All These Rooms

Song

A sudden lack of desire

strips the night from the waist up -

Bare-breasted night,

Lime-leaf Night,

Night of a thousand catfish

feeding on the surface

of a city pond in spate -

the sky’s discarnate twin

disturbed by their blind hunger.

This is the night

mother would sing of

from the bottom of the well,

the one that remains

insatiable even though we cup our hands

and drink and drink.

Oh never-ending night

of awe

whose hunger is everyone’s hunger.

A Dance

Two acacia nuts, sovereign and unkempt

buried in the milk-white flesh of my palm

apprentice me not to thee but to the dance before

water, mineral, salt. No answer

for an inquisitor except breaking twice

the space between earth and sky

so effortlessly courting then forgetting

all the things we’ve loved and lost

never to come again.

 Go on. 

As if there was a choice.

A small talisman: A long grey bird

in the elder part of January sculls the estuary and

each pussy willow turns serpentine inside the fold

of image upon image, water then the world.

At the caesura, what happens there?

 To foliate: the having of leaves.

Agency

Our gasoline held to everything - his sister’s dress
and grass, snails in the pond - within the smell of things burning
even the air disappeared. But I can hardly see

the blank fields anymore
for the earth has no memory
and cannot refuse to grow.

Generation

Incredible stillness a scene suddenly mute
no cicadas left for no trees remained -
no humming sound inside the grove.

Beneath a crab scuttling across the face of the moon
lovers - their faith in the tangible
world, in delight

from the smell of rain - is something I can almost understand.
For I inherited their world
and I remember nothing.

Etiquette

Surrendered life inside my mouth -
small fish, her father’s gift
to me, the company of his only - white flesh,

grey skin, ginger, and peppercorn - undoing -
history, language, luck - everything
except one body becoming another.

Nearly all life is compassionate
in this way - selflessly shifting
form, even the hillside

where we now sit, where my people
might have continued killing your people
if winning were possible. Then in your mother’s hand

no ripe pomello
like a green rising sun and in your father’s
heart no daughter

with laughter like a sparrow -
her small body holding court
among the drunk gods.

Tender are the ghosts
who humor our ruin
by remaining outside of this room.

Guidelines for the 2008 Franklin-Christoph Poetry Contest
http://www.franklin-christoph.com/Writing/PoetryContest.html

We will award $2500 in total prizes, including the $1000 cash grand prize. 10 Merit
Award Winners will receive $150 writing instruments.

Submission Period
Entries accepted June 1-Nov 30 (postmark dates), 2008.
[Read more →]

EARTH’S BODY: AN ECOPOETRY ANTHOLOGY

Coeditors Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street solicit submissions for an international anthology of ecopoetry. We are looking for a wide and varied array of submissions. Our working definition of “ecopoetry” is flexible; it includes not only what might be called nature poetry, and not only poetry that focuses on environmental issues, but also experimental poetry–poetry that explores language in its relations with the other-than-human. We welcome work by emerging as well as established poets. We welcome serious poems, playful poems, poems in open or traditional forms. Depending on limitations of space, we will consider not only short poems but also poems of several pages. The anthology will include only living poets or poets who were alive as of July 2007, and will include only poems either written in English or already translated into English; for poems not written in English, both the original and the translation must be submitted, and if accepted, both will be published. We will consider work that has been previously published. The poet (and/or translator) must control the copyright to the work.
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Worsty has won the poetry contest for May. She gets to whomp whomever she pleases, especially those of you who have to yet to enter a challenge. Scowl. Anyway, I’m sure she’ll have a challenge for us soon!
Until then worsty, whomp away!

MORTAR

Between the bricks all that mortar
was put down by men with trembling
hands with the prints rubbed
smooth at the fingertips. The mortar speaks
of tiredness, of always being in bed
with a longing between her legs, of never sleeping
but only almost. When the rain comes
she remembers being dirt and stones,
she thinks of the great grind works that crushed
her down, of the mixer and the slick
work. But for the last hundred years
she has been lazing in the wall here
on the western corner of main and tracy, her eyes
hungry, her tongue lusting after
the fat drunk men who trip as they stumble by
and press their thick fingers against
the wet grit of her before wiping their hands
on their tired pants, their fingers
hard and slick like the first hands
that laid her down so long ago.

Our realities were merging to
Copulate and produce beautiful,
Upon the most beautiful
Of babies.

Have I not written enough for you lately?
My sincerest of apologies
Are found in the back pocket
Of my jeans…
Folded and tarnished
At the seams.
And you, my love,
How do you feel like one of
My childhood dreams?
Panned out in a panoramic
Timeline of memories and vacancies -
Spreading out limb by limb,
Shadowed by the feeblest of trees.

He’s not He.
And she..
Well,
She’s not she.
So these retorts broken by
Sunset have forever morphed
Into our child, so dear.
So innocent
Behind our steering wheel.
Steer -
Finally making all of these
Passed memoirs clear.

Gather your speed dials and make the call.
Gather your speed dials and make us all.

Time in this world is captured
By the swiftest of speed..
Swiftest of time lost..
Competing to whom can
Fight being alive
Faster -
Quicker -
More efficiently -

My baby cries in the night
To remind me to change her diaper.
I sometimes think there’s a racing
Habit that counters this notion..
Like the waves my virgin eyes awoke
To in March at the Northwest ocean
That just bring me back to
These fondest of motions.

My baby cries in the night
To remind me to change her diaper.
And I’m starting to think,
My sweet Ellie Mae,
Is slowly upon slow
Breaking shades of gray..
As her baby teeth and her
Baby tongue
Don’t have any words to say.

And maybe, maybe one day
My beautiful girl, Ellie Mae,
Will have a voice to sing
Will have thoughts to be provoked.
Will have more speed than
The fastest of jet planes.

I know now that that ink blot
Of spit upon her bib
Was shrugged off as a stain.
And that this pen on still paper
Will easily be construed
As the same.

The thought is just as
Terrifying as dandelions purring
In late May..
And how they count another
Tally on our weathered skin.

Our thoughts can be so thin.
Our thoughts can be so thin.

But my girl,
She will have beautiful,
Thin,
Ink ridden skin.

Here’s another interesting post from the yahoo webserve. If anyone wants to get on that list and get lots of emails about creative writing opps, just let me know and I’ll post the necessary info.

Splinter Generation anthology

http://www.splintergeneration.com/index.html

Six young people, unsatisfied with being called Generation Y, Generation 9-11, and countless other ill-fitting monikers, are launching a one-time online compilation of written work with the intention of inviting people between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five to talk to each other through literature.  We’re calling it “The Splinter Generation”—a name that we posit might feel more appropriate, even if just temporarily, until we start hearing each others’ voices and perhaps think of something better. [Read more →]

Got this off a yahoo listserve for “Creative Writing Opportunities.”

Lake Forest College

Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize

Lake Forest College, in conjunction with the &NOW Festival, invites applications for an emerging poet under forty years old, with no major book publication to spend two months (February-March or March-April 2009) in residence at our campus in Chicago’s northern suburbs on the shore of Lake Michigan. There are no formal teaching duties attached to the residency. Time is to be spent completing a manuscript, participating in the Lake Forest Literary Festival, and offering two public presentations. The completed manuscript will be published (upon approval) by the new Lake Forest College Press &NOW Books imprint. The stipend is $10,000, with a housing suite and campus meals provided by the college. Send curriculum vita, manuscript in progress, and a statement of plans for the completion of the manuscript to Plonsker Residency, Department of English, Lake Forest College, Box A16, 555 N. Sheridan Road, Lake Forest, IL 60045. Review of manuscripts by judges Robert Archambeau, Davis Schneiderman, and Joshua Corey will begin May 15, 2008 and continue until the position is filled.

As per Natalie’s request, this month’s poetry challenge is to write an epic poem… in a month. This feat is impossible enough so there are no additional requirements. Don’t forget, whoever wins gets the coveted whomper stick and also gets to make up next month’s challenge. So bring it, I want to see the next Iliad up on this site in a month. Write something to torture freshman with for the next 2000 years!
[Read more →]