed, open-beaked caterwauls,
adorn my most aged & prized coffee mug;
a vessel, perfectly-sized,
it cups its contents so adoringly,
fiercely,
like an egg enveloping its cache of gold,
as I take privileged sips.
The big chicken on the left
might actually be a rooster,
& that one on the bottom,
a middle finger.
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
“Painted Chickens” appears in my new chapbook, The Death’s-Head’s Testament, scheduled for release in March 2019. If you like what you’ve seen so far, please take advantage of Main Street Rag Publishing Company’s fantastic pre-order sales offer of $6.50 per copy while it lasts, and feel great about your generous support of this enormously grateful poet!
Place your order HERE today!
Poem Up at Songs of Eretz Poetry Review!
My poem, “Salt,” (just scroll down) is live at the Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, the “love” issue, just in time for Valentine’s Day! Many thanks to editors Steve Gordon and Terri Lynn Cummings for sensitively engaging with and selecting this piece for publication.
To the Dead White-Throated Sparrow
“To the Dead White-Throated Sparrow” appears in my new chapbook forthcoming in March from Main Street Rag: The Death’s-Head’s Testament<<Available here for pre-order purchase for the fantastic price of $6.50/copy!
To the Dead White-Throated Sparrow
_____in my driveway:
Would you at least do me the courtesy
of an explanation?
What’s with your belly-mound-
cenotaph-arisen-from-the-stony-gloom
spiel? And why
this exquisite bundle of yours,
with its still-tender russets
folded in the unbounded repose
of a napping cherub,
as if you didn’t believe
you were still reaching for the clouds?
_____I mean,
was your plump little belly’s
sky tribute supposed to un-stone the gloom
underfoot (as if
your heavenward-splayed
finger-knobs, all ruddy-bottomed
like a napping cherub,
never knew their very purpose
was reaching for the clouds)?
The spectacle of your tiny black
lids pressed shut in sudden,
brutal resignation to croaking
_____underfoot (even
consecrated by such skyward-clasping,
ruddy-bottomed branchlessness)
hardly passes for
transubstantiation… Why package
a fully-intact cadaver’s senselessness in
the spectacle of black-faced
brutality’s sudden,
penitent resignation to permanent blindness
for stealing a glimpse
of the sun? Besides, adaptive
hydrophobia á la iridescent feather-sheath
_____hardly passes for
transubstantiation… Why package
a fully-intact cadaver’s senselessness in
this exquisite bundle of yours,
with its still-tender russets
folded in the unbounded repose
of a dead sun-god, as if iridescence
were designed expressly for
stealing a glimpse of the afterlife
in my driveway?
All right, buddy, just do me this one favor:
Spare me, would you?
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
“To the Dead White-Throated Sparrow” was first published in slightly different form in Underfoot Poetry. Thank you to editors Daniel Paul Marshall and Time Miller — both fabulous poets in their own right! — for selecting this piece.
On Robert Okaji’s I Have a Bird to Whistle
I had the great honor and privilege of previewing and writing the following blurb for the back cover of Robert Okaji’s newest chapbook, I Have a Bird to Whistle (Luminous Press):
In I Have a Bird to Whistle, Robert Okaji masterfully constructs a universe of incisively beautiful sensory observations, in which the poet lives at the crux—owns and revels in the “life energy” of the “liminal”—between “unshuttered” stimuli and the “concealed” truth of existence. Here, where every ray of light shed on an otherwise “transitory” moment celebrates the gift of consciousness, and every deviation from expectation substantiates the self-actualizing force of human will, the language of poetry—of colors, sounds, and symbols—circumscribes our very being, as it drives our search for meaning. As nuanced as they are bold and delectable, these poems are utterly human, and utterly divine!
– Stephanie L. Harper, author of This Being Done and The Death’s-Head’s Testament.
In short, this is a reading experience like no other, that you simply don’t want to miss!
U.S. Residents can purchase I Have a Bird to Whistle HERE for the fantastic price of $7.50/copy, shipping included. Non-U.S. purchasers can order directly from Robert by emailing aBirdtoWhistle@yahoo.com.
Concerning the Delay of My Self-Immolation
Concerning the Delay of My Self-Immolation
“Ich kenne nichts Ärmeres
Unter der Sonn’, als euch Götter!”
_______________~ J. W. von Goethe’s “Prometheus”
when i sacrifice myself
as a gift to my fellow humans
i promise it will be for nothing
so hackneyed as to protest
some hypoxic septuagenarian
hunched on a mountaintop
mistaking every garish tendril
to wisp from his head
for a well-honed lightning bolt
not that i imagine
there’s any portion of my no-longer-
combustible flesh i might set
upon the balance that could be
tendered for passage to Elysium
but you can believe i’d pluck my own eyes
from their conceding sockets send
the fabrics from my padded scaffold back
to China & traipse forever a blind
naked-as-a-mole-rat gnome in the garden of
unscented flowers if the stygian prophecies
were to divine any semblance of purpose
in chaining my corpse to the cliff face
& though these desiccating seasons
have yet to assemble
me into fuel for Helios’ pyre
if ever my splitting spurs should cease
to cry out dragon’s blood
i will crescendo
my twilight’s fury on the horizon—
my flames will soar
like an eagle on a Titan’s breath
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
“Concerning the Delay of My Self-Immolation” made its debut appearance in Robert Penick’s fabulous literary journal, Ristau: A Journal of Being, in January 2019. It also appears in my new chapbook, The Death’s-Head’s Testament, scheduled for release in March 2019! Please check out sample poems and early praise for this collection on my Author Page at Main Street Rag, and consider purchasing a copy at the terrific limited-time discount of $6.50!
I wish I had words to express how much your support of my work means to me. Please just enjoy the poems, and know that I’m immensely grateful!
Poem up at Eclectica!
I’m honored that my poem, “Family Road Trip” was published by Eclectica journal. I’m grateful to editors Jen Finstrom and Evan Richards for selecting this piece to help their fantastic publication kick off its 23rd year online!
Legacy
Legacy
i’m no kind of Ishmael to expound
some great protagonist’s wayward saga,
& haven’t the slightest inkling of other
women’s misfortunes, nor do i know
if i’m even justified in such grief over a life
squandered on an endless vigil’s cries of
who sees me now? & now? & now?
who, besides this mirror i face,
knows my bulging litany of failures,
my spurious assumption of a character i detest?
i was born lacking the power
to reason my way out of this gravitational
force i’ve abhorred since youth, & which
now condemns me to lug about my globed
satellites—
to bear these adjuncts’ fleshy heft, as if I were
still umbilically moored to the gangway by my own
murdered albatross—
each a whale of white with its vacant eye
downcast like a faded damask rose.
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
“Legacy” made its debut appearance in Underfoot Poetry, and is the opening poem of my forthcoming chapbook collection, The Death’s-Head’s Testament, scheduled for release from Main Street Rag in March 2019, and available for advance orders NOW at a substantial discount ($6.50 per copy!). Please consider purchasing a copy of my book (click link above), and/or sharing my author page with your online communities to help get the word out! I am forever grateful for all of your support of my work!
__________cover photo by Matthew Harper
Psychedelic
Psychedelic
because suddenly you see
the whole universe is yet to be
uncovered you lift
the lid & add precisely one and a half
teaspoons of photons to the black vat
of atoms nattering themselves into a froth—
& because with the heat they generate
you could boil
an egg (such as say
the calcium-bound alimentary plasma
of an embryonic chicken
or even one of the kiln-fired variety
that you might decide to glaze
with a tie-dye motif from the invisible
light spectrum cajoling it to appear
indiscriminate)—
the dense infinity of which tricks
your brain into believing the secret
of simmering
in a wood-smoke-redolent
reduction of souls
(the one that tastes like honey is your very own)
that makes you this cobalt curl of steam
finally climbing into the identity you’ve been
fancying for all eternity:
a heart thrumming crimson
trumpet-flowers
& indigo buntings
born knowing meaning
is forged in the vacuum
of a dragon’s breath
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
Please take a moment to check out my author page at Main Street Rag for my newest chapbook, The Death’s-Head’s Testament, scheduled for release in March 2019, and available now for advance orders at $6.50 per copy!
SLHARPERPOETRY 