words for thinkers, parents, activists, dreamers
“(Un)Married: A Sestina in Temperatures,” “Aerodynamic,” and “For a boy to die” (trigger warning, child suicide) are up at Eunoia Review. Many thanks to editor Ian Chung for including my work. Please take a moment and peruse these and the others published on this fine online journal. Support the arts, they are trying to support you.
❤
“Anatomy of Under,” “Sparking,” “Thoughts while digging in a patch of barren earth,” and one of the poems I have cherished for a long time, “the gift of no guarantees,” are all up at Anti-Heroin Chic today. Many, many thanks to James Diaz for the kind words and for including those babies of mine with that baby of yours. ❤
“The Laureate and the Lothario” and “Grand Falls, AZ” are now live in the freshly-minted print edition of The Wildhood Project‘s second volume, your voice in the wilderness.
Thank you so much to Cristina Falcone for including me in this beautiful volume!
** EDIT, April 2018 **
As of this edit, it appears as though this fledgling market has gone defunct (it happens often, sadly). My poems are therefore reprinted below. Hope you enjoy!
The Laureate and the Lothario
First appeared in Wildhood Project (2017)I ran into James Dickey once
(in a campground, not the afterlife).
The Congressional Librarians—
academics, all—
put up a rally-in-the-woods,
a well-formed senility
Chronus could really get behind.
*snortchuckle* frogs and crickets
bowled their raucous caucus
into our ears, yeah,
the reckless blood
was in us all
(deliverance from gall).
Guitar tones and trails wound off into trees,
all the options of darkness and firelight,
songteeth wide, the jawing, the brews—
the glories, oh, the stories!The dandelion head moon
puffed up white behind
its cloudseed blooms—
yeah, all that midnight jazz
the poets write about,
playing their trills and saxy tones
while the jerry-rigging scholars
rocked and rolled their way
into the holy hag stones’
time-hewn silence:
mossed, pitted, and
certain as sex.
Grand Falls, AZ
First appeared in Wildhood Project (2017)It sneaks up on you in summer.
Driving, you will think you’re in the wrong place,
that this is not the place for a magnificence of water.
There are the known rocks and gravel,
and the long view will be all ruddy brown and hazy,
a martian landscape of high desert under Arizona sky,
which is not a sky but a verb—
the blue a borrowing of depth,
an IOU to the lungless black behind it.So there is the gradient:
blue to dust-blue to orange to brown,
a paradox of flatness that curves itself
from sun-hot roof to dust-borne wheels,
and you will turn that one corner
near the oddly Bradburian, solitary bench
with the requisite shelter and garbage can,
and you will turn that corner,
and there it begins.You thought the earth was a table here,
but it was legs,
and suddenly they open and open,
and you are looking down into a scrappy kind of eden,
tough where it’s green, and
where the strange math of erosion
worked its long division with water
turned cocoa-brown from dust.
It’s flowing easily, playfully—
slow and gentle for falls,
on vacation from the flooding spring—
over rocks flat and large enough for sun-bathing.There are rocks and all the
familiar elements of surface down here,
tumbled among the exposed monolithic mysteries
in this untoward tecton footprint,
where depth is not itself but a verb—
and it’s a secret of the snowmelt,
that it can do this to the earth
the way the outbreath rim of cosmos
can do it to the sky.
Amphibi.us is now defunct, but before that, they published this (no archive available):
The aroused scientist
First appeared in Amphibi.us: Watterlogged Words (May 2010)The aroused scientist
walks bow-legged across the crisp split
of her wanton wholeness,
stepping spider-oblique
among her nettle-spring dreams
and the crisis/opportunity of motion.The green burr-sparks stick
in odd, arrhythmic places,
collect in the overlapping buzz of crickets
until she is 12 again,
coarse and brash,
curved in time and space,
picking at her socks
against the persistent seeds,
or running on sidewalks that rhyme,
wearing tomboy-striped shirts
and eating pepper-weed to see if it’s poison
and she never gets sick, she is alive—
animal all loose in her
and divine.
Many thanks to Sonia Greenfield for including me in such a worthy, necessary project. #resist
Feel free to visit the Rise Up Review website or Facebook page to read ‘Merica and others, then consider Liking their page and sharing the work that moves you. As Sonia says, “you never know who might need a poem.”
“Upwell,” “Transit, en masse,” and “Pompeii, A Documentary of Me,” plus a featured interview with yours truly are now live in the inaugural issue of Wraith Infirmity Muses. This links to the full poetry section — browse all content there or scroll down to read my poems. The issue also includes fiction, visual art and creative nonfiction.
WIM features work by and for those living with “invisible illness.” From the Word from the Editor note included with issue 1.1:
Wraith, when used in literary terms, is a wisp or faint trace of something. It can also mean ghost. Infirmity, is a physical or mental weakness. This simply meaning an illness, disease, disorder, or frailty. Lastly, muses are sources, personified, as inspiration for an artist or writer. That illness that burdens some, burdens many, in which only traces are seen in rare circumstance by others or is invisible altogether. It is a ghostly, ghastly presence in some people’s lives. It creates a need to purge, becomes a muse and life is born.
Many thanks to Pat for kindly including my work in this journal! Hope you enjoy.
❤
Samara
This journal does a “Before the Razor” feature that allows artists to share their creative process, specifically about the pieces that have been published in the issue. There is a lot of latitude given to the authors, who may interpret “essay” in a variety of ways. This is definitely worth digging into the Razor archives for! Some amazing and entertaining pieces there, and an interesting concept I haven’t seen offered anywhere else.
I was very excited to receive Razor’s acceptance of “Walking the Bone Path,” which included an invitation to participate in this series (you can read mine here). Many thanks to Baker and the editing team for including me in this great issue!
I’m grateful and happy that this protest poem found a home with Words Dance, thank you to Amanda Oaks for your confidence and support!
The Furnace Review is now defunct, but before that, they published this (no archive available):
Song to a mirror
First appeared in The Furnace Review (2011)5/2 was the day you got good at “Whatever,”
that game of leaving-first without leaving.
You’d had the scent of happiness
over that last hill this morning,
but now it’s lost,
dispersed into untraceable atoms
across the neighborhood—the same neighborhood where things have changed,
and M_____ and R____ stand in the yard screaming
for two hours in the morning.
“You promised me something!”
“I don’t deserve you!”
and you didn’t know what that meant, either,
not really.Bending without breaking
is easier than it seems,
and more dangerous.
It leads to standing in yards at 7am
and hurling decibels at your love
who volleys them back,
well-placed arcs that shred the neighborhood
with their fictions we believe.Nearly 40,
on loan to the planet,
you believed in “special” until this morning
when you lost the scent of that, too,
in the untraceable atmosphere.
It must be fluttering among the dogwood blooms
and Confederate jasmine—
40 feet up the pine, out of sight
among the unremarkable tree limbs:
you’re just like everyone else
and you’ve lost so many poems that way,
you can’t possibly be bitter—
maybe now you can get some sleep.
Just received my contributor copies of the Sweet issue of Memoryhouse print journal (coming soon to the archive in the Winter 2017 slot), containing my poems “Remember love” and “The diet starts tomorrow.”
The cover is luscious to touch, and the whole thing is beautifully done. Many thanks to Abbie and the editing team for including me!
samara powers poetry