Category: National Poetry Month
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Origin Stories – Virginia Smith
Ukrainian Easter Eggs by Virginia Smith There in our snug living room, a TV tray her craft center, my seventies mom laughed at Carol Burnett, M*A*S*H*, All in the Family, her pop cult cover for pysanky witchery, gently pricking a hole with her needle at egg’s two tips, blowing never-to-be chicks into a bowl for…
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Origin Stories – Jeanne DeLarm
Swap Meet by Jeanne DeLarm A round kitchen clock, batteries corroded, displays the correct time, some time. This glass baking dish, we can use in our rental. Rubber dolls play inside a mini house dressed in swatches of dirty fabric. Cowboys, Native American plastic men intertwine. Vinyl rodeo corrals tangle with palm trees. Army guys…
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Origin Stories – Stellasue Lee
Her Honey-Bunch, Gum-Drop, Sweetie-Pie Is Gone by Stellasue Lee Saturday, no calls I have to make, no plans of any kind, just this cat looking deeply into my eyes, questioning why my husband isn’t here— and if she could, she would order me to bring him back— When I try to hold her, comfort her,…
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Origin Stories – Sharon Scholl
Stolperstein* by Sharon Scholl One by one we can take them in — those names that once were flesh and lived among us. Neighbors disowned when they were politically inconvenient. People in the prison camps disavowed even when we smelled their corpses. One by one, their memories, insistent, take their former places in our homes.…
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Origin Stories – L. Shapley Bassen
IRL by L. Shapley Bassen In Real Life, words, pauses, punctuation. Smells, perfume, memory is a scrim, a masking of movements, bowel and ballet. Autumn, age, are slow shock. Now, whether body can weather toxins? Ankle cramp? No acronyms suffice. Spell it out. Origin Stories – IRL This is a new poem, haven’t submitted anywhere…
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Origin Stories – Howard Lieberman
A Butterfly in Odessa by Howard Lieberman The medium suits her, and she sings; she sings as if absolutely alone, Surrounded by simulations of grief: desertion, denial, umbrella’d by umbrage, eyes aflame with a kindle of tears. What is that for which she really weeps: this futile place, that distant, venal State, that flat, fatiguing…
