Poetry Month Spotlight: Jessica Jacobs

by | Apr 29, 2022 | NPM 2022, Poetry, Reading, writer's life

Poetry Month Spotlight

Jessica Jacobs

Artist Statement

When the pandemic hit, I was midway through writing a manuscript in conversation with the Book of Genesis—eerie company during a plague whose scale felt biblical.  Yet with my world suddenly so small, I was grateful for the infusion of energy and inspiration this immersive study provided.  While reading religious texts can often be a rather rote experience, writing about them allowed me to push back against these teachings, to ask if there are other ways to be and believe, to read between the lines to better see figures often pushed to the margins or simply ignored, and to question my own ways of being in the world. For whatever your practices or beliefs (and I’m still in the process of exploring those for myself) this is a foundational text, one on which so much of contemporary culture—for better and often for worse—is built. And, to my great surprise, this ancient work has made me feel more connected to our painful present moment, leading me to grapple with subjects I might not have known how to approach on my own: from historic patterns of racism and antisemitism to the climate crisis to questions of free will and fate.

 “Before the Beginning” attempts to imagine back past the moment of creation, to a time when every bit and being of the world was bound in primordial unity.

“Covenant Between the Pieces” examines the relationship between Sarah and Hagar, bound and divided by their relationships with Abraham, and tries to use their opposing placements on the field of the page as mimetic of the distance between them.

 

Before the Beginning

Covenant Between the Pieces

About Jessica Jacobs

Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, winner of the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and Goldie Award, and a finalist for the Brockman-Campbell, American Fiction, and Julie Suk Book Awards. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Julie Suk Award. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock-climbing instructor, bartender, and professor, and now serves as the Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, NC, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, with whom she co-authored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/PenguinRandomHouse), and her collection of poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis will be published by Four Way Books in 2024.

Find Jessica at https://jessicalgjacobs.com/ and follow her on Twitter @jessicalgjacobs and Instagram @jlgjacobs

Jessica and her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, offer free monthly generative writing sessions (https://sunjune.org/write-it-generative-sessions/). Jessica will be teaching a workshop on spiritual writing (for people of all faiths and none) in Provincetown in June: https://fawc.org/summer-program/in-the-space-between-exploring-the-sacred-through-poetry/

National Poetry Month
National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

As the pandemic has continued into its second year, we at Brain Mill are thinking about spaces & places: how we exist in space, the importance of access, and the particulars of navigating places. We have gathered together in ways that may have been new to us over the last few years, greeting each other in small squares of connectivity, developing relationship and care with virtual check-ins, follows, and voices translated via technology. In our best moments we have learned to listen; in our worst, we have been caught up by all the ways we need to do better and think more deeply about community systems and for whom entry is barred.

Poetry Month Spotlight: Stephen Roger Powers

by | Apr 27, 2022 | NPM 2022, Poetry, Reading, writer's life

The Space Where Words Are Formed

A Poetry Month Spotlight on Stephen Roger Powers

Artist Statement

I’ve had a progressive hearing loss since I was three years old. All my life, I have had to pay attention to the space where words are formed—the lips, the teeth, the tongue—in order to understand what I am listening to. The pandemic upended all of our lives, but for me and other hearing impaired and deaf people, it also cut off an important avenue of communication, lip reading. I fully support mask wearing to reduce virus transmission because the science is simple and indisputable; however, if I need to understand what someone wearing a mask is saying, I am forced to ask them to pull their mask down while speaking. People are generally nice about this, of course, though a handful insist on shouting through their masks, which is no help. I came to realize too that asking people to pull their masks down while speaking put me at greater risk for infection, which has made me question how necessary it was to understand something in most circumstances. Because it feels so personal, and because it is something that marks me as “different,” I have been reluctant to write seriously about hearing impairment, other than a mention here and there in a poem. I also felt maybe it would come across as gimmicky. Several years ago, I did publish a short story in Bryant Literary Review inspired by the stand-up comedy act I used to do about my hearing impairment. Jokes about hearing impairment are easy because they are a defensive mechanism. Navigating a world hostile to hearing loss is far from easy. Nevertheless, masks forced me to consider my hearing loss in ways I hadn’t before, so a few poems ended up focusing on it. I’ve been a Dolly Parton fan all my life too. Every time I get a new pair of hearing aids, they make the world sound so different that I have to go through an adjustment phase lasting weeks or months as my brain relearns what the world sounds like. I’ve had the pair of digital hearing aids I’m wearing now for three years, and I still haven’t completely gotten used to them. Part of the reason for that is my hearing loss has gotten a little worse lately. Age might have something to do with it. Music, though, sounds very different now. I have to turn it off. My memory is the best place to play songs I know by heart. Tinnitus is common with hearing loss, and what once was white noise in my left ear now often is music.

 

Hearing Loss Is Difficult To Describe

The Most Common Question People Ask Is How Can I Hear Dolly

 

Mornings on the porch are best without my hearing aids.
I can still hear traffic, but I’m not sure if it’s traffic I hear
or a memory of what traffic once sounded like.
A cochlear implant might help me more,
but asking you to pull down your mask
so that I can read your lips feels safer for now
than drilling my skull.

I’ve always wondered if maybe I love Dolly
because I’m hearing impaired and hear her differently.
An artist once asked what losing hearing is like,
so I described a realist painting morphing
slowly to impressionism,
then abstract expressionism,
which gives me the most freedom to interpret what sounds are.
He said what if I get a cochlear implant
and hate what Dolly really sounds like?

Mornings on the porch are when I hear Dolly clearest,
as if records were playing in my head.
I’ve heard her songs so many times
they are what I know best, memorized like DNA.
I will still have them when the day comes
I lose the rest of my hearing.

 

Subtitlefocals

 

My new hearing aids make me worry about Russia.
They are rechargeable, so how will I hear
once Putin hijacks our power grid?

Words sound so different with these new ones
I still cannot understand you.
Your tongue and teeth are now
rattlesnakes in a popcorn popper.

Why doesn’t someone invent subtitlefocals?
Glasses with speech recognition technology
projecting subtitles below the speaker’s mouth?
My choice of fonts and colors?

At my age it will get worse before it gets better.
I can feel it coming like a whale’s water displacement
rising up from under me, lifting me before I see it.

My tinnitus ear worms are worse too, so clear and distinct a radio
might as well be playing, like the one my grandmother left on
in her kitchen all night to scare burglars.

That’s why I am on the move so much.
I am trying to find silence.
Silence is a destination,
but my tinnitus ear worms are forever
harmonizing with whatever tune
the tires are singing.

About Stephen Roger Powers

Stephen Roger Powers is the author of three poetry collections published by Salmon Poetry and Highway Speed, a collection of short stories. Other work has appeared in 32 Poems, Shenandoah, The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume V: Georgia, Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, and Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems. He was an extra in Joyful Noise with Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton, and he can be seen if you know just where to look.

Find him at www.stephenrogerpowers.com and follow on Twitter @dollypoet and Instagram @dollyfan

National Poetry Month
National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

As the pandemic has continued into its second year, we at Brain Mill are thinking about spaces & places: how we exist in space, the importance of access, and the particulars of navigating places. We have gathered together in ways that may have been new to us over the last few years, greeting each other in small squares of connectivity, developing relationship and care with virtual check-ins, follows, and voices translated via technology. In our best moments we have learned to listen; in our worst, we have been caught up by all the ways we need to do better and think more deeply about community systems and for whom entry is barred.

Poetry Month Spotlight: Ae Hee Lee

by | Apr 20, 2022 | NPM 2022, Poetry, Reading, writer's life

Poetry Month Spotlight

Ae Hee Lee

Artist Statement

While thinking about space/place, I was drawn to the haiku as a form of restraint and intensity. I took inspiration from Brain Mill’s call for poems that speak to space/place as well as the architecture of the page, and explored how I could also engage with the topics of connection/longing through fragmentation.

 

Buy Now

About Ae Hee Lee

Born in South Korea, raised in Peru, Ae Hee Lee currently lives in the United States. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks: Dear bear, (Platypus Press, 2021), Bedtime || Riverbed (Compound Press, 2017), and Connotary, which was selected as the winner for the 2021 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming at Poetry Northwest, The Georgia Review, New England Review, and Southern Review, among others. She can be found on her website: aeheeleekim.com and on Twitter @aeheelee

National Poetry Month
National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

As the pandemic has continued into its second year, we at Brain Mill are thinking about spaces & places: how we exist in space, the importance of access, and the particulars of navigating places. We have gathered together in ways that may have been new to us over the last few years, greeting each other in small squares of connectivity, developing relationship and care with virtual check-ins, follows, and voices translated via technology. In our best moments we have learned to listen; in our worst, we have been caught up by all the ways we need to do better and think more deeply about community systems and for whom entry is barred.

Poetry Month Spotlight: Angela Trudell Vasquez

by | Apr 13, 2022 | NPM 2022, Poetry, Reading, writer's life

Poetry Month Spotlight

Angela Trudell Vasquez

Artist Statement

My work is infused with nature. I am a poet of place as much as anything. I observe the world around me, suss it out, and sculpt it on the page. I love theory and spend large amounts of time exploring the stanzas in my brain, reading, being immersed in art and in the wild. I harvest my free writes for poems quite often. Sometimes lines come to me in dreams. I write to discover what it is I am thinking. This is my way of approaching the page.

 

Space Time

 

I.

We are magic dying.

Pink peonies gasp tight ants assist open petals

no peony exists without ministrations of light

brick wall frames space between drive

a garden of red clay pots brightens balcony

all balconies lit with green light caress eyes

eyes mystery, upset images transform in skull

how we got here is fought over in courtrooms

people pretend to be god brandish fire sticks

hands tools, nails weapons

a newborn is a garden of purple heirloom potatoes

an angel reads minds from her high chair, babbles

mother feeds child smashed orange skin sweet potatoes with tiny spoon.

We are most vulnerable when we sit at the table with fork and knife.

 

 

 

II.

 

Early rose light calls from window

jack rabbits bound

flight occurs on ground.

Where are my crow friends?

Hawk brown circles school bathed in blue light

students descend stairs fade into brilliance

talks done talk begins

black pen scratches white paper

mind waxes                 sheds peacock feathers.

How do you begin to think mired in thought and self-doubt?

Walk clears canvas, blank sheets beg

pull feet to mountain ascend.

 

Because

 

The dew spools in the far corner of the pasture,
a black and white Holstein dairy cow
licks her newborn calf clean.
Her pink tongue unfolding.
Emerald field grass stripes blink.
The calf looks over the hill
past barb wire fences, inter-
state traffic, rolling green
hills and faded white farmhouses,
across the north plains
towards the coral orb,
the heat of the rising sun
for the first time…

Sobs wrench my body cavity
for all in captivity. Tears
flood my shirt.
I pull over.

Let me sit in sadness for a spell.

I need to write this out.

……….Died in her sleep.

……….Her sister threw herself in front of a truck.

……….Leaves behind three daughters.
……….Her father called her, Negrita.
……….The other two sisters were fair.

The mother
bathes her calf
mist rising
love, a pink tongue
in the morning
licks its forehead
dew blinks grass
fog lingers around their ankles
a vision
culled from the herd that crowds the hill.

Credits

“Space Time” was published first by Yellow Medicine Review and appears in the collection In Light, Always Light published by Finishing Line Press in 2019.

“Because” is from the collection In Light, Always Light published by Finishing Line Press in 2019.

About Angela Trudell Vasquez

Angela (Angie) Trudell Vasquez is a second- and third-generation Mexican-American writer, editor, small publisher, and the current poet laureate of Madison, Wisconsin (2020-2024). She holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Finishing Line Press published her collections, In Light, Always Light, in May 2019, and My People Redux, in January 2022. In 2021, she attended the Macondo Writers Workshop started by Sandra Cisneros, and became a fellow, also known as a Macondista. She is the current chair of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. Her work has appeared most recently in Yellow Medicine Review, Sheltering with Poems, In Other Words, Hope is the Thing, Poem-A-Day, and can be found on the Poetry Foundation’s website.

Find out more at www.angietrudellvasquez.com, www.artnightbooks.com, on Facebook and on Instagram.

Check out her new project, Poet in Residence with Madison Public Library, March to May 2022.

National Poetry Month

Photo by Nicole Taylor

National Poetry Month

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

As the pandemic has continued into its second year, we at Brain Mill are thinking about spaces & places: how we exist in space, the importance of access, and the particulars of navigating places. We have gathered together in ways that may have been new to us over the last few years, greeting each other in small squares of connectivity, developing relationship and care with virtual check-ins, follows, and voices translated via technology. In our best moments we have learned to listen; in our worst, we have been caught up by all the ways we need to do better and think more deeply about community systems and for whom entry is barred.

Sentinel Species: Animals as Witnesses and Warnings

by | Apr 29, 2021 | animals, National Poetry Month, NPM 2021, Poetry, writer's life

Sentinel Species: Animals as Witnesses and Warnings

by Chase Dimock

During the first months of the pandemic in Los Angeles, one of the biggest changes I noticed was the clearing of the skies. Without the infamous knots of LA traffic, the omnipresent smog dissipated, the skies became a crystalline blue, and air quality improved drastically. Then, animals began to creep back into the city from the hills. Fewer cars and crowds emboldened deer, bears, and even mountain lions to venture into the paved lands their ancestors once roamed. I watched coyotes cross Ventura Boulevard unafraid. Now that LA is starting to reopen, my hope is that we see the decontaminated skies and the flourishing of animal populations during the pandemic as a sign of the resilience of nature and a preview of what we can achieve if we committed to reducing our impact on the land.

I remain cautiously optimistic, though, as many of the animal witnesses in my first book of poetry, Sentinel Species, can attest, humanity has not always been adept at interpreting the harbingers of nature, or capable of mustering the will to address the damage we cause. Defined broadly, a sentinel species is an organism whose behavior can alert humans to a danger that we ourselves are unaware of. Because animals possess heightened senses humans lack, they can often detect the coming catastrophe of an environmental disaster we created. My sentinel species poems explore how animal behavior and the environment as a whole, along with our personal relationships with individual animals, speak to repressed or ignored aspects of our collective humanity.

The most famous of these sentinel species are coal mine canaries used to detect the odorless presence of carbon monoxide. When a canary fell stiff as a board, feet in the air in its cage, miners knew it was time to evacuate. My poem about the canaries takes us back to when they were replaced by modern carbon monoxide detectors in the 1980s and imagines them extending their professional craft as humanity’s alarm bell to other looming threats of the decade.

A new sentinel species to emerge in the last few years is the frozen iguana in Florida. Recent winters have brought unusually cold weather to the tropical climate, causing iguanas to instantaneously hibernate, stiffen, and fall from trees. In “The Falling Iguanas,” I examine Florida lawns littered with frozen iguanas as a harbinger of climate change and the fate of invasive species in a land that cannot sustain them.

My initial interest in writing a collection of poetry about animals and our relationship with the environment began a few years ago when I found a children’s book on Christopher Columbus and the animals he encountered on his voyage. A page about parrots in the Carribean sparked a curiosity for me: another species capable of recording what was said and speaking it aloud witnessed the conquest of the Americas and the exploitation of the people on that land. Two parrots were shipped from the Carribean to Spain as gifts for Queen Isabella. They arrived just in time to see the Spanish Inquisition.

This historical footnote inspired one of my earliest poems from the collection. “The Inquisitor’s Parrots” imagines what the birds saw as witnesses of two atrocities against humanity. Obviously I took some creative liberties with the parrots, but it is true that a Spanish general wrote about an occasion when parrots had alerted the native people to the march of the conquistadors in time to flee. The parrots stand in for all witnesses to history whose suffering may have garnered a marginal notation, but was never recorded in their own words.

This theme of animals as witnesses to human history guides many other poems, including an allusion to Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and the ill-defined line between the feral and the domesticated in “Spilt Milk,” a hippopotamus who survived the Berlin Zoo firebombing during World War II, the vulture from Kevin Carter’s famous photo during the Sudan Famine, and the rejected plan to breed “ray cats” that glow when exposed to radioactive waste.

In addition to animal species as observers of the ebb and flow of civilization, I also explore my personal relationship with animals, including my pets, my place in the environment, and how the mythology of animals informs how I understand (or fail to understand) nature. In “Coming Out to a Spider” I think back to my teenage angst in grappling with my sexuality, exposing my most private desires and struggles witnessed by the spider in the corner of my bedroom.

In “The Blobfish,” I riff off the fact that the blobfish we see in photos does not actually look like that in its own habitat. When we pull it from its pressurized depths, it bloats beyond recognition. I imagine that blobfish as a pet in scenes from my childhood through adulthood in which I too felt out of my own depth and was judged based on the shape I took when dragged into someone else’s environment.

While I draw heavily on the symbolism of animals, I am also critical of how I can sometimes fall into the trap of casting them in gold and forgetting the heart beating beneath. In “Shooting the Janitor,” I was inspired by how learning about campus birds from the biology students at my college changed the way I viewed vultures. Pop culture has branded them as whirling harbingers of doom, when in reality they clean up the dangerously toxic corpses of animals that humans are mostly responsible for.

I lay out my aspirations for a human imagination of animals that balances the spirit of the fantastic with the responsibility of respecting the real conditions of animals in “Imitation Unicorns.” When I first held my infant niece and saw the unicorns on her onesie, I thought about the moment when she will learn that unicorns aren’t real. I don’t want other animals to feel diminished in comparison to the mythical unicorn, but I also don’t want to limit her imagination and sense of wonder. In her, I see the hope of finding inspiration and spiritual connection with animals without ignoring the mud and muck of nature, which isn’t very fantastical but remains our vital responsibility for respecting the rights of animals and the environment.

Although most animals cannot speak, their behavior explains the effects of our own human behavior on their lives. The difficulty is in interpreting their reactions in of themselves instead of seeing only what pertains to human interest. While we can learn a lot about humanity from studying the behavior of animals, this endeavor often comes at their expense; even circus elephants and lab monkeys know what it’s like to be a guinea pig.

Sentinel Species is available at Bookshop.org and many other online book retailers.

Jareen Imam author photo

Chase Dimock lives among mountain lions and coyotes in an undisclosed location between Laurel Canyon and the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. He serves as the Managing Editor of As It Ought To Be Magazine and makes his living teaching literature and writing at College of the Canyons. His debut book of poetry, Sentinel Species, was published in 2020 by Stubborn Mule Press. His poetry has been published in Waccamaw, Hot Metal Bridge, Faultline, Roanoke Review, New Mexico Review, and Flyway among others. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois and his scholarship in World Literature and LGBT Studies has appeared in College Literature, Western American Literature, Modern American Poetry, The Lambda Literary Review, and several edited anthologies. For more about Chase, visit chasedimock.com.

Top photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

Skein to Skein

by | Apr 27, 2021 | grief, National Poetry Month, NPM 2021, On Books and Writing, Poetry, writer's life

Skein to Skein

by Charles Valle

Content Warning: Death or dying; pregnancy loss.

Minutes after we directed the doctors to turn off the ventilator, we knew our limited time with Vivian was ending. Certain moments remain a blur. The nurse disconnecting monitors and tubes, say, or swaddling Vivian’s lifeless body in the hot air balloon–patterned hospital blanket. Screen memories, perhaps.

Other moments remain quite vivid—the pathways to recall so well-travelled, they will be with me until my death. I recall the urgency of finding my camera to make sure I captured photos of my wife, Kathleen, holding Vivian for the first time. I recall the awkward transfer, the anticipation of what holding Vivian would feel like. And I held her. And I recall my surprise at how heavy 8 pounds, 3 ounces felt. Her full dead weight. Her head on the crook of my right arm. I recall trying to remember every feature of her face knowing I would never be able to hold her again.

While I was holding Vivian, a well-meaning nurse asked us if we wanted to have a harpist come and play in the room. I remember being so confused by the question. It was so far out of the possibilities we had been preparing for during the previous nine months. We had not considered that variable in the calculus of parenthood: a harpist playing in a cramped hospital room for my dead daughter. I may or may have not lost my shit at that point.

There were lots of other questions that day from the NICU doctors and nurses that I cannot remember responding to. I was clearly in some catatonic state. And, much as in the subsequent months after Vivian’s death, I recall watching people’s mouths move and attempting to process their words and, as if escaping my body, I would see myself attempt to answer. One of the questions concerned Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a remembrance photography organization, and whether or not we wanted them to take photos of Vivian. We must have answered affirmatively, because a week or two later we received black and white photos of Vivian—even more beautiful and heartbreaking than my jagged memories.

For months after, I would stare at those photos every day. At night when I couldn’t sleep, or staring out windows during work, daydreaming, the photos would haunt me and appear as if drawn by Caravaggio—severe contrasts of a fading reality with such a clear focus on the different parts of Vivian’s body.

My first attempts at writing about Vivian, and the grief work I was undergoing, were abject failures from a creative production perspective. Much like the initial impulse to find my camera and capture moments, my initial poetic instinct was to capture: the loss, the rawness of the trauma, the muddled mess of emotions that I couldn’t quite process, etc. The writing was therapy. My creative output consisted of fragments, broken lines, phrases unturned.

The years following Vivian’s death were, unsurprisingly, the most difficult of my life. Kathleen and I resolved to move forward. Moving forward meant integrating back into normal society—all the trappings and gestures of living in the United States during late stage capitalism. It meant negotiating the twenty-first-century spaces as a BIPOC poet: assigning, interpreting, and prioritizing meaning to the partisan theatrics, the accelerating wealth inequality fueled by Quantitative Easing, social media’s unveiling of racial injustices, the affects of disruptive technologies, the effects of climate change.

Moving forward also meant trying to have children again. We were very fortunate. We’d never experienced as much relief as we did when hearing the cries of our second child, Ivan. By the time our daughter, Olive, was born, our integration back into normal society appeared seamless. Most people had no idea just how broken we were.

Like most working poets, I struggle to find time to write. Scribbles on receipts, napkins, the marginalia on work notes, texts to myself, email drafts. The skeins of poetic fragments continued to pile up. In my upcoming book, Proof of Stake (Fonograf Editions), there’s a playful nod to Louis Zukofsky’s “A”-12 where I talk about my poetics of grief: “An integral / Lower limit memory / Upper limit intertextuality.” In thinking about grief and loss, I was always interested in the concept of displacement, area, and volume. Can we quantify grief? What are grief’s boundaries?

My personal experience with grieving taught me that my emotional responses occurred in waves. Similar to the stock market or equities charts, my grief would encounter resistances and supports. Up, then down, ad infinitum. There were long periods of consolidation. Supports breaking down. Higher highs. Lower lows. It’s maddening. It’s also completely fascinating to me.

Below is an excerpt from my elegy to Vivian. Knitting and weaving from various skeins, I ended up with a fifty-nine-page elegy that ruminates on a wide range of subjects, from the effects and winding paths of disruptive technologies, such as paper and cryptocurrency, to critiques and observations of art movements, diasporas, social unrest, and the history of the Philippines.

from Proof of Stake

 

And the portability of grief is such a wondrous thing
The transit so efficient
Every circumstance so easily succumbing
To tenebristic splendor
The unsettling realism of the eyes you never opened, Vivian,
The lifeless hand that could not grip my trembling fingers
Follow me across continents
From Europe to Asia, the dark
Background persists with single sources of light
Shining on different body parts
One day, it is your perfectly-shaped eyebrows
The next, the meconium spilling out of your nose,
Your mouth. I close my eyes in Cambodia and see
Your hands. I wake up in Iceland and the light focuses
On your chin, your lips. In Singapore, I burn incense
And imagine your voice. In the Philippines, I scatter
Your ashes on the leeward side of hope
And reflection, the prismatic nature of remains
Ashen and oaken, bits of bones
So far removed from any sense of
Purpose or structure
Mourning in residue
The structures of grief pressed
And dried. Textures so indecipherable
They disorient with ease
Emotional glyphs asperating sullied surfaces

Jareen Imam author photo

Charles Valle was born in Manila, Philippines, and immigrated to California when he was seven years old. He holds an AS in Chemistry from Saddleback College, a BA in English from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in Poetry from University of Notre Dame. Since 2006, he has served as one of the Poetry Editors at FENCE Magazine. Charles currently resides in Portland, OR, where he works as a Change Manager for Nike as well as serves on the Board of Directors for the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC). His first book, Proof of Stake, will be published by Fonograf Editions later this year.

Top photo by Munro Studio on Unsplash