This is pure fun! My micro-chapbook, You Break What Falls, is available through the Origami Poems Project. What is a micro-chapbook, you might ask? In this case, it consists of six short poems on one sheet of paper, folded (hence origami) to form a chapbook. You may download it, free of charge, here: http://www.origamipoems.com/poets/236-robert-okaji
Oh, yes. Folding instructions are on the Origami Poems Project site.
Interiors
The history of shadows, a longing
for brightness to bring through your
eyes shapes and their
belongings: our differences, entwined.
It is evening. Wind breathes in the trees and
through your hands at the piano, returning
speech to its origin, clouds, the moon,
burning wood. November, dying.
How often I fail through lack of words.
Beauty in form. Not to create but as in
respiration, to share, to accept and
return without thought. In and out,
the days reciprocate. White, black. Figures
waiting in darkness for light to come bear them.
Love, Scattered (Cento)
I cull and offer this and this,
and these last definite whorls
or later star or flower, such
rare dark in another world,
outdistancing us, madness
upon madness, the crest
and hollow, the lift and fall,
ah drift, so soft, so light,
where rollers shot with blue
cut under deeper blue as the
tide slackens when the roar of
a dropped wave breaks into it,
and under and under, this
is clear—soft kisses like bright
flowers— why do you dart and
pulse till all the dark is home?
I am scattered in its whirl.
This cento is composed exclusively of lines taken from fifteen pages in the Collected Poems of H.D., 6th printing, 1945. Hilda Doolittle is a fascinating figure in 20th century American poetry. You might look at the Poetry Foundation’s biography for further information:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/h-d
The Echo is Neither Sound nor Hope
empty trees
a darkened
window
the void
between chairs
unchanged
as if you’d never spoken
Shadow
walking,
crushing juniper berries
at dusk
the dog shadows me
in his absence
Another review of If Your Matter Could Reform is up on GoodReads, as well as on the reviewer’s blog:
And of course the print version has now been released:
With shipping, to U.S. addresses, the total should be $6.00. The shipping to international addresses will, I’d imagine, vary.
Epiphanies
What greater doubt
than if
preceding only,
or hope cascading through the withheld
unspoken phrase?
Or the conditional, as it slows to place
an obstacle in its very own
path. If only I could
I would deny its existence,
but the conjunctive
bears blame as well,
though nothing’s put before
the preposition (which one
would certainly never end with).
Leigh Ward-Smith has been kind enough to post a review of my chapbook on her site, Leigh’s Wordsmithery: https://leighswordsmithery.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/poetry-review-robert-okaji-if-your-matter-could-reform/
My poem “Bread” is featured this week on Extract(s):
My poem “Trains,” which originally appeared last spring in Lightning’d Press, has been reprinted on Aubade Rising:
O at the Edges 