WHAT IS MY LIFE ABOUT?
by Julie Price Pinkerton

This naked, lonely question
is still simmering in a crock pot
on the counter of a beach bungalow

where no one lives. But if you like,
I can show you some examples of what falls
out of my life when it’s whacked like a piñata:

My friend Emily reminisces about the cat
she used to have, and still misses.
“Clearly, Pippin and I were telepathic.”

In my collection of very bad Christmas decorations
there is a cloisonné manger scene with a baby Jesus
who has a snout like a piglet.

I have been criticized for always looking downward
when I walk. But in only five decades I have found enough
coins to sink a rowboat.

If I were a household object I would insist
on being a gooseneck lamp or the yarn mane
of a toy horse.

Most of my prayers are like drive-by shootings.
Please help me. Please save her. Thank you
for the parking spot.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

---

Julie Price Pinkerton: “I am a poet of faith. I’ve never written that sentence before. I was raised in a Baptist church on a gravel road on the outskirts of Brazil, Indiana. All of Brazil, Indiana, is kind of an outskirt. The church of my childhood was weird and toxic. Long story. At the center of it: Our pastor’s son (who became a pastor himself) was a pedophile. Nobody knew this until many years later, but something was off there, and I could tell. I hated going there. I stuck with my faith, though. Went to a really small Methodist college, the University of Evansville. A battering ram hit my faith in God when I was a freshman and our school’s entire basketball team was killed in a plane crash. Among the lost was the boy I had just started dating. But faith was still there, flailing. Post-college adult stuff. Marriage, divorce, the switching of churches, the switching of denominations (within Christianity), jobs, cities, marriage again, and hobbling along with my belief in God, which never leaves, but baffles me repeatedly like a train I can hear blaring somewhere in the woods but I cannot find the tracks. I’m 54 now. And Christ is still the only thing that makes sense to me. My atheist friends find this quaint. That’s OK.”

https://www.rattle.com/what-is-my-life-about-by-julie-price-pinkerton/

#poem #poetry #literature

MOTEL NIGHT ATTENDANT
by Mark Evan Johnston

Out here on Route 38,
I’ve learned the difference
between noise and sound.
Sound is familiar: the whirr
and clank of the ice machine,
the clink of a radiator,
the sough of the wind,
an occasional train.
Here noise means trouble.
Number 32, angry
with his wife, throws
a Gideon at her head.
I only hope he doesn’t
throw the lamp.
I sit here beneath
sixty watts of darkness
reading a trash novel,
waiting for the cheap tinkle
of this small bell to sound
but it never does.
Everything is in order:
the linens (call them that)
for tomorrow’s chambermaids (call them that),
the books, the Coke machine.
I make sure the Planter’s peanuts
don’t turn green
behind their sun-struck plastic.
Sometimes I almost hope
for trouble: a random shout,
an untimely splash in the pool,
a crying out that doesn’t
have to do with sex.
I want to have to go down
to Number 18 and set
things straight.
Years ago (here comes old Krebs),
we had a murder here,
before my time.
(He works the night-trick
at the mill.)
Some loon got trashed
(Krebs doesn’t stop to talk)
and poured beer on his wife
while she was getting off
on the Magic Fingers.
(Krebs always leaves
his shoes outside his door.)
He cried and tried to blame
it on the management, but
it came out he tampered
with the wires. Dupard
was his name, Canadian.
But don’t get me wrong.
I’m not looking to open up
Number 10 and find someone
dangling from the south end
of my sheets, or blood
pooling from under
the bathroom door.
Krebs, a night’s work himself,
has the country music on too loud.
The 3:15 sounds lonely,
the bell stands mute,
the buzzing of our new
neon sign would like
to drive me crazy.
But that’s not a noise.
That’s a sound.
No trouble tonight.

—from Rattle #27, Summer 2007

---

Mark Evan Johnston: “A few years back, when I would visit my daughters outside Pittsburgh, I stayed at a small motel. It had the air of being the sort of place where someone might have been murdered once, or would someday be murdered. I realized as I thought about it that this impression was created by the expectant silence of the place, a silence into which random sounds would occasionally intrude. In ‘Motel Night Attendant,’ I have attempted to register how these small intrusions might strike the speaker of the poem.”

https://www.rattle.com/motel-night-attendant-by-mark-evan-johnston/

#poem #poetry #literature

But isn’t that what poetry is all about?
Images speaking to the unspeakable
In our dreams as we lie awake in our sleep?

ALLEN GINSBERG’S DEAD
by M.L. Liebler

Why, to write down the stuff
and people of everyday,
must poems be dressed in gold,
in old fearful stone? …
I want poems stained
by hands and everydayness.
—Pablo Neruda
I know Allen Ginsberg’s dead,
And I want to write
A poem for him just like every-
Body else wants to do, but I can’t
Help but think of my neighbor
Who too died alone, recently, in his home of
30 years, and how he was a person
Who will never have a poem
Written in his honor or to his memory.

He was a person who will never have
His life enshrined in sound
And symbol of verse or song.

I didn’t know my neighbor either,
But I want to remember him
With verse and poesy just the same.

I want to celebrate
His life as the important treasure
He must have been as someone’s

Husband, father, brother, friend.
I want to do this
Simply because he lived.

My neighbor wasn’t famous,
And I probably only saw him once
Or twice in all the years that I lived
Behind his back fence.

But his words always made me
Amazed at the kindness of this world
When he spoke softly to me,
While he tended his garden.

I don’t remember his words
As memorable quotes spoken
By a famous person. It was just small talk

Spoken in the lexicon of the backyard.
No “Howl” or “Kaddish” or
“Sunflower Sutra” to be sure,

But graceful words that rose
And danced over the fence,
Behind his red bricked house.

So, while I would really love
To write a poem for Allen Ginsberg,
Like everyone else, right now
It seems more important for me to capture
My neighbor’s life, just another person
Whom I never knew.

I’ll write it all down
In a poem that he’ll never read
And that his family will never see
In print or hear at a public reading.

But isn’t that what poetry is all about?
Images speaking to the unspeakable
In our dreams as we lie awake in our sleep?

And, now, because I’ve shared this poem
With all of you, we are forever connected
All of our bones together
Side by side in the rich graveyard
Soil of poetry and life.

—from Rattle #9, Summer 1998

---

M.L. Liebler: “When I’m in the second grade, I start scribbling stuff. It’s—you guys know, being poets and writers—it’s in there; you can’t do anything about it. But I had no idea, and I would get in trouble for it. They would call my grandmother and say, ‘He scribbles, and we don’t know what it is, but he’s scribbling again, so you pay for the book.’ When I got to the fifth grade I was doing this all the time, scribbling on paper and notebooks and so on. I remember having a big English textbook that had a pelican on a post in the ocean, and when I opened that book I noticed that it had things in it that had a lot of white space around them. When I saw that, I thought, ‘That’s kind of what I’m scribbling. What I’m scribbling has a lot of white space around it.’ So at that point, that’s when I was first able to say, ‘Oh, it’s a poem.’” (web)

https://www.rattle.com/allen-ginsbergs-dead-by-m-l-liebler/

#poem #poetry #literature

Thanksgiving for Two
by Marjorie Saiser

The adults we call our children will not be arriving
with their children in tow for Thanksgiving.
We must make our feast ourselves,

slice our half-ham, indulge, fill our plates,
potatoes and green beans
carried to our table near the window.

We are the feast, plenty of years,
arguments. I’m thinking the whole bundle of it
rolls out like a white tablecloth. We wanted

to be good company for one another.
Little did we know that first picnic
how this would go. Your hair was thick,

mine long and easy; we climbed a bluff
to look over a storybook plain. We chose
our spot as high as we could, to see

the river and the checkerboard fields.
What we didn’t see was this day, in
our pajamas if we want to,

wrinkled hands strong, wine
in juice glasses, toasting
whatever’s next,

the decades of side-by-side,
our great good luck.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58040/thanksgiving-for-two?mc_cid=fa788b5ee2

#poem #poetry #literature

Wooden Window Frames
by Luci Tapahonso

The morning sun streams through the little kitchen’s
wooden panes; its luminescence tempts me to forego coffee.
But I don’t. The dark coffee scent melds with the birds’
chirping along the hidden acacia. Then, a small bird
alights on the cross of the wooden clothesline.
Its tiny head turns from side to side, then as if sensing me,
it gazes at me through a window square.
We ponder each other, then remember our manners,
and it flies off into the clean, cold air.

My Kiowa friends say a visit from a bird
is the spirit of a departed loved one.
I think again of Marie, my friend, my comadre –
the many feast days, powwows, and trips we shared.
We cruised down Taos’s one main street,
and rushed to Smith’s grocery for last-minute necessities,
or Walmart for the white cylinder candles for wakes.
We hauled huge, bulging bags to the town dump.

Oh, sister, this entire town brims with memories
of our long sisterhood, since our early twenties
when we were young mothers,
but that was in the last century.

This quiet casita is surrounded by tall stands
of elm and cottonwood trees, their bare, brown
branches stark against the deep, blue sky.

Every other week, snow falls in thin waves
onto the flat ochre houses
that seem anchored to the ground.
Outside of these thick adobe walls, a stillness settles upon everything.
As memories drift all around, I gather ingredients for a stew,
scents of coffee and toast linger around the arched doorway,
and the warm air in the kitchen lightens the chopping of vegetables.
Soon, the windowpanes are damp from the simmering stew.

All there is now, is to wait, sip coffee, and watch the snow
fall in layers on the roofs, trees, fences, and cars.

I am in a serene cocoon of memories.
All our conversations and laughter are silent now.
Somewhere north of here, dogs bark playfully,
probably romping in the fresh snow.
Just up the road at the pueblo, your family gathers.
They replenish the fire, stir pots of red chile
and place potato salad and platters
of sliced oven bread on the table.

Copyright © 2024 by Luci Tapahonso. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 28, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“A dear friend, Marie Reyna, passed in 2022. Because the Covid pandemic had just ended, there wasn’t a public memorial. Then, in January of 2024, I was awarded a Helene Wurlitzer [Foundation] residency—allowing me to write and live in Taos for three months. It offered me an extended chance to visit and be with Marie’s family, relatives, and friends. I could finally memorialize and grieve the loss of our long friendship.”
—Luci Tapahonso

https://poets.org/poem/wooden-window-frames

#poem #poetry #literature

Juke
By Diane Seuss

What kind of juke do you prefer?
For me, it’s the kind with three
songs and thirty-seven blank
title strips. Three songs, and two
are “Luckenbach, Texas.”
The third is beautiful and arcane,
but the patrons hate it,
and the record skips.
I prefer the three-song juke
and the three-toothed human

smile. I found the juke of my dreams
in a bar called “Chums,” no clue
the origin or meaning
of the quotation marks. It was a prime
number of a bar, and now it’s dead.
One night, drinking half-and-
halfs, half beer, half tomato juice,
with schnapps chasers, a cheap
source of hallucination.
A soon-to-be-defrocked Catholic

priest, Vic Jr., my mother, and me,
our faces streaked blue with pool
chalk, juke red as a beating heart,
and just a strip of hollyhocks
and a tree line between us
and the northern lights.
I was young. I looked like a Rubens
painting of a woman half-eaten
by moths. What lucky
debauchery, the ride back

on a washboard dirt road,
taking everything for granted,
flipping off the aurora borealis
like it was some three-toothed human
in flashy clothes dancing
to get my attention.
I wasn’t a mean drunk then,
just honest.
Next morning, mom walked in
on the naked priest

in the shack’s garage,
washing himself with a rag
and cold water from the well
in a metal dishpan. I’d later do dishes
in that pan and wash my hair
in that pan. We popped popcorn
on the one-burner wood-burning
stove and ate it out of that pan.
I’m talking about a time and a place.
All I can say of it is that it was real.

The song choices were limited,
so the grooves were dug deep.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/161499/juke?mc_cid=4530d316f0
#poem #poetry #poets #literature

#literature #poem
found a great online site for #lyrics
from all over the world with translations in English and Spanish
f.e. #Nahid-Kabiri from #Iran
https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/2299

someone can provide me the online version of #Octavio-Paz #El-laberinto-de-la-soledad ?
#Mexico
I had it in copied paper - but seems I threw it away :(

Take a breath – look within,
witness all the wonders spin,
that Christmas spirit sends:
Reflective Advent!

Candle glow, holiday cheer,
Winter magic, snowflakes near,
hopeful light that ascends:
Transcendent Advent!

Spending time together, close,
giving joy – a sweet disclose,
Christmas carols blend and blend:
Joyful Advent!

Grateful for the good we find,
reaching out, connecting minds,
bridging gaps and making amends:
Reconciling Advent!

---

I want nothing more than peace on earth. There have always been too many refugees and there are more every day. Don't let them drown or bleed to death in the barbed wire of the border fences. Let us as humanity try to preserve our living space and not waste our last resources in senseless inhumane wars. Even without wars, the crises are so numerous that we can only overcome them together. We will only have a common future if we distribute wealth fairly and prevent billionaires.

---

#Christmas #wish #poem #peace #earth #world #politics #nature #environment #future #humanity #humanrights #refugees #problem #crisis #together

I Wake up in the Underworld of My Own Dirty Purse
by Karyna McGlynn

My stage name is Persephone.
I perform nightly for a smattering
of ill-informed Tic Tacs.

Now that I’m finally tiny,
I only have two fears:
that someone will leave
my Whole World in the sun
unattended & gravity’s strap
might one day strain & break.

Down here, no one desires me,
but there are relatively few decisions:
what flavor gum to huff,
how many grains of granola.

I spend my time rolling around
with lipsticks: matte nudes
& cabernet mistakes that looked
better on the models. I bind
my thighs with dental floss,
finally learn the aerial arts.

There are bobby pins.
I have to watch myself. I become
begummed, magnetized.
Things stick. Sometimes I can’t
shake them. For a whole week
I was Working Shit Out
with a broken necklace that had me
ensnared by the hair.

In my dark bordello,
Bic lighters are barges
out in deep water. I taste
the tang of their flint sharpening,
receding, hear the cargo
sloshing, the boatswain’s call
at the far edge of my sanity.
Sometimes keys wash up to me—
all faint numbers & silver teeth.
I no longer know what they open.

More than once, I’ve considered
setting the place on fire.
So easy. Plenty to kindle:
petrified pretzel logs, illegible receipts,
& sometimes, incredibly, a tampon
escaped from its casing—string
like a fuse on a soft stick of dynamite.

On hot nights, I unscrew my purse
perfume & move my naked body
like a question across the cool
roller-ball. She is a Silent Oracle
who only answers in spirits
& fumes: pomegranate, lily
of the valley, amber, wet fern,
African violet. I have eternity
to translate this Olfactory Code
into a working escape plan.

For lack of space: Please Help.
This is what I’ve been reduced to.
I hope someone Up There is looking
for me. I hope my Mother is
burning the goddamn crops.

https://poems.com/poem/i-wake-up-in-the-underworld-of-my-own-dirty-purse/

#poem #poetry #literature

Love Song for the End of Us
by Kenzie Allen

In the great die-off, the fireflies will become fewer still.
The jar, empty. The hills and exultation

dark. Vestibules crawl through the shape of an arch
slowed then dead, memory locked to the last survivor

and whatever stories they told; a cardinal returned each summer,
vanished. Perhaps my children brown in the ultraviolet.

Save any space you can.
The hum of June buffets the doors not so long before we mourn.

There was a garden. Something to pray for, even at the wake.
I want to say it was enough.

I shudder to think of the bear trap shattering bone,
his tender paw gripped in a mouth he should never encounter,

or the gills cut through clear with filament
sharp as invisible; lipless fauna surrounded by fire

on every shoreline. We've seen so many
feathered stomachs filled up with ash;

beyond doubt, no air is left—
yet the breath leaves.

Only the lights on the sidewalk tell you
anything is left to be open to be left.

The flame hailing from the sill
in candle, holy water, paper stars—

that's the tongue of this house laid bare,
wide and beckons welcome.

I have prepared the linens.
I kissed a prayer to each crevice

like cupped hands, a flower pressed
brief and capsized by mid-afternoon

bad deeds done by strange fingers,
as though you don't know where you've been.

from the book CLOUD MISSIVES / Tin House

Some of this poem was inspired by my time living in St. Louis, the “Gateway to the West” and where I used to catch fireflies, and in Trondheim, Norway, where the city and nature were so intertwined. The rest was inspired by the markers of our irrevocable impacts on this earth and the more than human world. We are bound to its future as much as it is bound to us.

Kenzie Allen on "Love Song for the End of Us"

#poem #poetry #literature

https://indieauthors.social/@garrett/113512141116871490 garrett@indieauthors.social - There is “Leave a Poem, Take a Poem” mailbox in my small town of Bremerton Washington but there are NEVER any poems in there! It seriously bums me out! Let’s change that.

Submit your poems to this form: https://tinyurl.com/mailboxpoetry and I will print them out and stuff this thing to the gills!

#poetrycommunity #poetry #poem #poetryisnotdead #writing #writingcommunity #writingmonth #amwriting

#poem

People Can’t Tell #AI From #Shakespeare — They Prefer AI’s Verse, #Study

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/torconstantino/2024/11/15/people-cant-tell-ai-from-shakespeare---they-prefer-ais-verse-study/

#poem #news #technology #Software #science #humanity

In Case of Complete Reversal
By Kay Ryan

Born into each seed
is a small anti-seed
useful in case of some
complete reversal:
a tiny but powerful
kit for adapting it
to the unimaginable.
If we could crack the
fineness of the shell
we’d see the
bundled minuses
stacked as in a safe,
ready for use
if things don’t
go well.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57400/in-case-of-complete-reversal?mc_cid=e06eea4bd2

#poem #poetry #literature

Jack Gilbert is one of the best poets I know of!

Alone
by Jack Gilbert

I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody's dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on their lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other's eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.

Jack Gilbert died on this day in 2012.

Jack Gilbert, "Alone" from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2012 by Jack Gilbert. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58412/alone-56d23cc3c2dbe?mc_cid=e6fcc3424a

#poem #poetry #literature

CRIBBAGE LESSONS
by Susan Johnson

The summer Dad decided it was time
I learned crib, counting fifteen two,
fifteen four, I loved doing the sums

in my head, tallying up the pairs,
runs, as if life were arithmetic,
which at six it was. Going into

second grade, the owner of three
hand-me-down bathing suits from
one sister, two cousins, I went

swimming five times a day and at
the general store one mile away,
bought a dime’s worth of penny

candy from a woman who had to
be a hundred. In four years mom
would have her mastectomy; in ten

she’d be dead. We didn’t know any
of that then. Just that it all adds up
until it doesn’t. Then you’re skunked.

—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024

---

Susan Johnson: “I spent my childhood being outside as much as possible and trying to solve the many puzzles that made up my life. I do the same as an adult, only now it’s language that I use to work through and understand what I encounter. I’m also more accepting when it doesn’t quite add up.”

https://www.rattle.com/cribbage-lessons-by-susan-johnson/

#poem #poetry #literature

Veterans of the Seventies
BY Marvin Bell

His army jacket bore the white rectangle

of one who has torn off his name. He sat mute

at the round table where the trip-wire veterans

ate breakfast. They were foxhole buddies

who went stateside without leaving the war.

They had the look of men who held their breath

and now their tongues. What is to say
beyond that said by the fathers who bent lower

and lower as the war went on, spines curving

toward the ground on which sons sat sandbagged

with ammo belts enough to make fine lace

of enemy flesh and blood. Now these who survived,

who got back in cargo planes emptied at the front,
lived hiddenly in the woods behind fence wires

strung through tin cans. Better an alarm

than the constant nightmare of something moving

on its belly to make your skin crawl

with the sensory memory of foxhole living.

#poem #poetry #literature

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50571/veterans-of-the-seventies?mc_cid=af276c027e

A Phosphorescence
by James Cervantes

I discovered phosphorescence one day

clearing pine needles from an acre plot

in the mountains. I raked and scratched

large piles, then became obsessed with the base

of one tree, raking harder and deeper until black,

matted clumps of needles came up to reveal a glow.

Fire, I thought, afraid for the forest. But no smoke,

no burn smells. There could be light without fire,

like that moment of warmth I mistook for fire,

a gentle touch on your arm that was light

and would be no more than that.

“‘A poem thirty-five years in the making,’ a blurb might read. In truth, my witnessing of ‘A Phosphorescence’ occurred thirty-five years ago, much as described in the poem’s first eight lines. Year after year, I would write out the experience but would then get stuck. Last year, I revisited the definition I found online: ‘light emitted by a substance without combustion or perceptible heat;’ [but this time I read its application] in physics: ‘the emission of radiation in a similar manner to fluorescence but on a longer timescale.’ So that emission continues after excitation ceases. Finally, I had the poem!”
—James Cervantes

https://poets.org/poem/phosphorescence?mc_cid=767b428e27

#poem #poetry #literature

Endlessly

Is this so pointless?
A day, wasted, on a path
from unhealed sorrow

© Simon J Ashcroft, 2024

#haiku #poem #poetry #PoetryCommunity

HAIKU
by petro c. k.

it’s all over
but the counting
distant sirens

—from Poets Respond
 
petro c. k.: “As one who often writes haiku, it’s always a challenge to distill moments to its essence. When I was sitting with my thoughts, I heard sirens off in the distance, which captured the sense I had of melancholy, anxiety, and unknown dangers on the horizon.”

https://www.rattle.com/haiku-its-all-over-by-petro-c-k/

#poem #poetry #literature #news #politics