Search results: “star in the East”

Deadlines: August & September

Every middle of the month: new deadlines, new contests, and new opportunities for your voice to find the world. The next six weeks include: our own Palette Poetry Prize, Pank Book Awards, Black Warrior Review, Asian American Literary Review, multiple residencies and grants, and more. Powered by Literistic!

DEADLINE: 8/16

FEATURED: Our Palette Poetry Prize

We are thrilled to offer the Palette Poetry Prize for 2020: $4000 and publication. We are seeking one excellent poem that represents what poetry is and can be for our world today. Send us your incandescent heart on the page. The winner will be selected by our guest judge, the 2019 Pulitzer Prize Winner Forrest Gander. Palette’s editors will choose the ten finalists, and any honorable mentions they think deserve extra attention. Second and third place will receive $300 and $200, respectively.

Reading Fee

DEADLINE: 8/16

Voyage’s First Chapter Contest for YA Authors

Voyage wants to see your first chapters! One of the most difficult challenges in writing a novel, is getting that first chapter right—and we’re aiming to challenge you. Can you write a first chapter that captivates your audience enough to make them want to keep reading? If the answer is yes, then we want to read your work. Submissions are open June 8 to August 16. Guest judge Dhonielle Clayton will choose three stories from a shortlist. The 1st Place winner will receive $3000 and an hour-long consultation with Literary Agent, Eric Smith of P.S Literary Agency. 2nd Place will receive $300 and publication, and 3rd place $200 and publication.

Reading Fee

DEADLINE: 8/17

Omnidawn Open

Brian Teare is judging this year’s poetry manuscript competition. This contest is open to all writers worldwide with no limitations on the amount of poetry a writer has published. We recommend submissions should be 40–120 pages of poetry, not including front and back matter. (Most manuscripts we receive are 40-80 pages long.) Winner receives $3000 & publication.

Reading Fee

DEADLINE: 8/18

The John Montague International Poetry Fellowship

The fellowship requires the poet to reside in Cork for twelve weeks and find time to work on their own writing. They would arrive in late January and depart late April. The fellow would contribute a public reading, a four-morning poetry masterclass to the Cork International Poetry Festival and a 5-credit workshop with the creative writing department of University College Cork. Their mentoring duties would consist of devoting two hours each, per week, to two Cork poets over eight weeks (32 hours total). The fellowship will not only allow the candidate to spend time concentrating on their own work but also to acquire experience in literary mentoring and the teaching of writing in an academic context. They will receive a monthly stipend of €2000, totalling €6,000 and self-catering accommodation. The costs of travel to and from Cork would also be covered.The recipient would be a poet from outside Ireland of international standing. You must have at least two full-length collections of poetry published, be respected by peers and preferably have experience in the coaching or teaching of other writers. To apply, you must submit a literary CV, letter explaining why you want to work in Cork and and a course outline for a four morning poetry masterclass aimed at poets who have already been successfully published in periodicals.

DEADLINE: 8/30

The Fischer Prize

Open to any and all poets living in the United States and its Territories, or American citizens living overseas. Any style, any content. An additional $500 will be presented as the Cantor Award to the highest scoring poem from a Colorado poet, over and above the prizes for the winning and finalist poems among the Fischer Prize submissions. The judge for 2020 is Marin County (CA) performance poet Claire Blotter.

Application Fee

DEADLINE: 8/31

3Elements Review

3Elements Literary Review is a themed literary journal, and all THREE elements (the specific words, Trapeze, Pinprick, Calico—art & photography excluded) given for the submission period must be included in your story or poem for your work to be considered for publication. NO EXCEPTIONS WHATSOEVER. Your story or poem doesn’t have to be about the three elements or even revolve around them; simply use your imagination to create whatever you want. You can use any form of the words/elements for the given submission period.

DEADLINE: 8/31

Thin Air Magazine Free Submissions for BIPOC

Thin Air Magazine offers free submissions for BIPOC through September 1st. We accept fiction and nonfiction up to 3,000 words. We will consider book excerpts as long as they can stand alone. Poets, please send us up to three poems in one document totaling five or fewer pages. Work that contains visuals or art are welcome as long as you own the copyrights.

DEADLINE: 8/31

Off the Grid Poetry Prize

Founded in the fall of 2011 to provide a forum for older poets, who are sometimes overlooked by the current marketplace. We are looking for work by poets over sixty, ripened in craft and vision, and sufficiently sprightly to promote their work through readings and networks. This year’s prize will be judged by Marilyn Nelson, poet, author, and translator, and winner of the 2019 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, among other honors. The competition is open only to poets aged 60 years or older.

Reading Fee

DEADLINE: 9/01

Anomaly

You may submit up to five poems. We are seeking poems that challenge the history and currents of the English language, poems that unsettle cultural norms, poems that utilize language to contest and remake the world. You can also submit one story (fiction or CNF piece) of no more than 5000 words, translated prose of up to 5000 words, or 1-6 translated poems (up to 10 pages). Stand-alone excerpts of longer works are welcome. We also accept literary work in translation. We’re excited about a wide range of submissions, but especially compelled by work that is recalcitrant, wayward, rebellious, whether formally, linguistically, politically, or otherwise. Reading fees will be waived for all Black writers for the rest of our open reading period

DEADLINE: 9/01

Diode Editions Full Length Book Contest

Open to all poets over the age of 18 who write in English. Length: 55-85 pages (front matter is not included in page count). We will consider translations, and we welcome collaborations. Winners will receive $1000, 10 author copies, and select poems from the book will appear in Diode Poetry Journal. If the winner(s) can attend AWP 2021, they will have an opportunity to participate in an off-site reading, and also in signing sessions at the Diode Editions booth.

Reading Fee

DEADLINE: 9/01

Black Warrior Review

We especially strive to magnify voices that are traditionally and systemically silenced. Writers of color, queer and trans writers, disabled writers, immigrant writers, fat writers and femmes: you are all welcome and wanted here. Submit nonfiction or fiction under 7,000 words, though we prefer fiction under 5,000 words. One piece at a time, please; we also accept flash fiction (herein defined as stories under 1,000 words), up to three pieces in a single document. We are also looking for poems that play with and interrogate genre, form, and language. Please send up to five poems, no more than ten pages total, in a single document.

DEADLINE: 9/01

Asian American Literary Review

The Asian American Literary Review is a space for writers who consider the designation “Asian American” a fruitful starting point for artistic vision and community. In showcasing the work of established and emerging writers, the journal aims to incubate dialogues and, just as importantly, open those dialogues to regional, national, and international audiences of all constituencies. Submit one piece of fiction of up to 5,000 words, 6-11 pages of poetry–single long poems of at least 5 pages are also accepted–or one piece of creative nonfiction of up to 5,000 words. Translations should try to include a copy of the original text as a separate file.

DEADLINE: 9/08

Pank Big Book Contests

One Grand Prize Winner in Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction Full Length Books Contest will each receive: $1000, grand prize, $500 publicity campaign, invitation to book launch, signing and reading at AWP 2020, invitation to New York City book reading, 25 author copies. Fiction Submissions include: Novels and Short Story Collections. Nonfiction Submissions include: Memoir, Essay Collections, Lyric Essays, Hybrid.

Reading Fee

DEADLINE: 9/14

Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition

The competition is open to both new and established poets aged 18 and over from across the globe and has two categories: Open category (open to all poets aged 18 years and over) and English as an Additional Language (EAL) category (open to all poets aged 18 and over who write in English as an Additional Language. It costs £5 to submit one poem or £4 per poem for more than three entries. Entrants may submit a maximum of ten poems. Poems should be no more than 50 lines. The winners of each category will receive £1000 and both runners up £200. Judge this year is Fiona Benson.

Reading Fee

DEADLINE: 8/15

The Anzaldúa Poetry Prize

This prize is awarded annually, in conjunction with the Anzaldúa Literary Trust, to a poet whose work explores how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding. Special attention is given to poems that exhibit multiple vectors of thinking: artistic, theoretical, and social, which is to say, political. First place is publication, $1,000 prize, and 25 contributor copies. Up to five finalists will be announced, and all poems will be considered for publication as a general submission. Submit 15 to 30 pages of poetry. Please include no more than one poem per page. The author’s name should not appear in the document. Guest Judge: Marcelo Hernandez Castillo.

Reading Fee

DEADLINE: 9/20

Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets

Submissions are open to new and emerging writers (poets with no more than one full-length published work forthcoming at the time of submission). Send us only your best, polished work. We accept simultaneous submissions but please notify us if your work is picked up elsewhere. No more than 3 poems (5 pages) per submission. Please submit all your poems in ONE document. The winning poet will be awarded $3000 and publication on Frontier Poetry. Second and third place will win $300 & $200 respectively, as well as publication. The top fifteen finalists will also be recognized. We do not hold preference for any particular style or topic—we simply seek the best poem we can find. Send us work that is blister, that is color, that strikes hot the urge to live and be. We strongly invite poets from all communities. You, & your words, are welcome here. Judges this year: Paige Lewis, Camonghne Felix, and Jake Skeets.

Reading Fee

Let the World Have You

By Mikko Harvey

The pond wore a thin blanket
of ice. The ice reflected
the surrounding trees.
A goose flew
overhead and appeared
on the screen of the ice
briefly, passing like a taxi.
There were yellow No
Trespassing signs and white
No Hunting ones.
The signs fantasized
about the activities
they forbid.
The ice fantasized
about being shattered
suddenly by something
heavy, like a piano.
The goose guarded
her fantasy — which involved
a doorway, her mother,
and a pile of bones
— carefully.
I fantasized
about not having
any fantasies, and in
so doing drifted
even further from the pond

+

because the young
people everywhere
wanted to be older,
the dinner party
wanted to be a raindrop, the sex
wanted to be a hug, the interior
to be the surface, the doorway wanted
to be a goose — and truly believed
it could be an excellent goose
if given the chance —
the tiny nervous
mouth sounds wanted
to be a symphony, the symptom
wanted to be the whole disease,
and at the end of the night
all the jokes that worked
secretly wondered
what it would have felt like
to be jokes
that did not.

Knock knock.
Who’s — help, please,
I’m trapped inside
of a script I wrote
for myself.
I can hardly feel
anything underneath
these absurd robes
I put on
each morning,
so heavy they are
if not killing me exactly
at least harming the sacred
rabbit who lives
inside me —
No, I’m fine
the rabbit calmly
takes a break
from cleaning
his paw to say.
Save your concern
for yourself. And
those you love,
of course.
Okay, well.
I mean, yeah,
so the rabbit’s doing
okay. Which is great.
But still.

Still, if your life really
does turn out to be
a cycle of starting
fires, briefly
worshipping them
and then the next morning
sifting through the charred
remains for the most
mysterious little chunks
of wood burnt
black and shiny,
taking them home
and lining them up
on a shelf in your room —
I would like to take
this space to remind you
of the cat
in your grandmother’s story,
the one who gets caught
in a bear trap, comes home
a week later with her hind
leg mangled, bone visible
and surrounding flesh
infected.

This is rural
Finland, wartime,
with no vets around to call.
So the family dog — generously
or instinctively, I guess — starts to lick
the festering wound,
trying to clean it.
But days pass and
the leg won’t heal.
So finally this dog, gentle
as a nurse, takes the whole tibia
in his teeth
and pulls it
clean off. Probably saved
her life, your grandmother
laughs, putting
her fork down.
And yes, we can all
agree he was a good dog.
Good dog, good dog,
good dog,
good dog

but it’s the cat
I want you
to remember
(does any other
animal address itself, much less
disregard the note
of affirmation
it insisted on pasting
to the refrigerator door
each morning in a rush
while reaching for filtered water?).
The cat who knew
she needed help,
and sat still
so the dog could do
the unimaginable.

When all the bear trap wanted
was to be the leg around which
it closed.

Poetry We Admire: Motherhood

By Kim Harvey

The month of May means Mother’s Day in the U.S. and it’s that time of year when Spring is in full bloom. During this season of rebirth and new life, we looked for poems that explore the different aspects of motherhood—what it means to have a mother, to be a mother, to leave behind a mother, to lose a mother.

For May’s Poetry We Admire, we curated five excellent poems from around the net on the theme of mothers/motherhood. We bring you Taylor Byas in River Mouth Review, Nicole Cooley in BOAAT Press, Ally Ang in The Shallow Ends, Teri Cross Davis in [PANK], and Jae Nichelle in The Offing.

Your first acquaintance with a mother’s

scent, how her t-shirt droops and smothers.

Your neck in a back-bend over the lip

of the sink. The old McDonald’s cup she dips

into the faucet. How she butters

your scalp with conditioner and stutters

through your unruly crown.

from “Wash Day in the Kitchen Sink”

by Taylor Byas in River Mouth Review

There is much to admire in this tenderly evocative piece by Taylor Byas that goes right to the heart of an early childhood memory of a mother washing her daughter’s hair in the sink. The sensory details are incredible, such that I am utterly transported. I can almost feel the water and the mother’s hands rubbing my scalp. The anaphora, repetition, subtle end rhyme & enjambment are so well done that it all seems natural and effortless. I especially love, “The sprayer hose, its sputter / as it wets the back of your neck.” And I adore that the communication and love between the daughter and her mother is visceral, palpable, and transcends words: “Another language concealed within her grip.” Be sure to check out the entire issue of this great debut journal.

After my mother dies, I walk and walk the city until I can’t catch my breath furiously up and down the highway by my parents’ house in New Orleans. Past Prestige Flooring. Section 8 Housing. Zaddies Tavern, the hospital where my mother did not go to die.

Grief sharpens and loosens—

Then, five days after my mother dies, my best friend brings me to yoga class in an old library, with high ceilings and twinkling lights and I lie on the ground and take my first deep breath since my father found her body.

from “Breath, a Suite”

by Nicole Cooley in BOAAT Press

This sweeping five part elegy for the speaker’s mother is an examination of how grief inhabits our bodies and fundamentally changes us. Beneath the profound loss of the mother is an undercurrent of grief and regret for what we’ve done to Mother Earth, as the scene is set during a wildfire, the air thick with smoke. The smoke also brings to mind in the reader (as explicitly stated by the speaker’s husband) the memory of 9/11 and how that life-altering day changed us. All of it is so brilliantly represented by smoke in the air, the simple act of breathing, and the mother’s history as a smoker (reflecting also a specific time in the nation’s past). The complicated memories of the all too common mother-daughter dynamics regarding weight and body image really anchor the poem. Cooley deftly moves through all of these emotional and narrative complexities with grace and authenticity.

5 lie down inside of it / the belly of this poem / growing ripe & swollen / with your mourning / let your child body / sink into sleep / at its breast

from “I Call Grief By My Mother’s Name”

by Ally Ang in The Shallow Ends

Ally Ang’s poem is also an elegy for a mother, written in the form of footnotes with the numbers plotted against the blank page like a constellation. This poem after Ocean Vuong is pure genius— the slashed line breaks and short syllables, the body imagery, examining again how grief changes you (“grief makes a vessel / of your body / just as water / takes the shape of its container.”) And specifically how the death of a mother “finds you / abandoned child / curled into a question mark.” This poem taps into the reptilian brain and I can feel it deep in my belly, the pain of a child who has lost their mother.

After eight years of marriage

I swelled the fruit of you. It was

spring and you bloomed like

Washington’s magnolias

laden with possibility—

the madder matter of me

folding and cleaving inside you

from “Goddess of Blood”

by Teri Cross Davis in [PANK] Magazine

This poem is told from the perspective of the Goddess of Blood, taking a journey through the five sacred mysteries of blood: birth, menarche, pregnancy and birthing, menopause, and death. So, in the same poem, we experience being born and giving birth. Each section has its own strong images and metaphor, starting with “Birth— You rode in on your mother’s / tidal prayer. I baptized you / in vernix and blood.” Then we move into menarche as a rusty entrance with a door swinging open to the blood’s slow exit at the “midnight altar of your bed.” Death is still the final mystery, as the speaker (ie. the goddess of blood) wonders if she will leave her subject “like a wrung sponge.”

& it’s a rapid unbirth. & we’re back in our mothers

who are back in their mothers back in theirs & who,

depending on what we believe, climb trees or are Eve. &

regardless, we’re naked & unlearn to hide & to shame

& unspeak our first words. & mine, I believe, was mama

from “The Poem in Which We All Go Back to Where We Came From”

by Jae Nichelle in The Offing

Jae Nichelle has two powerful pieces in the new issue of The Offing. I have a special love for art that explores alternate realities and time travel, like this time in reverse phenomenon of unbirthing where we each go back into our mothers’ wombs through time all the way to the very beginning, whatever you believe that looks like. The way this poem flows across the page with its perfect line breaks, pacing, and use of empty space, even the soft consonance of its controlling image of “womb & water”—all gorgeous! And I love the way the poem ties in language as the last thing we would “unlearn,” giving new layers of meaning to the idea of mother tongue.

The entire Palette family would like to wish all the mothers out there a very happy (if belated) Mother’s Day! And to those who are grieving the loss of a mother, we see you & we are sending you all our love.

Be gentle with yourselves, everyone. Peace.

Embodied Experience: An Interview With Sandra Faulkner

By Benjamin Bartu

I read Sandra Faulkner’s Poetic Inquiry: Craft, Method, & Practice this January, while visiting family in Australia. Starting the book, my intent was to incorporate what I learned reading about the process of poetic inquiry into our interview. It was a matter of chapters and days before I began practicing the art myself, eager to make sense of the spate of wildfires that proved to be just the first of the new years’ cavalcade of disasters. That Faulkner is able in her words and writing to not only successfully advocate for the practice, but also to make it as accessible as she has in Poetic Inquiry is testament to the craft of her prose, as well as the scope of poetic inquiry’s application. I thought there were things we created to survive us, and somewhere else the things we created to survive. Poetic inquiry has shown me the two are indistinct. I could not have learned about it at a more essential time.

BB: One thing I love about this book is how well it succeeds in being both personal and meta at the same time. This starts in Chapter One, where you introduce a poem of yours, “Moving to Poetic Inquiry,” in which you familiarize readers with the craft using a piece devoted to it. The effect is substantively different from the one your prose achieves; how do you see the two in conversation with one another?

SF: Those who use poetry in their research and as part of ABR (arts-based research) practice must consider the dialectic between aesthetics and epistemics, that is the dialectic between how your work functions as poetry and how your work functions as research. When I first saw the potential of poetry for social research, I tried to combine my traditional social scientific writing and poetry. This was disastrous as poetry, because traditional social science writing does not contain (m)any of the things we associate with poetic writing—music, metaphorical language, attention to line. The work approached something like poetry, but the language and voice was too stiff, too dry, too “scientific.” It did not do what I needed it to do, which was be research that was evocative, representative, and worked as poetry. Then I tried a different approach where I wrote poems paying more attention to poetic craft. I started by focusing on aesthetic concerns, rather than using my researcher lens. This writing worked as poetry, and some of the poems were published in academic and literary journals. After this, I was able to see how approaching Poetic Inquiry from a craft perspective produced better work. It is in that middle space of considering research and artistic criteria, and asking yourself what your goals are for your work. This is the conversation (and maybe argument?) that we need: What is your work doing to achieve your research goals? What is your work doing to be “good” poetry?

As your book makes clear, Poetic Inquiry is hardly part of the normative research discourse. Is there a normative poetic discourse it is positioned against as well?

Poetic Inquiry is the use of poetry as/in/for research. Given the focus on poetry in a research context, considerations of what is good Poetic Inquiry occur within discussions of craft and criteria for ABR (arts-based research). Those who engage in ABR practices consider both artistic craft and methods. Thus, the discourse of interest is methodological; we can talk about the poet-researcher, the goals, uses, craft, history, and practice of poetry.

Reading the many poems that you incorporate into this book, variations in titles and form became especially fascinating to me. In poetic inquiry, are the principal functions of these techniques to contextualize? Is an inquiry-driven poetics dependent on context in a way other kinds aren’t?

I’m glad you asked this question, because I still wrestle with how to present Poetic Inquiry. What I can tell you is that it depends on the context. If I am reading poetry in an academic setting—a journal, text book, or presentation—I want and need that academic theorizing. I ask myself, “why is there poetry here?” “How is this part of research?” “What is poetry doing here?” The strength of poetry is the ability to position dialectics, to be evocative, to be embodied experience, but in a research context I often need a clue as to what the poetry is and should be doing. Having said that, there are times when a poem or poems can stand solo without the explanation. The explanation can be too didactic and ruin the experience. Perhaps that is what footnotes are for in Poetic Inquiry projects. I mean, who reads footnotes anyway?

What is poetic inquiry’s relationship to editing? If editing is a vital part of the process, is it usually clear what one is editing towards?

Revision. Revision. Revision. I tell students that revising is part of the process, a necessary part of method. If you want your work to achieve your goals, which are often multiple, then you have to revise and edit. I find having different sessions focused on specific editing goals helps. One session may be devoted to the aesthetics of the work. Another session may be all about the research. Of course, whether you achieve those goals is not usually something the poet-author-researcher can reliably assess.

In the book you discuss poetic inquiry’s close relationship to embodiment, and therefore its potential utility for feminist writers and scholars who “call for a methodology that is attentive to bodies and bodily knowledge.” How does this attention extend to race, disability, and class?

I consider Poetic Inquiry to be feminist methodology. I use poetic inquiry to collapse the false divide between private and public, as a form of embodied inquiry, and as political response. This means that the work must be part of a feminist ethics and reflective research practice. It necessarily attends to intersections of class, race, ability, gender, and sexualities. Or at least, the best work does. A poet needs to ask themselves how their positioning influences the lenses they use. In every project, you need to ask yourself: What about gender? What about race? What about class? What about ability? Feminist poetry as a form of poetic inquiry and political action offers a means of doing and showing embodied inquiry and to give voice to gendered and raced experiences.

How have you made use of embodiment in your own practice of poetic inquiry?

For me, writing poetry is an embodied activity. For example, I just finished a chapbook of poems titled Trigger Warning in response to news headlines. Reacting to headlines in the past few years has been a visceral experience for me. Often, I feel a mix of anger, deja vu, and sadness, and I feel it in my head and body. The poems in Trigger Warning speak to my embodied experiences and the connection of personal experience to larger understandings of gender, race, and class represented in the media. The presentation of embodied responses in poetry is part of living a feminist life. I write poetry as a way to understand and articulate bodily experiences and as a way to show feminist theory as an everyday practice. I work out lines when I am walking around town, when I am running; there is not separation between mind and body in my poetic practice.

In the section Poetry as Political Response, which begins with this wonderful quote “Students and audience members will take what they will from poetry. This is perhaps part of the traditional researcher’s fear.” This speaks to the democratizing power of poetry, and made me wonder; who is poetic inquiry’s primary audience? Is the democratizing value of poetic inquiry contingent upon its dissemination?

Poetry is powerful. Poetry matters. More people are writing and reading poetry than ever. A big strength of Poetic Inquiry is that it bridges a divide between public and academic work. I see it as a public project and an important part of public scholarship. I work at a public university, and we are having conversations about the public good. Our research is for the public, so considerations about how we can bring this work to the public speaks to the strengths of Poetic Inquiry.

So yes, we need to share our work in all kinds of spaces—blogs, rallies, bus stops, church, Girl Scout and PTO meetings as well as in more traditional academic venues.

What are the limits of poetic inquiry?

There are none! Okay, I will give the answer that I give to my students. I think there are some projects that may be better suited for Poetic Inquiry than others. Because poetry can be both/and, be read on multiple levels with varied interpretations, it is well suited for identity and social justice projects, any project where you want to show multiple points of view, a project where you want to evoke strong emotions in an audience, a project where you can’t make definitive statements. However, if you need a definitive representation, then you may need to use other means. I’m thinking of the use of statistics to show structural issues of inequity in such areas like housing, wealth accumulation, and debt. Of course, I would make the argument that you could use mixed methods; show the emotional resonance of a social problem with poetry and use “harder” science to make definitive factual claims.

Later on in the book, there’s a wonderful line in your chapter on craft, “[T]he line between my research poetry and my personal poetry has become like a gossamer thread as I live and embody the ethnographic poet’s life,” as this separation in your own work has become progressively scanter for you with the passage of time, have you noticed a similar phenomenon when engaging with the work of others?

Thank you for this question. Yes, I read others’ work with the same engagement, whether I’m listening to news, reading headlines and morning poems, or preparing to teach. I often consider how the material relates to a topic I’m teaching, a life problem I’m working through, or a writing project. And, especially when reading poems, I find inspiration, motivation, and instructions for work and life. I bring in poems when I teach, share poems with friends, and write response poems.

Since writing this book, you have also edited an anthology titled “Poetic Inquiry as Social Justice and Political Response,” within which a piece of yours appeared, co-authored with Sheila Squillante, “Nasty Women Join the Hive: a NastyWomanifesto Invitation for White Feminists.” How did the process of collaboration inform your understanding of poetic inquiry’s relationship to embodiment?

I am drawn to those whose work is doing things I admire. I understand that creativity is also a collaborative process. So, I have asked some of these folks to collaborate with me, as I get ideas for projects and refine them in conversation with others. Again, everyday conversations and life are inspiration and motivation for poetic projects. Sheila Squillante and I have been collaborating on work for a few years, often sparked from IM chats about the tedium of daily domestic life. Andrea England and I were at a writing residency at SAFTA and our breakfast conversations about feminism, teaching, and politics led to an edited collection on writing and resistance (Scientists and Poets #Resist). Collaboration is part of my daily embodied being.

Sandra L. Faulkner is Professor of Communication and Director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Bowling Green State University. Her poetry +images have appeared in Literary Mama, Ithaca Lit, Gulf Stream, Writer’s Resist, Rise Up Review!, damselfly and elsewhere. Her latest books are Poetic Inquiry: Craft, Method, & Practice (Routledge); Poetic Inquiry as Social Justice and Political Response (Vernon co-edited with Abigail Cloud); Scientists and Poets #Resist (Brill coedited with Andrea England). She researches, teaches, and writes about relationships in NW Ohio where she lives with her partner, their warrior girl, and two rescue mutts. She was the recipient of the 2013 Knower Outstanding Article Award from the National Communication Association and the 2016 Norman K. Denzin Qualitative Research Award. https://bgsu.academia.edu/SandraFaulkner

Featured Favorites of 2019

By Benjamin Bartu

These past few weeks, with their own wild and discordant sense of time, have felt like an invitation to reflect, to look back and find the good. We asked our readers to identify some of their favorites from the Featured Poetry we published in 2019. This is what they chose, with short reviews by our Associate Editor Ben Bartu.

I smear the makeup you left behind
on my face in an effort to love myself.

The Theory of Sinking

by Márton Simon, translated by Timea Balogh

That we have the opportunity to publish works of translation is one of our greatest honors at Palette. Márton Simon’s “The Theory of Sinking,” here rendered in English from the original Hungarian by Timea Balogh, was one of the most startling poems we came across in the last year. It was particularly illuminating to read this poem alongside Julia C. Alter’s “In/Continent,” (which also made this list), and contrast how the two poems conceptualize motherhood using oceanic imagery. Unlike Alter’s piece, Simon’s work seems unfixed in its own waters, uncertain in the possibilities it offers up. Just when the poem seems ready to come to a close, ending its last line as it ended its first, another line emerges, shorter, an afterthought that opens again, remaining with the reader long after the tab is closed.

(For more of Timea Balogh’s translations of Márton Simon’s work, please visit Duende: https://www.duendeliterary.org/mrton-simon)

In that terrible heat,
we made our feast.

Husband is The Loveliest Word

by Logan February

When we get it in our heads that two pieces are in conversation with one another, it often becomes difficult, if not altogether impossible, to see them as separate again. This is precisely the effect “Husband is the Loveliest Word,” had for me, which felt from first read like the sister poem to Denis Johnson’s “Heat.” Both pieces recount stories of summery domestic intimacy; one is an expression of despondence, one of transcendence; they are both brief poems; they are both poems that use perfect timing and harmony to turn banality into profundity. More than anything, they are pieces that speak for themselves.

It takes nine months
for me to remember
my pelvis. My body
forgotten now that no one
drinks from it
and no one drinks
it in.

In/Continent

by Julia C. Alter

In the past year, themes of loss, kinship, and motherhood emerged as some of the more common threads linking many of our published pieces. Making our way back through these poems, few have done a better job of interrogating and engaging with these ideas than Julia C. Alter’s “In/Continent.” Reading the piece, I couldn’t help but think of Kimiko Hahn’s The Narrow Road to the Interior, a collection that also deals with loss and motherhood in fragmentary form. Alter’s poem parcels loss out into fragments, and inso doing transfigures absence into hope.

Inside me the bees revive with a hum
rub together, roll in yellow. These bees,

they keep getting reborn

Practicing How to Be In This World

by Jaime Zuckerman

Jaime Zuckerman’s piece, in many ways, inspired this list. It is the kind of poem which demands a returning to, and seems to offer more with every reading. In assembling this collection, we wanted especially to highlight poetry our readers would take pleasure in returning to, not just in discovering for the first time. We admire not only the power of imagination at work in the craft of this poem, but also this poem’s ability to inspire confidence in the power of imagination.

I could chop something off any minute, and I remember
the plastic carrot and turnip toys with knife
I had as a kid, chopping each section of fake
vegetable off, but really, there’s a beauty in
this mystery of him not knowing that I know.

Chinese Girl Strikes Back

by Dorothy Chan

Some poems Palette has published in the last year have become signifiers for us, important turning points in the development of our identity as a journal. Others have showcased some of what we love most in poetry; innovative forms, subversions of normative power structures, and really, really good line breaks. When we’re especially lucky, a poem delivers all of this. Such is the case with “Chinese Girl Strikes Back,” the title poem of Dorothy Chan’s third collection of poetry, to be published in 2020 by Spork Press. The poem unfolds like a play in three acts, doing the work of representation, education, and narrative construction. We are in awe of this piece.

Pocho Boy #5

By Alan Chazaro

“Pocho Boy Meets World” is a Latinx poetry column written by California poet, Alan Chazaro. The son of Mexican immigrants, he is leaving his home and teaching job in Oakland to pursue living in South America and Mexico for the next year. For each destination, Pocho Boy will search for emerging and iconic Latinx voices to read, while documenting the textures, histories, and influences of each poet’s hometown region. Join him as he eats his share of quesadillas and uses broken Spanish in hopes of connecting more deeply with what it means to be a U.S. Latinx writer in Latin America.

Vol. 5: In Brazil, Pocho Boy Enters Basements & Translates Japanese-Brazilian Poetry

Where to begin with Brazil? Can I write about being there without mentioning the museums and galleries full of young, vibrant artists who toured me around their colorful cities? Or the crazy parties and beach life that kept us all up until the sun came out on a Tuesday morning? Or the constant warnings and alerts I’d heard from others about the robberies and killings I was sure to witness there? Or the healthy and delicious island-inspired food and cocktails at cheap prices? Or the non-stop music and dancing in the streets with strangers? Or the soccer history and fans with flags half the size of stadiums? Or the hikes and bike rides up steep mountain paths? Surely, there’s a lot to riff on after exploring around the Southern Hemisphere’s biggest country, but since this is an investigation of poets and their unique identities, I’ll stick to what I found in the basement of a cultural center in an unexpected library hidden deep inside São Paulo.

As a foreigner, you probably have a certain perception of Brazil. I know I did. Some of it may be true, but I found that most of what I expected regarding the country was exceeded and shattered—as it always is when you travel abroad. For starters, Brazil is an ultra-diverse nation, in every sense, perhaps competing only with the U.S. for the sheer amount of variety you’ll find. In São Paulo, for example—the largest, most populous city in the entire globe anywhere south of the equator—the income inequality is so drastic and varied that some residents ride public buses for four hours from the outer favelas into the center for work, while others ride helicopters across downtown for their business meetings (the city has more helipads than any other place worldwide because of all the millionaire residents). In terms of skin tones, there is no singular definition or image of a Brazilian, which means that I was mistaken for being a local (and I look more Middle Eastern than anything) just as much as my wife (who is a white-passing Latina)—the only country in which we were both regularly perceived as being natives. But more than having a fleet of helicopters in the sky at all hours and getting a pass from the locals as being one of them, perhaps the most surprising detail from my time in Brazil—particularly in the southern region—is that it hides the largest Japanese population anywhere outside of Japan. This may seem ignorant of me, but, have you ever met a Japanese person who spoke fluent Portuguese then switched over to English or Japanese while wearing a Neymar jersey in a hipster bar with a group of Afro-Brazilians? Up until then, I hadn’t. And because I’m fascinated by first-generation and immigrant identities, I wanted to learn more.

I quickly discovered that one of the neighborhoods in the capital of São Paulo is essentially a replica of Tokyo, with little alleys, Japanese architecture, manga and anime shops, food stalls, gardens, modern high-rises, temples, arched bridges, community centers, ramen shops, and 100% Japanese-speaking Brazilian residents—many of whom don’t even speak Portuguese. The district is known as Liberdade, or Liberty, and includes a mix of first-generation adults, but also many second- and third-generation youth, making for an interesting swirl of cultures and histories. It was truly unlike anywhere else I’d ever visited in Latin America—in which you’ll rarely find a dominant community of outsiders with such a clear and distinct influence on the city’s architecture and lifestyle—except Lima, Peru, which has a noticeably large and long-standing Chinese presence in the center of the city as well; but that’s perhaps a story for another time.

So, when I first crossed that bridge into Liberdade—an island floating above a tangle of cosmopolitan streets below—I felt like I stumbled into a world within a world, and I was determined to find whatever poetry I could that was born from this blend of faraway places. I started at the local museum, which explained how Japan signed a treaty with Brazil at the beginning of the 20th-century to boost labor in Brazil’s coffee fields. Since the Brazilian labor force was struggling, and the U.S. had stricter immigration laws, many Japanese workers decided to cross two oceans to land in South America instead. This unpredictable tide of history turned Japanese newcomers into an underclass of field-hands in Brazil’s southern countryside, helping to replace a void left by war and the end of slavery. Over the years, many poorly paid Japanese families mobilized and moved into the cities for better opportunities; large communities were established in urban areas to the south, where they have remained ever since. Having deeply integrated into Brazil’s social and economic fabric, generations of Nikkei Burajiru-jin, or Nipo-brasileiros (Japanese-Brazilians) have been born.

I asked—as always—those who could field my questions about this group, particularly about their literary presence in the city. Though 99% of those I spoke with were completely unable to assist me in my search, everyone seemed intrigued about Nipo-brasileiros poetry. Even those at the city’s main Japanese heritage center in downtown seemed caught off guard but were highly interested and supportive of my quest. I went nowhere for days. Finally, after asking around various book shops in and around Liberdade and other parts of the city, I found a place inside of a place inside of a place where I was told someone might have an answer. I literally had to go underground in a further-out cultural center and snake my way around the bottom of the building, past abandoned rooms, to eventually come back up another flight of stairs which led to an otherwise deserted library overlooking an empty parking lot. After weeks of searching, I’d found my jackpot.

Since no one there really spoke English or Spanish, we communicated just enough for me to explain my purpose. Thankfully, a younger Brasilian appeared (the only non-Japanese volunteer in the center, who was studying the subject for his PhD) and took me to a back room, where he told me to wait, and soon after brought me a small stack of books from the impressively organized archives of Brazilian literature written by Japanese authors. Many of the books weren’t what I was actually looking for, but one caught my attention: Jipanko Brasiliense by Simone Katsuren Nakasato. It was exactly what I had been burning calories running around the massive, traffic-clogged heart of the city looking for. Victory. But then, another obstacle—I couldn’t borrow the book from the archives, so I had to attempt to translate a handful of poems on the spot to get a sense of what this elusive subject was about. Here’s what I was able to scrap together (apologies to the Portuguese and Japanese-speaking communities if any of this came out butchered). I should note that each poem has a Japanese version, but I am unable to replicate it on the page. The Portugese version always precedes the Japanese, perhaps suggesting the author’s stronger relationship to current location over heritage, though strongly maintaining a sense of both in her “soul.”

The opening poem, a two-liner titled “Esclarecimento” (“Clarification”) establishes: “O que é um imigrante? / Visão dupla em um ser de uma alma sozinha?” (“What is an immigrant? / Double vision in one soul?”). Though not much to work with, the tone does establish a positive sense of self: of addition, rather than subtraction; the speaker, instead of being blinded by contrasting sides, is given more clarity about her wholeness, a “double vision.” The fact that this is the first poem in the collection and presents the speaker’s duality by asking two questions also speaks to the inescapable conflict for those of us who carry a tongue that is apart from our body, a language and history that doesn’t match our skin and blood—and how this never-ending interrogation is buried at the core of our being. For many of us who are children of immigrants, poetry is the place where we go to resolve our confusion and write our other selves into existence, asking questions rather than declaring truths, becoming whole by embracing our fragmented identities.

But she expands beyond the self. In a later poem, “Ao Brasil” (“To Brazil”), the speaker takes on a larger, more political and nationalistic voice by declaring: “Queremos un sonhado / almejado / e clamado / Ecossistema cultural…. Produzir pela inumerável, / constante e infinita / ação de todos os brasileiros… Fortuito país de povo e le povos” (“We want a dreamed / desired / and claimed / Cultural ecosystem… Produced by the innumerable, constant and infinite / action of all Brazilians… [a] Fortuitous country of people and peoples”). Here, I am reminded of Brazil’s greatest beauty—the diversity and range of the nation’s “people and peoples.” This poem is the verbalization of walking in Rio de Janeiro on a weekend evening among the glamorous masses, of going further north to humble towns and eating Feijoada, of seeing a shirtless child kicking a ball across a dirt yard in front of a house with no windows. Of poets, like Simone Katsuren Nakasato, a Nikkei Burajiru-jin born in Campo Grande, learning how to sing and dance in new worlds. Of the “constant and infinite” forms of identities that are writing from unexpected regions throughout Latin America. Of shattering stereotypes and bending binaries in order to create a healthier and more sustainable “cultural ecosystem” on our planet. Nakasato’s voice literally represents her people—it’s her way of taking “action” as a Brazilian for an overlooked population during an overlooked chapter of world history—thus increasing her community’s visibility and narrative. And yet, her voice highlights the simple truth of immigrants everywhere: the struggle to define the self when caught between conflicting and merging cultures (and I can’t imagine two cultures more apart than Brazil and Japan).

From the few works I was able to translate, I wondered more than ever: How come it was so difficult—in such a modern, cosmopolitan city—to find out about this group’s poetry, and what can be done to bring more poets from this community to the forefront of a national or even international conversation? Whose voices do we value in our society and why? And what can we gain from going out of our way to learn about mapping new “cultural ecosystems”? As always, I am left without answers, but open to the adventure of discovery.

The Luster of Everything I’m Already Forgetting

By Nicole Rollender

I press my mouth      to my son’s warm back,    cowbells distant. This wild
longing to keep      my body between his     & any kind of desolation. Sharp-
boned spells to ripen baskets       of Old World       potatoes & Christ’s body
dry on my tongue:       make me a good mother.       A woman photographed a polar
bear dragging a cub’s head        across snow, tendons’ red      wreckage the color
of earth after it’s burned       or how fireflies’ light look      after you’ve smashed 100
bodies to pulp       a still shimmer of survival.       The doctor cut my perineum
to free my son, heartbeat       galloping—& now      he wants to sleep standing
like a cow        but I beg him to sleep, say       cows can only dream on their veined
sides.       I think of the mother bear        if she isn’t dead, how was the cub     taken
unless famine season—       but we have to fight to the death, don’t we.       My son asks
how he got out       of my dark body.       I tell him he was cut free       & he says he folded
himself like origami          before emerging       a scorpion       razor-tailing out.
When he sleeps I re-hang       fallen star map & trace        his blue crayon trails (Google
says they’re lies) over Eradinus,       heaven’s river        its star names catch     my mother
throat: Azha, hatching place      Keid’s broken eggshells.       I don’t wake my son to look
at the moon. He sleeps       to grow, while I suture velvet      hands that care too much
&  not enough.       Sad house, since the cat has gone.     I want answers from these quiet walls
—it has watched mothers       before me hold       vomiting children     & then bathe them.
This     is the task we’re given, stay,        because if you go, your child     may wander
into a field filled       with rifle fire.     & the origami body      paper-thin skin cleft
from yours can ignite:       flaming wildflower scent      in his matted hair steels
though me.       Once my blue-veined breasts ached       to feed him &     I’m sorry
I can’t remember that pain       anymore; how easy it is       to forget the exactness of certain
blades. & is that       the way the body heals again       & again before entering the kingdom
of death,        trees white-garlanded       & the many women carrying water       jugs? I miss
my grandmother       who lost children young         & her memories of holding them
dead, they were so       luminous, she said,     daylight just gone.    The soul’s homeland
nameless. Now,       their bones all braided together          yellow tulips shake dirt loose.

originally published in Gigantic Sequins

Intersection #2

By Chelsea Dingman

With Intersection, her monthly column, celebrated poet Chelsea Dingman enters a place of questions left hanging—of lyric understanding, of addiction, and womanhood, and politics, and death.

Amid the Battery of Days

Blessed are they who remember
that what they now have they once longed for —Jean Valentine

It’s zero degrees Celsius. Early December. I feed my newborn daughter from my body, then a bottle. I’m not supposed to admit that I’m not breastfeeding. The nurses in the hospital shamed me into trying to feed her for the first three days of her life even though I had no milk. I listened to her cries as if they came from a room in another life.

What is a woman allowed to admit to? Starving? Shunning her pride? Praise that never proves true?

If I am praised for feeding my daughter of myself, am I a better mother?

[what I’m not saying, not to anyone, not for anything, not yet]:

My milk didn’t come in on my left side. On my right side, I have a mass the size of a golf ball. I can roll it around in my fingers. It feels like fire. It feels like a falsehood. It feels like I might die. It feels like the hard disappointment of bone & matter & love &

[another secret]:

My father died at thirty-six. When I turned thirty-six, I knew what the adage living on borrowed time looks like. I might’ve been self-destructive. I might’ve stopped eating quite as healthy and sleeping right. I might’ve thought the idea of a long life was as impossible as borrowing time.

+++++[what my body whispers]:

This is in my biology. My grandmother could not nurse her five children. My grandmother, who had a stroke after her fifth child was born. My grandmother, who was told that the birth control pill contributed to her poor health (hence, the fifth child). My grandmother who died not knowing who my mother was due to symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. My grandmother who baked us cookies and took care of us after my father died.

[what weighs on my mind]:

A childhood friend of mine died of breast cancer that metastasized to her brain a couple of years ago. She was young. She died within months of her mother. She left behind a baby son. She had contacted me when her son’s father had died suddenly, before her. She wanted to know what her son would need from her. She never told me she was sick. Instead, she sent me a message, when I was living in Florida, in the months before she died, saying you’ve always been a good friend, no matter the distance.

Is a good friend one who remembers? What does the body remember? What solace can this world offer her son who remembers nothing?

+++++[the voice in my head says]:

No one is too young to die.

[in case another woman needs to hear this now]:

I apologize. Constantly. I know better. I apologize anyway.

[in case this someone else feels this failure]:

My mother accompanies me to visit a pediatrician who tells me that babies do “beautifully on formula.” She tells me not to worry, but to focus on myself now. I schedule a mammogram and a breast ultrasound. I wait to see what time will decide. I wait and wait and wait and—.

+++++++++++++++[another aside]:

There are moments in this life that I didn’t want to be alive. When I was young, when my father died, when I was a grunge-listening, steel-toed boot-wearing teenager. Those days have long past. I want to be alive. I want to be alive. I want to see my children through their lives. I want my children to have a mother. I am alive, now, for the moment, but

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++[I am terrified of this life]—

I cry in the shower. I cry in the laundry room. I cry when my daughter turns her face away from me after she’s been given a bottle too many times. My milk continues to deplete in my right breast. I cry. I google breast infection. Breast cancer. Breastfeeding. I want to cut my breasts off. To be safe from my own biology. To be safe.

My son asks me to play Monopoly but I’m trying to feed my daughter. I know he misses me. My inattention is the perfect sky, just out of reach. Like the dead. The almost-dead. Like anything struggling to survive.

I’ve survived December after December since my father died. It is 34 years this December since I’ve seen him. I grew up without him. I grew up without knowing him. I grew up despite him: here or gone. That is how time works.

I read a news article while writing my new book in which a woman’s son starves to death because the health care community insisted that she breastfeed. My daughter lost weight for the first three weeks of her life because I was terrified. Because I felt like I didn’t know my own body, my own mind.

What can any mother do in the face of biology, but forgive herself?

So who mothers the mothers
who tend the hallways of mothers,
the spill of mothers, the smell of mothers,
who mend the eyes of mothers,
the lies of mothers scared
to turn on lights in basements
filled with mothers called by mothers in the dark,
the kin of mothers, the gin of mothers,
mothers out on bail,
who mothers the hail-mary mothers
asleep in their stockings
while the crows sing heigh ho carrion crow,
fol de riddle, lol de riddle,
carry on, carry on—

+++++++++++++++—Catherine Barnett “Chorus”

Poetry We Admire: Food & Family

By Kim Harvey

For our November Poetry We Admire, we have rounded up some of the best new poems we could find out there around the theme of Food & Family.

There is an ode to home, hurt, love, and healing and a poem in praise of Reynolds Wrap that is ultimately an elegy. There is daydreaming in a grocery store imagining reaching out to strangers, a father’s hands carrying liquor & ice cream, daughters watching a mother slowly fading away, a mama and grandma leading a family and feeding all the hungry mouths, and a recipe for honoring the ancestors, a ritual of mourning. These poems show us how food is tied up with memory, family, love, and loss.

This month we feature poems from Parentheses Journal, SWWIM, BOAAT Press, Poets Reading the News, The Hellebore Press, and Juke Joint Magazine. Let us share in a holiday feast of words from the grocery aisle to the roast and sautéed greens with ice cream and peach cobbler for dessert, and Reynolds-wrapped leftovers for later.

It’s all served up with love and gratitude for these delicious poems and for our extended poetry family. Blessings to you all and Happy Thanksgiving!

Crisp cold bags of butterhead lettuce,
big-stalked celeries, savoy cabbage
rimpled like the folds of a big emerald
brain, yellow and orange bells.

I don’t have enough money
for any of these.

from “Daydreaming at Publix”

by Eddie Krzeminski in Juke Joint Magazine

What I love about this poem, in addition to the music of the language and the excitement of the stream of consciousness daydreams, is the vibrant imagery and metaphor (cabbage = a big emerald brain) and the yearning for community (i.e. the narrator earnestly seeking a connection with the red-haired girl leaning over the freeze-dried plums and Charon hauling the carcasses of spoiled fruit-stuff). We completely relate to the speaker’s confusion among the “pink menagerie of meats” and their urge to reach out and embrace the “phantom hands” of the man in the mint green shirt standing behind the shelves pushing out the new milk cartons. It’s that quirkiness, vulnerability, and desire for human connection that drives this poem right into my heart.

In the afterlife of colonialism, one woman
must announce the murder of another sister.

Reader, please place the chicatanas,
garlic cloves, tree chilis, coastal chili peppers,
and slice of onion in a molcajete and grind them
together.

(Feel free to add a pinch
of water and salt, or tears.)

from “Chicatanas for Mourning: A Recipe”

by Alan Palaez Lopez in Poets Reading the News

If you’re not yet familiar with the work of Afro-Indigenous poet/artist/activist/scholar Palaez Lopez, start following them now. They have a chapbook coming out this year and a full-length collection forthcoming in 2020. In the meantime, enjoy this spine-tingling recipe for chicatanas salsa which is a prayer of mourning and remembrance of Carmela Parral Santos, mayor of a small Oaxacan town. Santos opposed deforestation and was found murdered in August because of her stance. The recipe calls for, among a list of other ingredients, “either water OR tears / salt (no salt if using tears),” “the strength of five generations of ancestors,” “2 dozen roasted chicatanas” (flying ants); “2 roasted garlic cloves,” “a love for all things Black,” and “a commitment to Indigenous life, everywhere.” There are instructions for how to arrange the adobe bricks with two white candles and Carmela Parral’s photograph, along with freshly picked mint to inhale, to commit “to care” and to “experiment with life, / always.”

& my mama is my president, her grace stunts
on amazing, brown hands breaking brown bread over
mouths of the hungry until there are none unfed

from “my president”

by Danez Smith in BOAAT Press

The incomparable Danez Smith has done it again with this “mighty anthem” declaring a new president or many new presidents including: Eve Ewing, Colin Kaepernick, Rihanna, Shonda Rhimes, “the trans girl making songs in her closet,” “the boys outside the Walgreens selling candy,” the “neighbor who holds the door open when my arms are full of laundry,” “the meter maid who lets you slide,” “beyonce & all her kids,” etc. At the heart of the poem is the speaker’s mama with her “brown hands breaking brown bread” and their grandma whose “cabinet is her cabinet / cause she knows to trust what the pan knows / how the skillet wins the war.” I want to live in this land of fierce women leading the way, this country where love rules.

I will take you in my hands
stuff your holes with omelets, roasts, sautéed greens
convince you that loving doesn’t hurt
that it won’t leave you wandering an unlit hallway
climbing a hedgerow of thorns.

from “Scar Tissue”

by Christine Taylor in Parentheses Journal

Taylor, who is also the Head Editrix of Kissing Dynamite, writes beautifully of a house as a place of refuge where the narrator is always fixing broken things— the gutter, the shutters, the cabinet door hanging on its hinge,”the old thermostat that insisted on 80 degrees in summer, /the cracked wooden door ushering in the cold, / the sniffly stray ginger kitten blind in one eye.” The narrator, like many of us, shows love by taking care of home and the people in it, by cooking for them, and repairing/healing what’s broken.

You close your mouth
to the spoon’s cool curve,
not impressed with the cubes
of summer melon. Soon, you
will refuse other favorites,
maple nut ice cream, clusters
of chocolate-bound
peanuts.

from “Rind”

by Kami Westhoff in SWWIM

Westhoff’s heartbreaking poem takes us inside a family where the adult daughters are feeding their mother the summer melon that once brought her joy, but she is gradually starting to refuse even her favorite foods, closing her mouth around the spoon. The last stanza is especially moving, as the melon is representative of love the way food so often is: “you were teaching us everything / we’d ever need to know about love. / The way it halves us. Slices us./ Carves the best of us from what / cannot be swallowed. Closes / its mouth to the rest.”

His hands
Large canteens filled with liquor & ice-cream,
Releasing pressure wherever we’d go—
The feed store, the rig, to buy chicken

From KFC—behind him, I’d walk

from “When I was ten, the insides of my father’s mouth”

by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick in SWWIM

There are several standout poems in SWWIM this quarter that relate to the Food & Family theme, and this one shows it’s not just mothers who are associated with food. Hardwick’s poem engages the reader in a father-daughter relationship. I particularly admire the metaphor of the father’s hands as large canteens filled with liquor, ice cream, and chicken from KFC. And I love how the title drops us right into the surprising and bewitching first line with the lovely and dangerous imagery that follows, hinting at family secrets (“What his mother carved into him, a curse.” / It will befall you, too.”)

pyrex serving pan lip / baked macaroni or peach cobbler / cobbled armor jagged ridges / lunchbox sandwich sheath / sheets sheets sheets shimmer

from “Reynolds-Wrapped Leftovers”

by Quintin Collins in The Hellebore Press

We close out this poetic feast with peach cobbler and leftovers. Leave it to a poet to praise common things like how the Reynolds wrap “sheets sheets sheets shimmer.” I admire the music of this poem, its consonance and slant rhyme with sounds and imagery like “sheets spun round cardboard swords.” Once we’re beguiled by its music, the poem takes us to a more personal, vulnerable place when we discover that the narrator’s grandfather worked for Reynold’s Metals and his retirement gift was a beluga watch, which the narrator’s uncle places in his palm at the grandfather’s funeral to “save a piece of his father for later.”