poetry Archives

Guest Posts, poetry

Morning

April 5, 2021

By Eric LaFountain

Slower mornings are so much better than those

track race mornings, when the gun went off and the

sprinting began in a frantic a.m. rush.

I can’t sprint anymore,

I don’t know where that sprinter went,

I prefer if he never returns.

I’ll take my coffee in bed on a Wednesday.

Please don’t rush me or expect a prompt response.

I’m busy smelling the fresh brew now (it has notes of pecan and milk chocolate).

I like resting the warm mug on my naked

stomach and the phrase “mocha java,” the way it sounds

said aloud, how it makes my mouth water.

Are you seriously still trying to reach me?

The deadline has passed and everything is okay.

Our world is closed, our world opened, our world closed again.

I barely noticed.

Coffee beans should be oily, fragrant, decadent.

And the morning should be wide open and roomy to enjoy all of those sips.

I already told you I’m not on your timeline.

I already told you I’m not up to task.

You’re too loud, and I don’t like the sound of your voice.

It’s a bus fume voice, there are so many

bus fume voices, bad for the health, bad to be near and breathe in.

Someone told me once about Hunter-Gatherers, how they only

hunted a couple hours a day, at most, then spent the rest

relaxing in rivers and napping and having sex.

So can’t you see I’m a Hunter-Gatherer?

What’s so hard to understand?

Can we maybe try this again, start over?

Do you like the smell of my coffee?

Would you like to have some and lay in my bed?

Just climb in already, get comfortable.

I’m sorry but I forgot what we were talking about.

I forgot if the world is closed or opened or has closed again.

Eric LaFountain lives and teaches in Miami. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Potomac Review, Jabberwock Review, Hobart, and Pleiades. He’s currently working on a YA novel about an abandoned boy and abandoned cat. You can follow him on Instagram @eric.lafountain.

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This past year has been remarkable, in the best and worst of ways. (Her)oics Anthology is a collection of essays by women about the lived pandemic experience. Documenting the experiences of women both on the front lines and in their private lives, this book is an important record of the power, strength and ingenuity of women.

Pick up a copy at Bookshop.org or Amazon.

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Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

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Click here for all things Jen

Guest Posts, poetry, Winter

A Winter Spell for the Changeling

December 31, 2020

By Sandra LeDuc

Turn into the slide.

It’s the first thing you learn about driving on ice.

Do not pump your brakes.

Do not panic and overcorrect

lest you send the car into an unrecoverable spin.

You were probably going too fast for the conditions.

Because what the ice wants, it gets

a frozen wave seeking its shore.

You are a pebble, turned, lifted, spat out

against guardrail, snowbank, ditch, over the embankment down into a ravine

snow dusting the hood.

Or maybe you are flung into unending light.

Turn into the slide.

Incantation, blessing, plea to the unknown.

Strength in your hands as you let go of the wheel.

You are drifting.

Sandra LeDuc is a queer writer, adoptee, and musician. Originally from Minnesota, she lives in Seattle with her wife, two cats, and a dog named Noodge. Her work has been published in The Rumpus and Entropy. She can be found on Instagram as @sandrainseattle

Recommended Reading:

Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Click here for all things Jen

Guest Posts, poetry, Trauma

TRAUMA, MARY OLIVER, AND ME: HOW POETRY SAVED MY LIFE

August 7, 2019

by Nadia Colburn, PhD

Mary Oliver, who died recently at 83, lit the way forward for me when I doubted that I could ever move past suffering into survival, let alone beauty and joy.

In 2011, I was a poet who had stopped writing poetry. Although writing had long been a trusted friend, holding my hand as I remembered being sexually abused as a child, writing also seemed to hold me in place, to mire me in pain.

Much of the poetry I had once loved now seemed to mirror back to me violence and suffering. I didn’t want to be the cliche of the unhappy poet, or worse. Two of my poet friends, both also graduates of the my PhD program, had recently committed suicide. I often thought back to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, two mother poets who had famously committed suicide. I couldn’t help but wonder if poetry was doing us more harm than good.

I was a mother of two young kids when memories of a babysitter abusing me came flooding back. If for a while writing poetry allowed me to express my feelings, I soon worried that the form was holding me in my pain with no way out. I decided to move away from poetry, to write non-fiction instead. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, poetry

SIMPLE BEAUTY (Mas Tequila)

February 27, 2019

By Alma Luz Villanueva

“I used to think I was the strangest person in the word, but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me, too.”

Frida Kahlo

Me– “Frida, I think if
we had been girls to
gether, we would have
been best amigas.”

Frida– “Are you more
boy than girl?” she
laughs.

Me– “I think I’m half
and half, sometimes the
boy takes over, and
sometimes the girl.”

Frida– “I wouldn’t
want to be all boy or
all girl, that would
be boring, como no,” she
laughs again, stirring the
dark mole, making me
hungry. “Juana will
take over, time to
paint, boy/girl,
girl/boy, I give
birth to paintings, not
children,” she
smiles. Continue Reading…

Converse-Station, Guest Posts, poetry

The Converse-Station: Laurie Easter Interviews Alice Anderson

August 28, 2017

Jen Pastiloff here. I’m the founder of The Manifest-Station. Welcome to The Converse-Station: A place where writers interview writers. With the site getting so much traffic, I can think of no better way to utilize that traffic than to introduce the readers to writers I love. The dialogues created within this series have stayed with me long after I’ve read them on the page. Today’s is no different. It’s between Laurie Easter and the amazing Alice Anderson.

By Laurie Easter

Alice Anderson is an award-winning poet and author of the new memoir Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away: A Memoir, published by St. Martin’s Press on August 29, 2017. I met Alice at the AWP conference in Washington DC last February, where I picked up a copy of her breathtaking poetry collection The Watermark. Alice’s writing reflects the spirit and charm of her personality. Honest, straight-forward, and intensely beautiful. Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away is a book that sucks you in and doesn’t let go. Both harrowing and full of love, it is a story of survival, resilience, and redemption that will resonate for a long time to come. It has received rave reviews, including starred reviews from both Kirkus and Booklist. An excerpt from Alice’s memoir Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away can be found online at Good Housekeeping. https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/relationships/a45620/some-bright-morning-ill-fly-away-alice-anderson/

Laurie Easter: There is a tendency to classify works of literature. And while some writers may resist labeling their work, taxonomy allows publishers to target a desired audience. For example, some of the sub-genres of memoir include travel memoirs, divorce memoirs, coming-of-age memoirs, etc. One thing I find interesting about your memoir, Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away, is that the book occupies space within many sub-genres. As readers, we get glimpses of the narrator coming of age in scenes from her childhood and young adult life. We witness her in varying locations: Sacramento, Paris, New York, and Mississippi. We experience the multitude of traumas she lives through and observe how she deals with the devastation of childhood sexual abuse, physical pain and suffering from accidents, Hurricane Katrina, mental and emotional abuse by her husband, domestic violence, and the ultimate threat of losing her children. Each one of these narrative threads could categorize the book as a particular type of story—a trauma and redemption story, a navigating the chaos story, a mother’s fierce love story. To me, the one key element that stands out is Resilience. The book is many things, but above all else, I see it as a story of the resilience of not only this one woman and her children, but of human nature and the body. And that resilience gives me hope.

How do you see this story? What kind of narrative is it for you? If you were to distill it down to one key element to label it, what would that look like? Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, poetry, Young Voices

Three Attempts at Being Coherent

April 5, 2017

By Sun Rey

referendum.

Was there ever a space where my body was nothing but a placeholder?
That when I wrapped my lips around your tongue, the depth of my flesh was nothing but a barometer: certain pigment, certain
pressure.

Should she do the same, would there be a difference? Is there a difference between two brown queer girls? Or is the space we occupy tied up so tightly by Tiny Minority status that we are fossilized as we are breathing— you can’t tell the difference between a Hindu and a Muslim— I keep hearing you say “oh wow i’ve never met anyone like you!”— you can’t help touching my hair— you spread the baby oil across my bumpy skin with gloves on— i mean—
you saw who i was didn’t you?
you saw who i was you didn’t
just line up the faces i’ve been collecting into neat cornrows:
tall, gay.
brown skin, hairy arms.
arab name, black hair.

Let me pray to my many-fingered God
that you didn’t just mean to choose me as a relic. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, poetry, Race/Racism

Thole–. (a lyric on my American guilt)

November 21, 2015

By Joe Jiminez

I watched a video: men’d hurled bodies onto a freeway.

In front of my television I paused, unthinkingly—

Bodies. Asphalt. Sky—.

México. This is where my mother is from—.

With my eyes, I listened. For something often comes when we shut down frenzy and instinct and let the body be a body—.

A body is a form, a physique, anatomy, skeleton, a soma.

A body is a torso and hair, main parts, heart and nerves, tendons and toes.

At my computer screen, I paused. I was watching it again—the bodies in México thrown onto pavement. The frame, and I gawked at the bodies’ dismal shapes, a geometry all at once unfamiliar and wonted because pixels.

Killed men strewn across a dark road… Eons ago, the land also suffered so many insufferable deaths.

A living room shrine dedicated to a woman named Rosa Diana Suárez: white party dress, photographs, wall-painted ivy, a tiger in a tree. Offerings of chicken and chewing gum, and her father made this in memory of her—.

“impunity is the main motive of the gender[ed] crime…”

Don’t you remember?

Land and specie and dominance—how is this not the same?

Thole—. That is the syllable for it.

How it means to tolerate, so distinct from allowances. Or the slim permissions we make to seek some horror and not ourselves be eaten with it. “to endure something without complaint or resistance; to be afflicted and to suffer—.”

We thole. You thole. I thole.

Guest Posts, poetry

Voices of Our Ancestors.

February 10, 2015

By Alma Luz Villaneuva.

I began to write my first real poetry on my farm in Sebastopol, California, the early 1970s. My daughter, Antoinette, had turned fifteen, the same age I was when I had her. It felt like a time bomb went off deep inside of me, at thirty. A gathering of words. I was choking with them. An eruption of words. From my womb. A lava of words began to spill from my mouth, eyes, ears, my trembling fingers, pen. I locked myself in the bathroom- the only door with a lock- with pen/paper, sitting on the toilet seat as my kids yelled, “Where’s Mom, do you know where Mom is…” I had three of my own children (my daughter 15, two sons- Ed, 13- Marc, 8) and two ‘stepsons’ (Eric, 8- Jacob, 6). So five children in all at that time, two of them yelling, “Where’s Mom!” Marc began to jump up to the window, trying to look in, his head appearing, disappearing, “Mom, are you in there, Jacob has a dart in his head!” I sighed, but I got my first line down, trembling. One line on the small blank notebook page, but it was mine.

When we first moved onto this beautiful farm on a full acre, a stand of redwoods off to the side of the house, an ancient walnut tree, weeping willow by the creek, peach, pear and apple trees in the back fields- not an orchard but enough for us- two barns across the creek, and the boys would build their forts back there, my older son, Ed, a beautiful tree house, installing a stained glass window he made himself (of a summer sun, a fertile field)…we had a cross burned on our front lawn. Actually, two crosses burned on our front lawn. Friends of ours followed us from the Bay Area- brown, black, white hippies with long hair- they helped us move in, camping for a few days with live music, much singing and dancing too. Hence, the burning cross after everyone left. My daughter screaming at the sight around midnight; there it was, a cross burning on our front lawn. I was shocked, terrified…would they try to lynch us, but I kept it to myself.

Jen Pastiloff is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Join her in Tuscany for her annual Manifestation Retreat. Click the Tuscan hills above. No yoga experience required. Only requirement: Just be a human being.

death, Grief, Guest Posts, poetry

Grief Anniversary.

December 17, 2014

By E.B. Wexler

“anniversary” implies that I do not have grief the other 364 days

I do.

But as the date approaches

I feel, slowly arising

The original grief

The breath sucked out of me when I got the news over the phone.

The early grief

Walking around in a daze, wondering where she went

How things would be now

She was 31

She was my “person”

And it was out of the blue.

I have not been the same since. And I don’t want to be…. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, love, poetry

How to Love a Stranger.

November 13, 2014

By Adina Giannelli.

How about we meet in Chicago, a city neither mine or yours, and see what, if anything, might be found there;

And you will fly in from a small southwestern city, not your own, and I will arrive at O’Hare late, owing to unanticipated flight delays, and I will meet you in the lobby of the Hotel Godfrey, and you will be there, waiting;

And our hotel will be full of Europeans and people looking for a time, a show, a warm body (always a warm body);

And I will talk to you for hours, that night, about unanticipated subjects of all kinds; you ask for a year-by-year recitation of my life, and you ask are you okay? and how are we doing? and does this irritate you, the barrage of questions. Some people find it cloying, you will tell me, but I think it kind;

And we will sleep, strangers in a large cocoon, and your hand will slip quietly over mine;And we will float, curious, upon the muddy waters, in our rapid riverboat, our bodies anchored to metal folding chairs, our necks craning to see the city’s architecture from our watery vantage, the sun shining bright against us, in spite of and through the wind;

And the boat will rock and occasionally rise, the tide high or low (but I don’t know), and we will glide in our seats, unsure of what is flowing forth before us, certain only of our bodies, separate and together, moving easily through space and time;

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