Two very beautifully precise poems of place by Daniel Carden Nemo
"From the cracks in temple platforms we pull small,
unwilling objects: coins, pieces of shrapnel,
slivers of amethyst or glass, green as unripe figs"
aboutplacejournal.org/issues…
A fine lyric poem by Pennsylvania's John Repp.
"Hear the bee. Hear the clavichord. Hear the split
lemon of the heart. How? Hunger for sour juice,
soft seeds chewed to bitterness, the heart a relic
of what once got said, of what once said something"
broadkillreview.com/post/hea…
"The second woman says, you’ll look so gorgeous with black hair. We’ll look like sisters. The first woman says, yes. Then they are quiet for a moment. I can hear the winds of autumn outside rising."
cgreview.org/magazine/hair-d…
“My father, / lymph node masses fading from / his x-rays, said surviving one thing / means another comes and kills you. / He’s dead, and so, I trust him.” —John Murillo, “On Confessionalism” @commonmag@FourWayBooksthecommononline.org/on-confe…
"PJ had read about a Waffle House disaster scale. Green, business as usual. Yellow, limited service. Red, big trouble. He wondered where they were on that scale."
mrbullbull.com/newbull/flash…
ALT What Music Is
Have you ever seen a Pomeranian goose?
One comes to visit me every morning
at the end of third shift. It's domesticated
& the people next door to our medical facility
let it wander. It waddles up to the walk
as I leave work: honk honk do you have bread sir?
Perhaps a fish or two? It's brown
& white & big & a bit pushy.
Pretty bird I tell it & it preens
like an addled swan.
I always wonder what the birds are saying.
How do starlings sway in their murmuration
across the sky? After do they tell each other,
Dybek’s “Chord” opens a statement that could be the beginning of a joke, riddle, or parable. “A man steps out of the sunlight”; anything could happen. The poem moves by rhyme; that “chord” in the title also happens to be *inside* the accordion sighing. Hear it? Titular beauty.
The lit new issue of Public School with new poems and peer written essays by Joseph Chapman, Justin Hamm, Karen Finneyfrock, Karen Holman, Katie Hartsock, Lauren Camp, Mike Santora, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Sehee S. Oh, and Zach Savich
publicschoolpoetry.com/curre…