“Eye” is the third section of the second poem in I Have a Bird to Whistle (7 Palinodes), my new chapbook.
The book is available here to U.S. residents for $7.50, shipping included.
Non-U.S. purchasers can order it directly from me by emailing aBirdtoWhistle@yahoo.com.
“Door” is the second part of the second poem in I Have a Bird to Whistle (7 Palinodes), my new chapbook. I’ll post a recordings of the third part in the next few days.
The book is available here to U.S. residents for $7.50, shipping included.
Non-U.S. purchasers can order it directly from me by emailing aBirdtoWhistle@yahoo.com.
“Serpent” is the first part of the second poem in I Have a Bird to Whistle (7 Palinodes), my new chapbook. I’ll post recordings of the second and third parts in the next few days.
The book is available here to U.S. residents for $7.50, shipping included.
Non-U.S. purchasers can order it directly from me by emailing aBirdtoWhistle@yahoo.com.
“Glass” is the third part of the first poem in I Have a Bird to Whistle (7 Palinodes), my new chapbook.
The book is available here to U.S. residents for $7.50, shipping included.
Non-U.S. purchasers can order it directly from me by emailing aBirdtoWhistle@yahoo.com.
“Passway” is the second part of the first poem in I Have a Bird to Whistle (7 Palinodes), my new chapbook, followed by “Glass,” which I’ll post in the next day or two.
The book is available here to U.S. residents for $7.50, shipping included.
Non-U.S. purchasers can order it directly from me by emailing aBirdtoWhistle@yahoo.com.
“Translation” opens I Have a Bird to Whistle (7 Palinodes), my new chapbook, followed by “Passway” and “Glass,” which I’ll post over the next few days.
The book is available here to U.S. residents for $7.50, shipping included.
Non-U.S. purchasers can order it directly from me by emailing aBirdtoWhistle@yahoo.com.
We Call the Neighbor’s Fat Burro Donkey Hotei, but His Name is Cantinflas
Certainty grows in corners, away from light.
From his mouth issues the breath we take, the words we keep.
Enjoy the collusion of shape and sound.
We share the hummingbird’s taste for sweet, but not its fierceness.
Its heart beats 1,200 times a minute,
and you ask me how best to bury money.
Hotei’s name means cloth sack, and comes from the bag he carried;
a man of loving character, he possessed the Buddha nature.
What we own cannot be held.
Most plastics are organic polymers with spine-linked repeat units.
The space you’ve left expands exponentially.
Left in the rain, the bell grows.
Christen me at your own peril. Agaves flower once then die.
Fluency in silence.
I dropped my pants when the scorpion stung my thigh.
The wind takes nothing it does not want.
After vulcanization, thermosets remain solid.
The Cantinflas character was famous for his eloquent nonsense.
Vacuum wrap the bills in plastic, place them in pvc.
Having mastered imperfection, I turn to folly.
Not the thing itself, but the process laid bare and opened.
Hoping to hide, the scorpion scuttled under a boot.
Thought to action, whisper to knife: which is not a curse?
The wind wants nothing; the burro sings his loneliness.
This first appeared here in May 2015. My failures often lead to success. I’ve never quite completed this piece, and don’t know that I ever will. But the first draft (nearly five years ago) set me off on a new path, one that has served me well. What more can I ask?
by Stephanie L. Harper and Robert Okaji
I remember what I cannot say
in the moment before
I somehow say something else,
instead,
but like a river reversing course
seeps its brackish warmth
into crisp mountain runoff channels,
my backdraft, too,
threatens
to stifle the resident cutthroats
along with their prey.
Nothing will remain safe for long
from the toxic sediments I bear
upstream, resisting
the current’s translucent
promise to rush me past the crest
of undulant reeds between
the salt marsh and open sea;
for no twist in the shoreline,
nor cloudburst’s surge could un-speak
the daylight
from its collapse
into the ocean’s black throat.
“Flux” first appeared on Underfoot Poetry, and is one of several pieces (with more to come) written during the past year in collaboration with Stephanie L. Harper, whose wisdom, patience and good humor enrich my life daily. Thank you, Daniel Paul Marshall and Tim Miller for taking this piece.
My poem “A Further Response from the Hornet’s Nest,” which somehow won first prize in Panoply’s first-ever contest, has been published in Issue 11 along with poems by such luminaries as Stephanie L. Harper, Kelli Allen, and AM Roselli. I’m thrilled to have a poem in this issue!
My last five posts of 2018 are reruns of five of the most viewed posts on this site during the year. “Wind” benefitted from being featured on the WordPress Discover site, and is by far the most viewed post ever on the blog.
Wind
That it shudders through
and presages an untimely end,
that it transforms the night’s
body and leaves us
breathless and wanting,
petals strewn about,
messenger and message in one,
corporeal hosts entwined,
that it moves, that it blends,
that it withdraws and returns without
remorse, without forethought, that it
increases, expands, subtracts,
renders, imposes and releases
in one quick breath, saying
I cannot feel but I touch,
I cannot feel
* * *
“Wind” first appeared in Blue Hour Magazine and is included in my first chapbook, If Your Matter Could Reform.
O at the Edges 