#npm2019

[nebula61]

My poem, published some years ago in Words Dance magazine.

Happy National Poetry Month!

[thiscityisapoem]

Day 2 : ire’ne lara silva

ire’ne lara silva’s new book, Cuicacalli/House of Song, is out just in time for National Poetry Month. From within its pages we pulled “We Played Survival”. 

We Played Survival

Our game had no other name. Find shelter. The picnic table became the roof of our home. Find food. The long grass with its seed heavy tips became our corn. We stalked the bob white quails. With stealth, with quickness, with hunger in our eyes, we trapped them. We always released them, but the important thing was to catch them. Catching them meant that even in our imagination, hunger lost its sharpness. Build a fire against the winter cold. We gathered kindling. Stacked firewood. We read the sky and the sun.

Listened and heard unknown voices on the wind. Someone had to stand guard. We needed weapons. I don’t remember if we whispered the dangers or only moved as one to do what was needed. They would not burn our home. They would not shoot us. They would not slit our throats. They would not take us alive.

I was seven years old. My brother five. We played in utter silence. No shouting. No laughing. Nothing done carelessly. What did we know of history. What memories lived in our bones.

PROMPT: Change your perspective. If you sit in a chair, sit on the floor. If you stand, lay down. Where does this new perspective take you? What knowledge, deep down inside you, is still present in this new reality?

- - - - - 

ire’ne lara silva is the author of two poetry collections, furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010) and Blood Sugar Canto (Saddle Road Press, 2016), which were both finalists for the International Latino Book Award in Poetry, an e-chapbook, Enduring Azucares, (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), as well as a short story collection, flesh to bone (Aunt Lute Books, 2013) which won the Premio Aztlán. She and poet Dan Vera are also the co-editors of Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands, (Aunt Lute Books, 2017), a collection of poetry and essays. ire’ne is the recipient of a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award, and the 2008 recipient of the Gloria Anzaldúa Milagro Award. ire'ne is currently working on her first novel, Naci. Her latest collection of poetry, CUICACALLI/House of Song, will be published by Saddle Road in April 2019. 

irenelarasilva.wordpress.com

[nascenia-blog]

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[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 18

And Give us water and food to pursue our tasks. Help us not become wards of the state, impoverished, homeless, destitute, crushed under the heel, buried in systems, imprisoned, dead, hospitalized. We die die die. Our dogs will not walk themselves after we go. Our bodies will not burn themselves after we go. Our apartments will not pack themselves after we die. Instead, bright ribbons of work, tangled in our bodies, will be vomited out and indeed bright ribbons will be vomited out. In the meantime, the light’s eyelashes open and close. And in the meantime, work and reprieve. Lie down; don’t lie; lie flat; lie still. See these Books bound in itching white leather? They are your life. And each feathery page, lifted by hot wind. O summer air, o gardens, o seasons ô châteaux. The glaring day, it binds, o occurrence, o soil o soul. —Robert Fernandez

[thiscityisapoem]

National Poetry Month!

It’s our favorite time of the year - National Poetry Month - crammed into 30 amazing days. 

This City Is A Poem is now in our fourth year (Woo Hoo!) and this year we have decided to focus on women and female-identifying poets both in our city and throughout the country. 

We look forward to energizing your writing through our daily prompts. As always, we welcome your responses and may even post them here or our social media.

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 24

Famous The river is famous to the fish. The loud voice is famous to silence, which knew it would inherit the earth before anybody said so. The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds watching him from the birdhouse. The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek. The idea you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosom. The boot is famous to the earth, more famous than the dress shoe, which is famous only to floors. The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it and not at all famous to the one who is pictured. I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing streets, sticky children in grocery lines, famous as the one who smiles back. I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do. —Naomi Shihab Nye

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 12

House on a Cliff Indoors the tang of a tiny oil lamp. Outdoors The winking signal on the waste of sea. Indoors the sound of the wind. Outdoors the wind. Indoors the locked heart and the lost key. Outdoors the chill, the void, the siren. Indoors The strong man pained to find his red blood cools, While the blind clock grows louder, faster. Outdoors The silent moon, the garrulous tides she rules. Indoors ancestral curse-cum-blessing. Outdoors The empty bowl of heaven, the empty deep. Indoors a purposeful man who talks at cross Purposes, to himself, in a broken sleep. —Louis MacNeice

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 10

Snow on the Desert “Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,” Serge told me in New York one December night. “So when I look at the sky, I see the past?” “Yes, Yes," he said. “especially on a clear day.” On January 19, 1987, as I very early in the morning drove my sister to Tucson International, suddenly on Alvernon and 22nd Street the sliding doors of the fog were opened, and the snow, which had fallen all night, now sun-dazzled, blinded us, the earth whitened out, as if by cocaine, the desert’s plants, its mineral-hard colors extinguished, wine frozen in the veins of the cactus.                     *   *   * The Desert Smells Like Rain: in it I read:   The syrup from which sacred wine is made is extracted from the saguaros each summer. The Papagos place it in jars, where the last of it softens, then darkens into a color of blood though it tastes strangely sweet, almost white, like a dry wine. As I tell Sameetah this, we are still seven miles away. “And you know the flowers of the saguaros bloom only at night?” We are driving slowly, the road is glass. “Imagine where we are was a sea once. Just imagine!” The sky is relentlessly sapphire, and the past is happening quickly: the saguaros have opened themselves, stretched out their arms to rays millions of years old, in each ray a secret of the planet’s origin, the rays hurting each cactus into memory, a human memory for they are human, the Papagos say: not only because they have arms and veins and secrets. But because they too are a tribe, vulnerable to massacre. “It is like the end, perhaps the beginning of the world,” Sameetah says, staring at their snow-sleeved arms. And we are driving by the ocean that evaporated here, by its shores, the past now happening so quickly that each stoplight hurts us into memory, the sky taking rapid notes on us as we turn at Tucson Boulevard and drive into the airport, and I realize that the earth is thawing from longing into longing and that we are being forgotten by those arms.                     *   *   * At the airport I stared after her plane till the window was                      again a mirror. As I drove back to the foothills, the fog shut its doors behind me on Alvernon, and I breathed the dried seas                      the earth had lost, their forsaken shores. And I remembered another moment that refers only to itself:                      in New Delhi one night as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out. It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War,   perhaps there were sirens,                      air-raid warnings. But the audience, hushed, did not stir. The microphone was dead, but she went on   singing, and her voice                      was coming from far   away, as if she had already died. And just before the lights did flood her   again, melting the frost                      of her diamond into rays, it was, like this turning dark of fog, a moment when only a lost sea   can be heard, a time                      to recollect every shadow, everything the earth was losing, a time to think of everything the earth   and I had lost, of all                      that I would lose,   of all that I was losing. —Agha Shahid Ali

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 16

Sawdust Why not lindendust,  hackberry, hemlock, live oak, maple, why  name the remains after the blade, not  what it cut—

only now do I see  that the air is full of small sharp stars  pinwheeling through every living thing  that gets in their way. —Sharon Bryan

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 6

My Dog I talk to my sleeping dog. I stroke his cold, hard, fur through my fingers. I tell him the stars are looking out for everyone at different points in your life. I tell him my heart is a rushing lion, a cheetah, and a cat running at the same time but at different speeds. I tell him people are born every day, die every day. I tell him birds squawk and cats meow. He starts to twitch his eyes, dreaming something no human could possibly live through. I tell him that my life is a seed, waiting for water. —Jamie Allport, age 11

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 29

The Word We ride up softly to the hidden oval in the woods, a plateau rimmed with wavy stands of gray birch and white pine, my horse thinking his thoughts, happy in the October dapple, and I thinking mine-and-his, which is my prerogative, both of us just in time to see a big doe loft up over the four-foot fence, her white scut catching the sun and then releasing it, soundlessly clapping our reveries shut. The pine grove shudders as she passes. The red squirrels thrill, announcing her departure. Come back! I want to call to her, we mean you no harm. Come back and show us who stand pinned in stopped time to the track how you can go from a standing start up and over. We on our side, pulses racing, are synchronized with you racing heart. I want to tell her, Watch me mornings when I fill the cylinders with sunflower seeds, see how the chickadees and lesser redbreasted nuthatches crowd onto my arm, permitting me briefly to stand in for a tree, and how the vixen in the bottom meadow I ride across allows me under cover of horse scent to observe the education of her kits, how they dive for the burrow on command, how they re-emerge at another word she uses, a word I am searching for. —Maxine Kumin

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 28

Of the True Ankle Joint i. How else can I say it? Every step I take I owe. ii. The triumvirate, femur, tibula, and talus, orders the metatarsals on. iii. Consider love, consider fine china: One hairline, almost invisible, fracture, and the tea will seep unstoppably into your hand. —Lola Haskins

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 22

Tell the Bees Tell the bees. They require news of the house; they must know, lest they sicken from the gap between their ignorance and our grief. Speak in a whisper. Tie a black swatch to a stick and attach the stick to their hive. From the fortress of casseroles and desserts built in the kitchen these past few weeks as though hunger were the enemy, remove a slice of cake and lay it where they can slowly draw it in, making a mournful sound. And tell the fly that has knocked on the window all day. Tell the redbird that rammed the glass from outside and stands too dazed to go. Tell the grass, though it’s already guessed, and the ground clenched in furrows; tell the water you spill on the ground, then all the water will know. And the last shrunken pearl of snow in its hiding place. Tell the blighted elms, and the young oaks we plant instead. The water bug, while it scribbles a hundred lines that dissolve behind it. The lichen, while it etches deeper its single rune. The boulders, letting their fissures widen, the pebbles, which have no more to lose, the hills—they will be slightly smaller, as always, when the bees fly out tomorrow to look for sweetness and find their way because nothing else has changed. —Sarah Lindsay

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 14

Lies About Sea Creatures I lied about the whales. Fantastical blue water-dwellers, big, slow moaners of the coastal. I never saw them. Not once that whole frozen year. Sure, I saw the raw white gannets hit the waves so hard it could have been a showy blow hole. But I knew it wasn’t. Sometimes, you just want something so hard you have to lie about it, so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute, how real hunger has a real taste. Someone once told me gannets, those voracious sea birds of the North Atlantic chill, go blind from the height and speed of their dives. But that, too, is a lie. Gannets never go blind and they certainly never die. —Ada Limón

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 8

Eating Fried Chicken I hate to admit this, brother, but there are times When I’m eating fried chicken When I think about nothing else but eating fried chicken, When I utterly forget about my family, honor and country, The various blood debts you owe me, My past humiliations and my future crimes— Everything, in short, but the crispy skin on my fried chicken. But I’m not altogether evil, there are also times When I will refuse to lick or swallow anything That’s not generally available to mankind. (Which is, when you think about it, absolutely nothing at all.) And no doubt that’s why apples can cause riots, And meat brings humiliation, And each gasp of air Will fill one’s lungs with gun powder and smoke. —Linh Dinh

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 7

The Body has its little hobbies. The lung likes its air best after supper, goes deeper there to trade up for oxygen, give everything else away. (And before supper, yes, during too, but there’s something about evening, that slow breath of the day noticed: oh good, still coming, still going ... ) As for bones—femur, spine, the tribe of them in there—they harden with use. The body would like a small mile or two. Thank you. It would like it on a bike or a run. Or in the water. Blue. And food. A habit that involves a larger circumference where a garden’s involved, beer is brewed, cows wake the farmer with their fullness, a field surrenders its wheat, and wheat understands I will be crushed into flour and starry-dust the whole room, the baker sweating, opening a window to acknowledge such remarkable confetti. And the brain, locked in its strange dual citizenship, idles there in the body, neatly terraced and landscaped. Or left to ruin, such a brain, wild roses growing next to the sea. The body is gracious about that. Oh, their scent sometimes. Their tangle. In truth, in secret, the first thing in morning the eye longs to see. —Marianne Boruch