Robert Okaji (Chapbook Confessions #3)

Chapbook Confessions is a series in which poets discuss, at length, the writing of their most recent collection of poems, in whatever way they desire. For more information on the series, go here. Below, Robert Okaji writes on his 2017 collection From Every Moment a Second.  Chapbook Confession, or, How to Write Chapbooks without Knowing…

Adrian Slonaker (4 Poems)

The Kids Who Moved Away Long before social media and internet searches, there were the derelict desks whose occupants had vanished like the Roanoke colonists. Tendrils of classroom cliffhangers wrapped around each void: Did Tanya graduate from her frog voice? Did David forgo flood pants? Did Kim snap Polaroids in Nairobi? You imagined faces frozen…

William Doreski (2 Poems)

At the Grave of Randall Jarrell The clunk and rasp of building a wood fire distracts but warms me. You love the grunt and groan of chores, talking to the cats, paying bills we can’t afford to pay. Meanwhile I’m picturing a pair of cypress almost doubled over with ice in a North Carolina graveyard….

Irene Hergottova (7 Poems)

Nothing of Me on the Moon The moon where I live sucks up all darkness, it’s a pond upside down. The moon that I know casts a circle of brightness, a Chinese lantern in the sky. Like a pot of honey never falling, she just sits there, waiting for my glance. I no longer ask…

Barton Smock (8 Poems)

funereal as some things incorrectly have wings, we stamp a chicken into the hood of a cop car. the groundskeeper on break inside the church wonders aloud how much is left of the lord. a boy not part of our boyhood bikes over to us with his feet he’s named individually show and tell. the…

Caroline Hardaker (6 Poems)

Clansmen ‘Bring me at my close to the Water Dogs’,                                             my father would say. ‘When I’m tired, waning, take me to play with those who ward the cusp of this earth – the…

Daniel Bennett (6 Poems)

Bermondsey Spaces By the corner forecourt of the Shell station the man eating ribs from a paper bag lets a crutch dangle on one elbow, as he picks his way through want and circumstance, under the gloaming, the overpass, beyond the river’s abstract mass. A light like fine quartz inside concrete ghosts our day. Low…

Early Ted Hughes (Forerunners)

Here are fourteen early poems from Ted Hughes, all of them from before the more well-known collections Wodwo and Crow. The powerful voices he gives to the animal and natural world, to history and mythology, to the experience of war, even to the theology of a sixteenth-century martyr burned at the stake, are well worth…

Virginia Slachman (Eden Park Meditation)

Eden Park Meditation i How odd that the days lengthen; the hours braced against a brittle sun that sears the lip of ice at the base of the black oak.                                          The ice and the sun are opaque and impenetrable, a sealed world. This world. The days don’t dwindle into twilight but linger so silently…

Kitty Coles (6 Poems)

Black Moon Season for walking out into white frost under the black moon. Feeling the grass bend, the cold enfold flesh, the dark draw closer. Scenting the wet earth, lying fallow: ice has its own smell. Tasting night on the tongue, cobwebby, thin, and the mouth’s own heat. Watching the breath steam, cloudy, abundant, twining…

Michael McGill (5 Poems)

Documentary A woman in a documentary is frozen in my mind. She stands behind an asylum window and whispers in a foreign language. The subtitle below her reads, “Please let me out of here.” She is framed by the subtitle; framed by the edit of her portrayal. Finally, she is framed by the asylum itself….

J. S. Belote (5 Poems)

Boriska Snowmelt mangles gray potato fields, oxcarts rot & sink by dung heaps, & month after month the heaps rise—   I don’t care. Again the sky is opaque. &, still, wizened, Andrei goes on painting icons. In one he gives Christ a cloak the color of earth. He hangs it nonchalantly over His left…