My poem “Though it is Written” is live at The Winnow Magazine! I greatly appreciate the care that The Winnow editing team took to pair my piece (scroll to page 20…) with such beautiful photography.
spirituality
Briefing from the Sunday Review Board
Illustration by Cameren Harper
@CamHarpArt
Briefing from the Sunday Review Board
_____“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!
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
“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
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.
Things I Cannot Say
Things I Cannot Say
Even when you are a one-year-old jumping out of your crib
(you have no particular reason for jumping, but you do it,
& the thud you make that’s loud but doesn’t hurt,
wakes your father, the menacing resonance of whose
footsteps approaching your room overwhelms you with terror—
your own heartbeat surging in your head—which you catalogue
into your infant consciousness as a sense of mortal danger
you will run from for the rest of your life, though you have no
language to account for it yet), you already implicitly understand
that your fear is a thing you must never talk about out loud, for
the only way its malaise living in your veins could feel worse,
would be if the words you formulated & ascribed to its being
resulted in its summary negation.
___________________________________For the same, essential reason,
you still hardly believe the amazing thing that happened to you
one day, back when you were a burned-out Graduate Assistant
(who couldn’t have distinguished a metaphysical marvel from
her left elbow)—when, because your arms were overfull with books,
an orangutan puppet named Andreas, & his overripe, over-handled
banana, which you’d recruited to teach German reflexive verbs
to Undergrads, you decided to take the elevator back up from your
third floor classroom to your eighth floor office in Van Hise,
& discovered yourself being flanked for five flights by two
Tibetan Buddhist Monks in their maroon & saffron-yellow robes:
Geshe Sopa, whom you recognized from the Asian Studies Department
on the twelfth floor, & his brightly-smiling companion, none other than
His Holiness the Dalai Lama—even though you’ll never forget how
Andreas clasped his banana, while you summarily exited your body
on a silent wave of preternatural warmth, the mouth of the thing
you would never again inhabit fixing itself into a ridiculous grin.
For my part, I think it’s entirely possible that I’ve been a bodiless soul
since infancy, & also that I never did actually receive a new life from
the Dalai Lama in an elevator in Wisconsin, but I cannot say for certain.
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
“Things I Cannot Say” was published in the Fall 2017 edition of Harbinger Asylum (thank you to editors Z.M. Wise and Dustin Pickering for selecting this piece), and appears in my forthcoming chapbook, The Death’s-Heads Testament, available NOW for preorder purchase (for only $6.50 per copy!) from Main Street Rag (scheduled for release in March 2019).
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.
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.
Because I Said So
Because I Said So
It’s been the same old thing year after year:
You mope around all gloomy & convective
grow turbulent with variable shear
& bluster in that helical invective
tone All I want to do this spring is spread
some bliss inspire the bees to pollinate
warm up the sea ensure the fish get fed
& coax some pinnipeds beach-ward to mate
but you just keep going all vertical-
like sprouting vortices to spew about
debris! Enough! Go be a spectacle
in Tornado Alley! Air that funnel out—
then find a nice dark cloud & settle down
to spawn some little terrors of your own…
STEPHANIE L. HARPER
This ditty was initially drafted during Tupelo Press’s May 2017 30/30 challenge. Thank you to friend and fellow poet, Clyde Long, for sponsoring this poem by ordering up a sonnet with the title, “Because I Said So,” which included the words, Tornado, beach, and bliss. The uniqueness of these requirements engendered a “pastoral” infused with the life-giving mayhem of spring, reminiscent of the air of triumph that the holy day of Easter embodies for so many.
May the miracles of this season, in all their incarnations, bless you and bolster you the whole year through!
Two Poems up at formidableWoman!
Steph, poet, & Sydney, cattle dog extraordinaire!
Thank you so much to editor D. Ellis Phelps of Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press for hosting my poems, “Risen” and “Instead,” at formidableWoman, and for making me feel like a celebrity with her warm, insightful introduction!
Browse D.’s wonderful site here: Formidable Woman Sanctuary
Also, check out these terrific submissions opportunities here: Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press
“Instead” appears in my new chapbook, This Being Done, which will be available for pre-publication order TOMORROW, February 26, 2018, through April 27, 2018, at Finishing Line Press. I will post the link to order as soon as it goes live! Stay tuned for further announcements throughout the next couple of months!
Lupercalia
Lupercalia
We probe into the distant wintry
rest of white oaks & umbrella pines
moonlit with longing to thrill
in the feral hesitant glints
that crack the black tourmaline cold
our eyes pursuing their penumbrae
until the brink of blindness reaching
for our bloodline of lost
infidel selves still bound
to the night’s crystalline tenors
As our illicit newborn brothers were
abandoned to the Tiber & delivered
keening for milk to their mongrel lives
we too were borne by a savage river
to a mother waiting on the Palatine shore
“Lupercalia” appears in my chapbook, This Being Done, which will be available for pre-sale purchase at Finishing Line Press, starting next week! Stay tuned for more announcements, including the order link on the Finishing Line Press website as soon as it goes live!
Alabaster
I am a pink rose petal’s pale glow
black ash tamped in furrows
between the breath of the living
& the souls of the dead
the dawn’s blush unfurling over sand dunes
& seagulls soaring on thermal spirits
of iodine salt & shellfish
& sometimes scattering in the wind
I can’t find where everything else ends & I begin
Now rising from the morning hush this cloud of me
speaks to the red tail hawk perched on a streetlamp
& tells her I’m fine because I’m still not sure
how to talk about not being fine
I am an instar trying to be
the clearest version of myself to sculpt
a final skin of lucent crystal
so that when you come to see my cinder eyes
glinting diamond dust I will be
the embered dusk bleeding into the sea
& you will know the truth of me
A previous version of this poem first appeared in Sixfold magazine, winter 2014.
SLHARPERPOETRY 