Underfoot

by | Jan 30, 2019 | NPM 2016, Poetry

i.

all mistand movement

my daughteris messingwith her hairwith her newbody

at the mirror

old dogwarming my sleep

and a memoryheld betweenthe fingertips

smoothpurple glassbead

ii.

how slowly

my heart and lungs

the shining reeds            filled

with grey sunwith lichen stone

if i scrub the linensif i apply the maskbrush out the knots            –oh

dusty banjo

your voicea spiderleg ahummingbirdwing

iii.

at the edge of the playground the ice was forming its beautiful shapes and crackling up under a black spruce where i could tell that it wanted to love me that it could not did not love me but there were all sorts of voices roaming around in the sunlight in the crystals and i caught one and dropped it into my pocket where it remained i can still hear it burning there

iv.

envythe gardena white rosebrowning

photographserrated leaf

and grandfather’sprize mountain goatsharpeninghorn

and it was earlywhen i followed youinto the languageinto the circle of men

with my thick hide

and smokethe censerhuffingbeardtongue (a certainviolet)

chanting

v.

no, noflux

this morninggreylight

— far away            the girlis dead —is dead is dead is

deadeadeadeadeadeadead

robinin the yard

vii.

my riverwalk my thinleaf my alder my rhododendron fungus and canker and salmonberry ghost in and out of the goldleaves with her button jar with her jam jar jelly jar pie tin the ground is the same ground moving and loving and the faraway roar of the river i walked in the dieback root rot duff and sweet humus woven into my skin my palms my spine my heartaloneafraid i was just a kid myself in the autumntime in the leafmold in the shame the detritus

viii.

daughteryour slim waist

            at night

the gardenarrivesso lovely so

your cuppedhands

the stubborn            nasturtium

Born and raised in Anchorage, Caroline Goodwin moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from Sitka, Alaska, in 1999 to attend Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry. She teaches at California College of the Arts and the Stanford Writer’s Studio and is currently serving as San Mateo County’s first Poet Laureate. Her most recent work is Peregrine from Finishing Line Press.

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.

Wrappers

by | Jan 30, 2019 | NPM 2016, Poetry

Wrappers

Cathryn Cofell

Wrappers

You’re twelve and in love with the boy next door
only you don’t quite know it yet.
That tingle between your legs
is something you fumble for while your sister sleeps,
while you are awake and dreaming.
You play married, practice that first boy kiss
against your pillow, hide pennies under
your tongue to imagine his taste.

The next day you’re doing laps in the pool
and suddenly blood is everywhere.
You check the water for sharks.
You dead man float but no one comes
to save you. This is how you learn
you are a woman: a pool of blood,
underwear packed with toilet paper,
a grocery bag handed over without words,
filled with pads and belts, too many loose ends.

You grow into this, the best you know how.
Follow package instructions, listen in the halls,
peel tampons like popsicles,
meet a proper boy who peels you like a popsicle,
makes you bleed on his gold shag rug.
You think about buying protection, being protected,
being exposed like a grifter.

Later, you’re in college, geography, discussing faults
and shields, so you tell the next guy over you think
you are pregnant. You are telling the wrong man,
he is not the one who should help you,
he is as close as you will get. Your friends take you
for a drive so you can cramp and bleed again.

After this, the blood never stops flowing.
You’ve seen bad guys on Starsky and Hutch
die from less of a loss and here you are,
day after day,
chucking off soaked undies in the bathroom at the mall.
This is no cycle, this is two straight lines
off the horizon, this is the community blood bank,
this is thirty years of looking between your legs
and you too dumb to move.

You will bleed through two weddings, one divorce,
twelve intrauterine inseminations,
twenty-five pregnant friends,
half a dozen bloated tirades on the way to the movies,
the gas station, through the lipstick aisle at Sears,
a thousand reasons to reject science or god or both
until you’re done,
done in,
chewed up like a piece of sugarless gum,
bled out like an old brake line,
scooped out like a pumpkin,
all your insides dumped, bagged, tied with a twist,
taken to the curb,
your outside shell washed clean
and grinning.

About Cathryn Cofell

Cathryn Cofell, Appleton, has birthed Sister Satellite (Cowfeather Press), six chapbooks, and Lip, a CD blending her poetry with the music of Obvious Dog. She believes the arts are crucial for positive health and advocates for an abundance of it, as a member of the WI Poet Laureate Commission and WI Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, and as a volunteer with the Fox Cities Book Festival, the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and the Appleton Poetry Rocks Reading Series.

National Poetry Month
National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2016

If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.

The Raisin & The Bullet

by | Jan 30, 2019 | NPM 2016, Poetry

Alicia Rebecca Myers is a poet and essayist who holds an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Writing Fellow. Her work has appeared most recently in Best New Poets 2015; The Rumpus; Brain, Child Magazine; Gulf Coast; jubilat; The Carolina Quarterly; and Fairy Tale Review. In February of 2014, she was awarded a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska City. Her chapbook, My Seaborgium, was released by Brain Mill Press in January 2016. She teaches at Wells College.

Website

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.

Widow

by | Jan 30, 2019 | NPM 2016, Poetry

Poetry Month Spotlight

Sonya Vatomsky

They didn’t tell me where the funeral was so I know it’s everywhere,

spilling over edges with its overwhelming hunger while I brew tea

the Russian way my mother taught me because strength necessitates

dilution. There is always tea and there are always lemons; consistency

is a little gift. “Did you know gift is the German word for poison?”

speaks a voice flush with anecdotes like some bloodfed mosquito

high on insulin (or maybe nostalgia). “Beware the standing guest”

I say, or think, or whatever –– talking to yourself is a dish best served

cold, and anecdotes are a fish without a schoolmate, and I’m waiting

for my own blue lips because it’s me who was the goth all these years,

wasn’t it? Wasn’t I the one dropping the knife at the dinner table and

saying come and come and come until tears ran dirty streets through my

various eyeshadows: sad little tombstones for my superstitions, carrying

sense out to sea? Whatever. They didn’t tell me where the funeral was

so I filled a ripped bag with knives, left their sharp trail as breadcrumbs.

I’ll be waiting here for your ghost, or for a regeneration of myself

which will not recognize him.

About Sonya Vatomsky

Sonya Vatomsky is a Moscow-born, Seattle-raised ghost. They are the author of Salt is for Curing (Sator Press) & My Heart in Aspic (Porkbelly Press) and a poetry editor at Anthropoid. Find them by saying their name five times in front of a bathroom mirror or at sonyavatomsky.tumblr.com.

National Poetry Month
National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2016

If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.

Then Became

by | Jan 30, 2019 | NPM 2016, Poetry

Then Became

Cynthia Hogue

Then Became

        for Sylvain

© Cynthia Hogue, 2014. Originally published in TAB: a journal of poetry and poetics (2014). Used with permission.

About Cynthia Hogue

Cynthia Hogue was born in 1951 in Rock Island, Illinois. She taught in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans before moving to Pennsylvania, where she directed the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University for eight years. While in Pennsylvania, she trained in conflict resolution with the Mennonites and became a trained mediator specializing in diversity issues in education. She has published eight collections of poetry, three of which— Revenance (2014), Or Consequence(2010), and The Incognito Body (2006)—were published by Red Hen Press. Other books include When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina (University of New Orleans P, 2010); Flux (New Issues Press, 2002); The Never Wife (Mammoth Press, 1999); The Woman in Red (Ahsahta P, 1989); and Where the Parallels Cross (Whiteknights Press, 1983). Her ninth collection, In June the Labyrinth, will be published by Red Hen Press in 2017. Since 2006, Hogue has been an active translator from contemporary French poetry whose co-translated Fortino Sámano (The overflowing of the poem), by poet Virginie Lalucq and philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, won the 2013 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poetry. Hogue was a 2015 NEA Fellow in Translation. She is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry in the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University.

 

National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2016

If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.

How I Will Do It

by | Jan 30, 2019 | NPM 2016, Poetry

Under the glint of your glasses I will love you

and as the hiss of the last can of Sprite sizzles from your hand

I will drink your extra Sprite and I will walk your dog I will

love you under the yellow basement lights of the DMV

I will let you feed me foreign candies in the taxi to the airport

and on the plane I will give you the window I will let you

hold the Skymall and someday the lap pool darling someday

the smallest book lamp you’ll ever need I will never read Home

& Gardens I promise you I will never let the literature of housewives

bring us down even with an apron or a minivan I will

still spank you gently and always tell you love you when

you are walking towards the door I never love you more than then

Tracey Knapp’s first full-length collection of poems, Mouth, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award in 2014 and was published in September 2015. Tracey has received scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fund. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2008 and 2010, Five Points, Red Wheelbarrow Review, The New Ohio Review, The Minnesota Review, and elsewhere.

Website

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.