Nobody needs it,
The loss of words, the alphabet
Of rock and sky, the dictionary
Spelling out the weight of pelican
Feathers and childbirth. Nobody
Needs the dream of images
Making no sense, the path
Of broken teeth and textbooks, Continue reading “Dream Arithmetic”
Tag: poems
Art Crawl: Take Your Head Off
Art is inspiring, like any creative outlet, and I have an extremely wide view of what creative outlets are: the main thing is that they need to make you feel like Emily Dickinson described when reading poetry: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Continue reading “Art Crawl: Take Your Head Off”
A Reckoning
What happens to pine needles?
They get wise and smell strongly
Of no place you have ever been.
Where do daffodil petals go?
They rely on the wind and spread news
To the beetles and river rats. Continue reading “A Reckoning”
Red Fern
If you don’t believe a story
Can stay with you in the background
Like a picturesque tree you pose before
For all of your life, witness this:
I loved the baking powder can
That Billy saved his money in to buy
Those two redbone coonhounds. Continue reading “Red Fern”
Merlin on the Road
On yet another February day late
in that month of unforgiving earth,
the irregular beating of junco wings,
I rest on a fallen rock, the slab electric
with the brutality of bone cold,
and the sun fights with clouds,
fights to spotlight me, and loses,
as I have been losing all of my life,
as I have been battling, element
against element with the best intentions. Continue reading “Merlin on the Road”
Today, Remember Edna
I first encountered Edna St. Vincent Millay in an old high school literature textbook. Parked like a shiny convertible amongst the hearses of early twentieth century American literature, she called to me. Now granted “Renascence” wasn’t a horn-honking kind of poem, and it was certainly death-haunted, but it was written by a woman, one of only twenty at that, and it sang of possibilities.
High school textbooks, of course, would not publish some of Millay’s best works that came later, poems about sexuality, love, and longing, that were certainly ground-breaking topics for a female writer in the early twentieth century. She lived life on her own terms, had many affairs, was openly bi-sexual, went to jail for supporting Sacco and Vanzetti, and traveled extensively.
Today, February 22, in 1892, Millay was born. Her friends called her “Vincent.” Continue reading “Today, Remember Edna”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 