poem

In-titled Poem Live in The Dodge Magazine

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Close-up of a partly-submerged northern green frog's face and eyes, with water droplets suspended around him.

I’m so pleased to share that my In-titled Poem, “By the Moonlit Water Where the Dombiki Sing,” is now featured in the lovely eco-literary journal, The Dodge. I’m grateful to editors Edward Sambrano III and Jamie A. M. for selecting my work for publication, and for their kindness and enthusiasm, in general, throughout the publication process.

“By the Moonlit Water Where the Dombiki Sing” also appears in my chapbook, We Have Seen the Corn, forthcoming summer 2025 with Kelsay Books, which I’m shamelessly taking advantage of this opportunity to plug, once, again :). 

Digital illustration of the sun setting behind a cornfield, shafts of light bleeding through the stalks, fading to a distant thunderhead and starry night sky beyond.
Conspiring Skyward by Cameren Harper

New Chapbook Announcement!

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Digital illustration of the sun setting behind a cornfield, shafts of light bleeding through the stalks, fading to a distant thunderhead and starry night sky beyond.

Conspiring Skyward by Cameren Harper

I’m super pleased and proud to announce that I have a poetry chapbook collection forthcoming with Kelsay Books: We Have Seen the Corn will be entering production in May 2025, and will be available for purchase soon thereafter (Don’t worry, I will keep you updated!). By the way, the gorgeous graphic above is the illustration my immensely talented and generous daughter, Cameren Harper, created expressly for use as the cover of We Have Seen the Corn, for which I’m inexpressibly grateful!

This little collection has been a long time in the making and most of the individual poems have been previously published (including the title poem, below*), but what I’m most thrilled about is this opportunity to amass and share with you all these words of grief, growth, joy, and celebration into one beautiful entity dedicated to my husband, inspiration, love of my life, brilliant poet, and most extraordinary (and freaking adorable!) of human beings, the one and only, inimitable Robert Okaji (idk, you may’ve heard of him…).

I’ve been sitting on this news for quite a while, but I’ve decided that there couldn’t be a better time to make such an announcement than during our revered National Poetry Month, so the cat is officially clawing her way out of the bag!

Thank you so much for sharing this poetic moment with me! And stay tuned for more info as it comes available!

*We Have Seen the Corn

with twelve-hundred miles
of fields in our wake

I am aching
to slip among those stalks & touch

their silk-topped ears all conspiring
skyward now

to beguile the birds’ cries from the brim
of that thundercloud

burgeoning
over the Nebraska plain

let’s pull off the interstate     so we can
stretch our legs for a bit

Indiana will wait

split those crows’ itinerant
congregation     there     & park

right alongside the unending green
I want to enter

its late-sun-streams sifting the sky motes
crimson-gold     & stirring

the cicadas’ whirrs & earwigs’ scuttles in the loam
to a viscous chorus

& with my hand clasped in yours     press
another lush measure

into our song’s sweet & sultry folds

~STEPHANIE L. HARPER

Poem Live at Rat’s Ass Review!

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Two watermelon carvings, mirrored images, side-by-side, hollowed as "monster mouth" baskets filled with fruit and concerned-looking eyes made of pineapple chunks and blueberries... Representative of large, middle-aged boobs.

My poem, “Of These One and All (after Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself 15),” is now live in the Fall/Winter 2024 issue of Rat’s Ass Review! Poems appear in the order of their poets’ last names; please enjoy some terrific writing as you scroll to, and beyond, Harper :D).

As a long-time admirer of (as well as previous contributor to) this top-notch web-journal, I’m truly grateful to editor Roderick Bates for his passion and integrity in steadfastly promoting poets and the poetry community, and especially for selecting my little ditty for publication in this fantastic issue!

Poem Live at Panoply

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Another In-titled Poem has found its perfect home in cyberspace! Thanks to lovely editors Andrea, Clara, and Jeff of Panoply, my poem, “Writer’s Block is a Bitch,” which also happens to be a Petrarchan sonnet (because I’m just like that…), is now published in issue 27. I’m especially proud and pleased that my poem appears alongside my husband, Robert Okaji’s awesome excursion into feline metaphysics, and a host of other luminous poetry and short prose.

Poem in Crab Creek Review!

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Ye Royale Pileated Woodpecker, Sir Ethan, photo by Matthew Harper

It’s an honor and a pleasure to share with you my poem, “Pileated Woodpecker,” which appears in the gorgeous summer 2023 issue of Crab Creek Review! Thank you editors David J. Daniel’s and Julia Hands for selecting my work.

Response to Cate Terwilliger’s “In Memoriam”

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Please read “In Memoriam” (by Cate Terwilliger of Meditatio Ephemera) below. Thank you, Cate, for your reverence, empathy, aplomb, and leadership in memorializing our fellow citizens who “let their lives — and deaths — speak” for the imperative of peace.

Concerning the Delay of My Self-Immolation

“I know nothing poorer
Under the sun than you gods!” ~ J. W. von Goethe

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 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 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 blaze
with the ire of a rebel Titan;

my ashes will salt the gods’ tears
lapping the west’s black edge…

~ STEPHANIE L. HARPER

“Concerning the Delay of My Self-Immolation” first appeared in the January 2019 issue of *Ristau: A Journal of Being*, edited by poet and human of excellence, Bob Penick.

Cate's avatarMeditatio Ephemera

They were names I didn’t recognize, names I’d never heard:  Alice Herz, Norman Morrison, Roger Allen LaPorte,  Florence Beaumont, George Winne, Jr.  Five Americans who, between 1965 and 1970, publicly self-immolated — set themselves fatally afire — to protest the Vietnam War.

I am thinking of them on Memorial Day, when we traditionally commemorate Americans who gave their lives in the cause of war.  I am thinking of them because we don’t dedicate a day to Americans who gave their lives in the cause of peace.

Thousands protested to end our involvement in Vietnam, the most divisive war the United States has ever fought apart from the Civil War a hundred years earlier that nearly tore it asunder.  Best estimates put civilian casualties during what Americans officially call the Vietnam “conflict” (and Vietnamese call the American War) at up to 50 percent of the total — approximately 1.3 million to more than 3 million people.

Many of those…

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Hope Springs Eternal & So Does Willie Nelson

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Image

Hope Springs Eternal & So Does Willie Nelson

Posted in honor of his 88th birthday!

Another death hoax? Gee, how original…
You folks ain’t fickle—guess I’ll give ya points
fer grit if not fer gumption. I’ve rolled joints
my friends, far stiffer than my tricky ankle,
imbibed red wine that’s older than yer gran’;
this here bandana holds more DNA
than most small countries on a holiday,
so keep your Internet! Just leave the bedpan
close, gas up the bus, & brace for twenty
more long years—well, give or take a decade.
The road’s a callin’, songs are in my head,
& my ol’ guitar plays as good as any;
there’s plenty weed to smoke & hair to braid:
So’s far as I can tell, I’m still not dead.

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

Poem up at Eclectica

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Mt St Helena_Sleeping Elephant

My “sleeping elephant,” Mt. Saint Helena (Sonoma County, CA), in whose mesmerizing shadow I grew up…

My poem, “Elephantine,” has been included with a fine array of poems in Eclectica magazine’s October/November 2019 issue’s Word Poem Challenge feature. The task was to compose a poem containing the words paper, indigo, brew, and cruise. Thank you editor Evan Richards for selecting this piece.

Pressing into the Depths

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Old-growth Oak

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.