Knocking At The Gate

I have gone out, a possessed witch,    haunting the black air, braver at night;    dreaming evil, I have done my hitch    over the plain houses, light by light:    lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.    A woman like that is not a woman, quite.    I have been her kind. Anne Sexton. (1981). "Her Kind" from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). Full poem here.

The Spring/Summer 2020 issue of Subtropics , the literary magazine of the University of Florida, included "Rebel" by Sylvie Baumgartel: Savonarola was hanged & burned With two others in the same Square where he had called for the Mass burning of paintings, Mirrors, books & makeup. Full poem here.

In Guernica , Xiao Xi's poem "the wind would not stop" is translated from Chinese to English by Yilin Wang: a child licks the candy wrapper; the treat has fallen into the mud. those who sing romance of west chamber under wintersweet trees, nearly all lonely elders. Full poem here.  

  From Lauren Berry's 2010 collection The Lifting Dress : The entire red carnation in my mouth. Like any panicked schoolgirl, I’m inarticulate       and constantly introduced to beautiful things.   Full poem here.

Ashes. Greasy heaps of ashes, miraculously but ungratefully awake, walking pridefully around in the sunlight, japing and hollering, preening and bragging, unconcerned that we are but cinders tossed up by the wind, too often ungrateful for the brief gift of being alive.

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas, how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took questions on how not to feel lost in the dark. Full poem by Brad Aaron Modlin here.

I've been doing some reading. Catching up on the last four decades, really. So when I read Cormac McCarthy, his writing looks like a sledgehammer and feels like a sledgehammer when it hits you square in the face. His hammers have been forged with such heft that nothing can withstand them. When I read his stuff, I never want to write anything because what else can possibly be said over the unmarked graves of all of these other fallen writers? When I read Toni Morrison, her writing looks like writing from anyone but feels like a sledgehammer when it hits you square in the heart. Her hammers aren't built for heft, though, so as much for speed and dexterity, and they always hit the soft spot, the place where the most damage can be done. When I read her stuff, I never want to write anything because I can't do anything like what she does and besides I'm bleeding out. When I read Jeff VanderMeer, his writing looks like writing from anyone else and it feels like normal writing ...

Wednesday night in our house means (a) I take a poetry class on Zoom and (b) since I’m not cooking dinner, we order Subway. This has become our way of life at least for the semester but I might be pushing my luck tonight. – J.F. "Jeff" McCullers

Valentine's Day is for lovers, and love is perhaps the greatest of all topics in poetry. In celebration and for your consideration, then: "Aubade" by Amber Flora Thomas   "American Smooth" by Rita Dove "The Quiet World" by Jeffrey McDaniel "Sonnet XXIX" by William Shakespeare "Life Story" by Tennessee Williams

  Nikky Finney writes in The Bitter Southerner : There are women who wait at the door until you arrive like you said you would. Women who stand at the screen with their elbows poking in at the wire like original tuning knobs made of fossilized walrus bone. There are women who wait at the door until your car rolls up in the yard, the engine cut, the headlights shut, the driver’s door cracking the air into two slices of brown bread... Excerpted from Finney, Nikky. (2020. Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems & Artifacts. Evanston, Illinois, USA: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. Photograph by Forrest Clonts