I’m so pleased and proud to share this terrific review of THIS BEING DONE in Panoply! Many thanks to editor Jeff Santosuosso for his professional excellence and staunch support, and to Andrea Walker for her insightful engagement with and praise for my poems!
humanity
There is This
There is This
Portland, OR: May 27, 2017
On a trellis erected between
my west suburb neighborhood
& the nearest MAX station
the wisteria vines burgeon
overhead in a dusky-purple
cascade like a dessert wine
but yesterday while I was
out walking as the early evening
heat broke I noticed a sallow carpet
of petals fallen
in their waning since just
the previous day was now
ensconcing the concrete & already
bearing the heavy imprints—illumined
by the sun’s oblique indifference—
of commuters’ footfalls
& the tell-tale parallel furrows
of hipsters on skateboards
I saw black sugar ants scavenging
the secretions of the barely-dead
& felt a sour twist of grief
over that chapter unfolding underfoot
of the inevitability I understand
to be inherent in all that is
as dictated by the rule of reason
which in turn instructs
the Hawkmoth’s impassioned
twilit plummets into a streetlamp’s halo—
the Death’s-Head’s testament to the light
by which darkness must be defined
I’ll admit to being fickle—a variable
ally of predators & prey alike—
as I’m no less liable to marvel
at the grit of a barn cat stalking a fat vole
(& then to cheer at the rodent’s brief death-throes squeak!)
than I am to release a breathless prayer into the wind
for a crab scuttling frantically ocean-ward
in the shadow of a whimbrel
Steely prudence requires
our acceptance of tragic ends for some
as they are said to ensure the greater
endurance of the whole & all of us know—
having learned since earliest childhood
some version of the proverbial
to every thing there is a season
& a time to every purpose under heaven—
that the sun’s descent into the Pacific
beckons the moon’s rise to its vigil
that the ardent frog’s first chirps at dusk
will ring into a night of river-song
& that the raccoons’ kits will always
endure December’s snowfalls
cloistered in their hollows
But the lesson yesterday scrawled
on a sick-sweet banner of dying
wisteria unfurled over a city
I no longer recognize
is a new black codicil
rained down from the heavens
in which teenage girls are menaced
& the throats of their intercessors are slashed
during rush hour on a train
There is no season
no time
& no poem to assuage
such unnatural waning
There is only this
futile transit of hours
to successive hours—
this exodus
of blood from its native heart
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
It’s been one year and one day since Taliesin Namkai-Meche and Ricky Best were murdered, and Micah Fletcher narrowly escaped with his life, on a MAX train in Portland, Oregon. Let Memorial Day be a day to revere their heroic stand against the vile inhumanity of racially-motivated hatred; and let us every day be a heart that remembers and strives to be worthy of their precious sacrifice.
“There is This” was first drafted during the May 2017 Tupelo Press 30/30 challenge, as I was grappling with my initial shock and grief upon first learning of this tragedy. It was subsequently published in the Fall 2017 edition of Harbinger Asylum, edited by Z. M. Wise.
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.
An Elegy for Birds & Bees
“Lavender Kiss,” by Matthew Harper
An Elegy for Birds & Bees
“When a woman pretends to press her life down into a nice, tidy little package, all she accomplishes is spring-loading all her vital energy down into shadow. ‘Fine. I’m fine,’ such a woman says… Then one day, we hear she has taken up with a piccolo player and has run off to Tippicanoe (sic) to be a pool hall queen…” Clarissa Pinkola Estés
over & over in habitual drone
i repeat a phrase in my mind that no one knows i say
because i have not told
i am saying i’m done
but this being done
is how i know i will never be done
though my climbing son
a speck eighty feet high in a skyline of swaying cedars
can heft the storm clouds away
from his own silvery horizon
& my seeking daughter
has tenacity enough without me
to prize out four leaf clovers
from speciously green reaches
_____but i will never release
this breath of finality that i keep
choked in my throat behind earnest songs for my children
no & i will swallow the rising bile
when the Northern Flicker perches
on our aluminum chimney top puffed-up
so proud in those marrow-less bones
of his impervious skull’s clever territorial ricocheting
being done happened
within my own sinew-lined pelvis
the cracked bowl
filled drained & refilled
with meticulously rich essences
long after anything living had been fed
the relentlessly heavy gnawing
red slough of losing myself
to nothing for nothing
frightened me
_____& so i had the offending flesh cut out
the fossilized rind that was left is now locked
with its un-told stories
beneath eons of hardened sediments
this being done happens in spring
while i am driving alone
it happens quickly
in instants of lapsed attention
in overzealous moments of stony apathy
when windshield wipers stick unexpectedly
or when sudden pink shafts of evening sun
transmute newborn lambs bucking
for tender grass & mother’s milk
into silhouettes haunting the roadside
_____the being done
is all these countless fleeting deaths
i tear into strips soak in chewed glue
& fashion together to house myself
in a prodigal crinkled purgatorial prune
these tiny stinging imprudent suicides
should all be spirited away from their haughty blooms
& borne into the ancient hive
clutched industriously
to the undersides of fuzzy exoskeletons
_____there my secret greedy orchestrations
would become coded in sacred routines
my life programmed in dance
& propagated by ecstatic waggles & fastidious figure eights
to a crescendo of communal comprehension
of the one seminal purpose
of the being done that shall be
done at all costs
the Queen’s Royal Jelly must be
sealed with wax in her hexagonal vaults
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
“An Elegy for Birds & Bees” first appeared in the 2015 edition of Slippery Elm Literary Journal — thank you editor Dave Essinger for your gracious and validating support of my work! — and is the title poem of my new chapbook, This Being Done, available NOW for order at Finishing Line Press, and scheduled for release in June 2018. For more insight into this piece’s inception and the role it played in informing the collection as a whole, check out my recent Q&A with Robert Okaji.
My heartfelt gratitude goes out to everyone for your investment in (as well as your abiding engagement with and enthusiasm for) my work. It truly means the world to me.
In Response to My 13 Year-Old Daughter’s Letter
Cameren at age 4, taken Mother’s Day 2005
In Response to My 13 Year-Old Daughter’s Letter
Apologize? For regretting your birth?
That the white dove of sarcasm
has officially fledged from your belly
alit on the canopy & uncaged its crystal trill
comes to me as no surprise
But neither of us could have foreseen the power
your brooding would conceive of pencil & ire
before the moment you spat out crumpled & hand delivered
my saltwater baptism
Your own tears now dried for hours blaze for me
from the gold heart in your gray-green eyes
willing my belief that you truly didn’t realize
I’ve been there your whole life
At sundown I’m the one always stumbling through the wood
like some sort of village idiot brandishing my dim lantern
at the giant pines as if I might catch them in the act
of uprooting themselves & slinking away
Though you flit by & vanish into the trees
in a flash I can barely make out as a memory
your trace among the cedars & silvertips remains as innate in me
as the wolf’s way to her newborn cub’s whimper
Two months early
yet already ripe for the triumph
& pain only the fiercest have dared to carry in one body
you were born to fly from me—
& so how could I ever be sorry
to know of finding you over & over again?
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
Thank you to editor Eli T. Mond for giving this piece a home in the December 2017 edition of The Ibis Head Review.
“In Response to My 13 Year-Old Daughter’s Letter” is included in my debut poetry chapbook, This Being Done, which is available for order NOW from Finishing Line Press!
If you would like to order a copy, I ask that you please do so as soon as possible before the deadline for pre-publication orders on April 27, 2018. Although my book is scheduled for release in June, the print-run is based on a minimum quota of copies ordered during the two-month presale period ending on April 27, 2018.
Order online: This Being Done, by Stephanie L. Harper
I’d like to express my heartfelt gratitude to any of you who have already preordered This Being Done. Your investment in and appreciation for who I am and what I do means more to me than I could ever adequately express. This journey wouldn’t be the same without your support!
Q&A with Poet Stephanie L. Harper (Part 1)
Thanks for this terrific honor, Bob!
I’m pleased to offer this Q&A with poet Stephanie L. Harper:
You have a chapbook, This Being Done, coming out soon. Can you tell us something about it? From where did the title come?
Yes, I’m thrilled that this debut of my work in book form is making its way into the world. The title, This Being Done, is an excerpt from my poem, “An Elegy for Birds & Bees,” which, the more I think about it, the more I believe is the crux of the collection. The poem came to me when I was profoundly depressed and drifting—feeling as if my childbearing days being behind me was somehow synonymous with not having (and not deserving to have) an identity or purpose for my own sake. The poem’s opening lines, “over & over in habitual drone /i repeat a phrase in my mind that no one knows i say…
View original post 1,273 more words
My Poem is Live at Panoply!
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.
Confessional
Today I used a piece of toilet paper
(ingenious how the squares are perforated)
as a bookmark,
to mark the beginning
of a story in a journal
I pretended to mean to read soon.
My own pretensions in the bathroom, I’d guess,
are no more elaborate than those of any other,
but we prefer not to confess them,
which is why confessionals nowadays tend to be
outfitted with porcelain & brass conveniences, & vanities
of granite stacked with prayers, or leastways
paperbacks (suggestive of prayerful reflection,
a well-regarded, liturgical means of bargaining one’s way out
of bondage to repugnant functions),
all to function as a colossal ruse—for truly,
we know no sleight-of-hand swipe performed (however
adroitly the unrolled squares are wadded
or folded), nor our most adroit illusions of luxury
contrived of bodacious poses over prodigal devices,
can justify such unnatural exertions.
Nature’s call is much like that of the cleric’s behind
his proverbial curtain—indeed, a loaded business
we can’t but answer.
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
Who, me? Employ a fallacy of equivocation? NE-VER!
My poem, “Imprisoned,” is up at Claudius Speaks
Thank you to the editors at Claudius Speaks Journal for including my poem, “Imprisoned,” in their themed issue (IV), Flight! You can read this poem in full as it appears in my forthcoming chapbook, THIS BEING DONE (Finishing Line Press), below:
Imprisoned
Now is not the time
for my fettered titanium lines—
no time for me to claim
I know a thing or two about life
as if I were anyone’s keeper…
A “suicidally depressed” convict doing life for murder
petitioned my psychotherapist friend to treat him:
& so it was that with all the detached generosity
a wife & mother of three could muster she rendered
a diagnosis of anti-social personality disorder
even as his icy eyes ignited in her a germ of lust
that razed every trace of her in a sudden flush
Now is really not the time for idle moralizing
about prisoners or locks & keys as if
there were any kind of justice in poetry
It’s not the time for tying up loose ends
saving pennies for rainy days or chrysalizing
our wrinkly little walnut meats to pupate belief
in the virtue of counting the hours
Now the dragon is awake
blinking in the daylight of withering dreams
wagging her head in a gnashing rage
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
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.
SLHARPERPOETRY 