A Dreamy Book Review

 

via Unsplash

This month in Luna Luna magazine, I reviewed Hannah Emerson's first full-length poetry collection and talked to editor Chris Martin about an exciting new series of books by neurodivergent and disabled poets. You can read my review here.

New Q&A in Luna Luna

"Cloaked" by Rebecca Chaperon

Q. What's something that surprised you recently?

A. How powerful I've felt.

New this week: Joanna Valente asked me some excellent questions in Luna Luna Magazine. 

Read the rest of the interview here.

[Image description: Painting of a peaceful blue nighttime scene; a woman stands on a rock in a dark body of water. The woman is nude save for her pointy hat and black cloak. She is holding a wand and raising her hands to cast a spell. High above her, the moon is distant but immaculately bright.]

One New Poem

photo: Bethany Szentesi via Unsplash

A not admitting of the wound
Until it grew so wide
That all my Life had entered it

—Emily Dickinson



Sometimes grace looks like someone else saying "My heart. My heart. Is broken." Sometimes communion looks like holding hands and weeping together. Sometimes a miracle looks like a blue book about loss. Sometimes a saint looks like you.

My poem "Our Lady of Desperation," out now in the first issue of OCEANS & TIME, is about all of this. The blessing of shared vulnerability. The beauty in admitting the wound.

You can read the poem here.

Unrequited

Some more welcome news: two of my space poems will appear in the book Unrequited: An Anthology of Love Poems About Inanimate Objects. It's a terrific collection, and I'm really happy to be a part of it.

I'll be reading both poems at the book launch party on Friday, June 17 at 7 p.m. at Upshur Street Books in D.C. Come say hi, eat some snacks, and hear some poems. Maybe buy a book. If that's not a good way to spend a Friday night, I don't know what is.

More details are here.

After Corrag

for you, who are tangled,
berry-stained; for you, seaweed-eyed
and skittish in a market; for you,
water baby, moon child, razor-
tongued witch woman--for you, a gift:
i am one too.

sisters then, may the grass
be sweet, crushed underfoot.
may the scattershot stars
become a blanket we, alone, can share.
may we find peace in what enwilds us.
may what was lonely grow
to make the full use of our hearts.



art by Melissa Peck
Read more about Corrag in Susan Fletcher's incredible book Witch Light.

What to Do When a Poet, Now Dead, Releases a New Book of Poems

in memory of Deborah Digges



Read the editor's note.

Reflect that this manuscript
has been respected. Wonder,
when you read that they tried
to preserve her intentions,
how much of her handwriting spattered
each page.

Read the epigraph--something
obscure--well, that's how
she would have wanted it.

Read the apologetic jacket,
the back cover with its
flat, detached praises.
On the back flap, her photograph.

Look hard at the headshot
as though her eyes, warm even
in a black and white rectangle,
have some explanation.

Close the book.

Try again tomorrow.




Painting: Cloud #16 by Ambera Wellmann

To the Girl I Was When I Bought This Book

The easy thing would be
to hate you: the smear
of your dull pencil is enough
to sigh my breathing.
You printed your name,

careful and proud, believing
you'd want it forever. I know
this book is brittle
from an avalanche of tissues. I know
you wanted blackberries

but planted only thorns.
These pages are stretched, bowed and tired,
this spine is nearly surrendered.
The hard part--and this
you even know--is arriving

at the endpapers, where (you
know) I will forgive you.




photograph by Signora Oriente

One Candle

Three classmates. One would-have-been
mentor. Someone's mother, someone's husband.
The protagonist of the novel you've been reading
for months. All this, since Monday.

Tell her, tell her everything. Tell her now,
before the next gray
and inevitable week begins.
Saturday will be here
before you know it.





photograph by Fabio Gassarino

Sit Her Down, Make Her Understand.

The house was coming down anyway,
sure. But without that single match?
It would have taken years, and you weren't
willing to wait. You torched that thing
from the inside--what did you think
would happen?

And now the walls are papered with fire
and the floor is blackened books,
and you will stand here, little firebug,
until the doors are embers. It was
your match, your sweaty fingers.
Now it will be your sooty skin.
You can do nothing for now
but wait, and in the meantime
pray for rain.

Variations on The Last Battle: Dawn on the Field

The thing you were, the things you had
have died, this blush is their blood,
and aren't you beautiful. Everything
has ended.





illustration by James Jean

Preface à 'Mystères de la main,' or, The Inventor's Daughter

after Adrien Adolphe Desbarolles (1801-1886)

She held Hyde Park
in the palm of her hand;
She offered London to me--
Gold lashes lined two forest pools
that would have drowned me outright,
had she offered those
as well.






Glove Map of London (1851) by George Shove
Inspired by Persephone's shove

The Moth

Every pothole was a puddle on the day that she came, and rain
soaked the porch until it groaned. The screen door was a perfect grid
of shivering beads. It was her face
that I saw first, the alien moon-mask of curious calm.
Legs followed, a plump fuzzy body,
slender wings that twined like toes
on the dripping door handle. I brought her in.

In the midday rain the kitchen
was cabin-dark, and I thrilled to small feathers
on my wrist. I don't know
how long I sat like that, begging my skin
to remember this touching, this being alive.
I set her on the counter by the toaster
and watched her over my book, this marvel
of somehow staying with me.

Eight days we conferred together,
me with toast or a crossword,
she not eating, staring still. One sunny afternoon
the breeze was kind, kissed the dandelions
not unlike her crooked feet. The field guide was thick
but I found her there:

Actias luna, family Saturniiae.
Life expectancy: 7 days. Outside, the sunshine
laughed at my shock. I crossed the kitchen,
blew on the fragile jade wings, watched the furred phantom skate,
empty as a paper boat, toward the sink.


photograph by Chris Wright

Shiva's Granddaughter in Late-Night Meditation

"Barn's burnt down--
now I can see the moon."
-Mizuta Masahide

With every sunset her appetite grew.
She prayed for the pipes to burst,
for a fire in an electrical storm,
an unlikely New England earthquake. She dreamt
of her bookshelves embedded
in beating hearts of flame,
the good white china crunching in fragments
beneath the smoldering rubble.
And, miles away in the dark,
a secret hand to wipe the soot
from her tear-damp cheeks.




photograph by Mark Allanson

The Ending Reconsidered*

The plan was always to be dead
Before I even hit sixty:
If bad luck and illness did not
Put me down, I’d do it myself.
This young heart is already scarred,
Every lover knew that. They knew
Not to believe that forever
Actually meant forever. Then—

You. I cannot say which moment
It was when I realized I could
Be old; one of those days, maybe,
When you spoke of a dark cabin,
Large dogs, used books. In this forest
You have unkilled me. Just know that.




*Some of my more emotionally invested readers (Hi, Mom!) have asked that I specify when what I'm writing is an assignment for my poetry workshop, and what the assignment is, so that you don't actually think I have, I don't know, witnessed a car crash after doing it in the back seat or divorced my husband, who happens to be a Greek god. So: this poem is an assignment. The assignment was to write a sonnet about death. Okay? Everyone? We clear? Good.

Interlude: Other People's Poetry, or, 29. You're a Genius all the time

Essentials

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

-Jack Kerouac, d. October 21, 1969

Small Epistle
You were no angel, Jack but neither
am I and our kisses, writ on dusty paper, will shatter
the very firmament. We seal the envelope
with tongues of young love. Will you come back
when you get this? Not for me.
Not this time.

October 25th: Tree of Life/Men and Angels

To those of you in the New York City and Connecticut area*:



Come say hello! There will be art, and book signing, and Cass, and Emily, and James, and me! It's sure to be a fantastic show.


*The gallery is about an hour outside of the city, convenient to train stations, and you really have no excuse.

The First Act

Just before handing over the paperback
you reconsidered, gathered it to your chest
and tore out the title page.
Broad curtains of rain swept the gutter.
The words for your destruction were lost
to the theatre of the night,
the applause of wet windowpanes.
I wonder what shade it was you saw in my eyes then,
when you wadded up the inscription
and shoved it way down in the trash.




photograph by Lina Scheynius

New Poetry

I judge each of you first
not by your cover
but your spine; that
sliver of design decides
your future with me. Names matter,
sad to say, and Marie, Eleanor,
Janine will more likely get
a ride home than Ed, James,
Pete.

I touch you all indiscriminately, hot fingers
on cool new plastic jackets. It
is your slenderness I love best,
dime-thin bodies
with such lovely eyes.



photograph by flickr user mslibrarian

Valentines, After

(read "Valentines" first.)

I finished the whole thing
in one sitting, leaning forward
against the comforter, one knee
to my dreaming husband. There were

barns, little barns, and picture after picture
of the same spotted dog. I was not
enchanted. I did not see the art
of an empty heart-
shaped box.

And then it was done, a few
pages of acknowledgments and things,
and the back cover. The red foil
heart on the front had lost
its shine in the night.
The book was smaller, suddenly,
and my hands felt gritty with sand
and bandages
that were neither here
nor in Valentine,
Nebraska.

I wept.




photograph by DeviantArt user Sinse.

Valentines

The library did not have the book I needed.
“I’d better mark it missing,” said the limping man,
returning with me
to the reference desk. “It hasn’t been seen
in seven years.”

The radio news is noise in the car. I wonder
where my book is living, on whose
dusty shelf, if the thief even knows she has
what should be mine.

I park across the street from my house, still
muttering about the wasted trip.
The man on the radio strikes a sudden somber tone.
“The Air Force says now that all four men aboard
a bomber that exploded
over Qatar today”
—he pauses—
“are safely on the ground.” I exhale,
having held my breath for these
invisible soldiers,
the men I did not know existed.

On my way out of the library
I passed a Poetry Month table, the volumes
tipped on one end to showcase their slenderness.
The pages flipped fast
and my answers were not inside.
Lying flat on one end of the display,
an afterthought, a push
of a bored finger, Ted Kooser’s Valentines.
I bring it home.

In front of my neighbor’s house I pull
the Kooser from the car and slam the door.
The street is silent and I realize
the imaginary bomber passengers landed safely—
landed safely, only to return
to the incessant emergency
of war.
I realize that even as the NPR man informed me
of my own relief
they rose from their stretchers
and prepared to die all over again.

The library book, glassy in its plastic jacket,
Slips from my fingers
and lands on the wet road.
In that deafened moment my eyes know only
Black street, white book,
red heart.