Robert Okaji’s poetic tour de force, “Wind,” tops the list of Krista Stevens’ feature, Throwback Thursday: 5 Favorite Posts of 2018 on Discover!
Prepare for your breath to be taken away!
nature
From the Seed
From the Seed
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!
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
Letter to Harper from Halfway to the Horizon
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!
Letter to Harper from Halfway to the Horizon
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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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.
A New Poem Up at BONED!
I’m thrilled to share the news that my poem, “Rhapsody in Bone” — a bit of formal verse for the 21st century… — is featured at the wonderful web journal, BONED! I’m grateful to editor Nate Ragolia for giving my quirky piece inspired by an ancient Inuit myth such a lovely and fitting home.
“Rhapsody in Bone” appears in my new chapbook, This Being Done, available now from Finishing Line Press. Orders will ship in June 2018.
Two poems up at Rat’s Ass Review!
Many thanks to editor Roderick Bates for including my quirky poems, “Jack’s in the Pulpit” and “Trumplewocky,” in this terrific selection of PWA (Poetry With Attitude) in the summer 2018 edition of Rat’s Ass Review (poems in alphabetical order, according to authors’ last names).
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!
Avium Morbum MMXVII
Photo by Cameren Harper, May 2017
This spring, it seemingly isn’t enough
that we’ve once again converted our porch
into a brood-rearing safe haven:
The once-adorable, amiable models
of avian parental prowess that have been
gracing us with their proximity
for years, are now a couple of flighty,
black & white fluff-balls of aggression.
It’s like their little bird brains just
suddenly lost all sense of perspective—
their former bearing of healthy respect
toward us & our home has morphed
into a hostile face-off of assaults
on the front door window, dive-bombing
campaigns on the car in the driveway,
replete with poo, & kamikaze-style strikes
on their equally-fraught reflections
in the side-view mirror.
Why, my teen-aged son has been asking,
are the Chickadees being so stupid?
Of course, he already understands
that the answer to his question lies
in another question—which, come to think
of it, is THE question that everyone I know
has been asking for months, since nobody
is really surprised anymore when something
extreme, irrational, or just plain opposite-of-
intelligent happens—it’s as if the Bizarro World
episode of Seinfeld just started up again on its own,
& in its antithetical-T.V.-show fashion, decided
never to end—because, apparently, Nature, itself,
is being required to stretch its fabric all out of proportion
in effort to accommodate the unprecedentedly-dense
troposphere’s lambasting winds; but I find myself
ask-answering him, anyway, if only half-hopeful
that this serum synthesized of not-reasons might yet
suffice to inoculate him against such rife contagion:
Do they remind you of anyone?
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
“Avium Morbum MMXVII” was first drafted during the May 2017 Tupelo Press 30/30 challenge.
My new poetry chapbook, This Being Done, is available for advance copy purchase at Finishing Line Press from now until April 27, 2018. The number of orders received during this two-month pre-publication sales period will determine the size of the print run, which is currently scheduled for release on June 22, 2018. For more info CLICK HERE!
