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I had the distinct pleasure of joining Katherine Heiss of Brick Street Poetry on the Off the Bricks Poetry Podcast to read and discuss a few poems from my newest poetry collection, We Have Seen the Corn, available for order online at Kelsay Books and Amazon.
Have a listen and enjoy!
We Have Seen the Corn has been published and is now available for purchase at Kelsay Books:
and Amazon Books:
I’m always glad for the chance to publish (and thereby share 😊) another love poem inspired by my one and only, Robert Okaji! So, I’m grateful to the poetry editing team, assisted by Candice Daquin, of Parcham Magazine based in Kolkata, India, for including “Letter from the Other Side of Silence” in their August 2023 issue, which was just released on October 12.
My poem, “Dear Autocorrect,” was published last month on Five South’s weekly humor column, One for the Road. I’m grateful to editor Kristen Simental and the Five South team for featuring this piece (accompanied by a lovely introduction and original artwork, no less!). I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed, uh, letting it write itself! 😉
Special thanks also goes to Jazz Jaeschke for initially sponsoring (and inspiring!) this poem during my husband Robert Okaji’s September 2021 fundraiser for Brick Street Poetry.
I’m too stunned to say anything intelligible about this earth-shattering poem. Just. Read. It.
Suddenly I find it odd that my arms terminate in hands — these firm and meaty pads, the bony fingers extruded in opposition to the outliers, these peculiar thumbs. Who designed these naked anomalies, wrinkling and weathering with the years? Where are my clever paws, their dexterous beauty, their soft and ageless fur? A […]
Unbecoming
How awesome is this, to be featured with such great poets! Register to attend, while spots are still available. (hosted by Liz Gauffreau) Register …
Illustration by Cameren Harper
@CamHarpArt
_____“Do not conform any longer to the patterns of this world,
_____but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…” – Romans 12:2 (NIV)
my dear friends i give thanks whenever i remember you
performing the Sunday liturgy in your private domiciles
as you fritter the late-winter daylight heads bowed
to the gardens you cultivate in solitude in which the holy grapes
of indolence germinate & swell into such harvests as only a protracted
back surgery recovery may ferment into sacred existential wine
imbibe i pray & rejoice in your propitious
proximity to those who are sanctified:
Blessed be the Teenagers
__________greasified & bespectacled
though they be for lolling with you on the couch
to watch an “old” movie from two thousand & three
for getting most of the cheesy references to last century
& even laughing aloud (albeit dubiously) as you’ve
been all the while vaunting the previous night’s travesty
of red flannel covered in Mickey Mouse heads
purple soccer shorts & magenta knee-high socks
_____& for not only seeming not to mind your ensemble
but also refraining from being put out by the three-inch-
long grey whisker sticking bolt straight out of your temple
from whence it had migrated undiscovered until crossing
the evidentiary vista’s periphery
Blessed be the Husband
__________for disarming your gesticulating
dismay with his velvety quip “It’s actually white”
which he punctuates with an ironic kiss before slipping
out the door like the Count of Monte Cristo to grab
a late take-out lunch called “linner” thusly
exercising his seasoned prowess as a nuclear engineer
who (having remained at all times cognizant of the breeder
reactor’s categorical purpose) has managed the containment
area around these billions of atoms your half-life needed
to split in provisioning wholeness for your progeny—
_____namely your exquisite boy who took off
at birth on a trajectory through the complex system
of boons & hazards some call autism which you try to follow
corkscrewing like a solid-fuel rocket that’s lost a fin mid-flight
_____& your willful-sweet girl whose arrival
from the spacetime continuum came sooner than expected
replete with congenital array of warp-drive clairvoyance
an uncanny talent for art & a heart anomaly requiring
multiple interventions that have left
__________distortions
rip-roaring in her vector field—
by stabilizing within his perimeter both your incendiary
preoccupation with fissile potential & its eventual fallout
(a. k. a. forty-something) an advanced state of spiritual
decay known to impel the trade of a semi-functional uterus
for a pair of robust guinea pig siblings who in all likelihood
will outlive god
Blessed surely be the Son
__________for being but seventeen
yet somehow finding his way unprompted
to the shower no later than three pee em
_____& for his gorgeous baritone honed by years
of lessons now forsaken for countertenor arias
redolent of a derailed train
O Blessed indeed be the Daughter
__________for the whiling away
of so many precious hours closed up in her bedroom
to conduct her assays of fan tributes on YouTube
_____& for the eternities of wringing crusades waged
on your universe trussed in her small perfect hands
Amen!
“Briefing from the Sunday Review Board” appears in my chapbook, The Death’s-Head’s Testament (<< click link for poem samples, commentary, and ordering information). I’ve decided once and for all to retire it from the cyberspace slush pile, and to give it the loving home it deserves, here, in the arms of the WordPress poetry community.
❤ -SLH
Remains the Dark
“How I wanted to be that sky—” ~ Ocean Vuong
What is want, if not the forsaken
self’s inexorable reversion to self?
Just as your virtual arrival at the event
horizon must propagate only departure
this eternal leaving you actually are
is the mouth’s forgotten swallow,
is sustenance un-sought,
is your every trace & its antithesis
at once ceasing to mean.
Though emptied, you are no less
unfathomable: the black belly remains
the dark you’ll never grasp how to be.
“Remains the Dark” was published in the Spring 2019 Showcase at The Zen Space, among a gorgeous collection of poetry, along with haiku and *tiny poems* by Lynne Burnett, the late Ron Evans (curated by Robert Okaji), and others, expertly edited by and adorned with the original black and white photography of the brilliant Daniel Paul Marshall.
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!
SLHARPERPOETRY 