Poetry That Invites Gratefulness in the Midst of Darkness and Blood: A Review of LOUDER BIRDS by Angela Voras-Hills
From the first moment I stepped into Angela Voras-Hills’ collection, Louder Birds, I knew I was in the presence of something vital.
The Social Distance Reading Series
Recent Posts
Three Poems
Can cats tell the difference between a real and electric fire
Does cold air blow in or warm air flow out
Do you have dreams where you fly out a window.
The Holy Ghost
There we always were, in always again, enjambed helter skelter on a Sealy
Posturepedic neither could leave. Outside cranes pounded the earth, & dead
End Times for the Poker Face
Growing up, one of my favorite shows was My Favorite Martian. If you’re not sufficiently ancient or addicted to terrible — I mean, retro-cool — TV to remember, Ray Walston’s title character looked like a human but had knitting-needle antennae he could raise from the back of his head, plus an aluminum foil spacesuit and other unspecial effects. Bill Bixby, his Hulk days still ahead, spent three seasons in the 60s trying to conceal from the neighbors that Uncle Martin was an alien. Hijinks ensued.
Canceled
Some canceled and some didn’t. They canceled because canceling was proposed. They said yes, I will, and canceled. Others said no but had to cancel anyway.
Fool at High Noon
Fool finally realizes why the marshall
deputized him and then blew town.
First thing he’ll have to do is buy
a gun—fast—then learn how to use it
A Review of Terese Svoboda’s Great American Desert
Great American Desert By Terese Svoboda Ohio State Press, 2019 Terese Svoboda opens her 18th book Great American Desert with an epigraph that reminds readers that many of the greatest civilizations are now desert wastelands--and that the West is...
La Edad de la Ternura
Every day after classes
we pick up Sonia from La Facultad.
That first year when she thought herself a doctor
and tried to help El Pedigueno with a stick through his hand.
Four Poems
Sometimes you see something so
dreadful that the mind’s camera snaps a shot,
shoots a video of the scenario,
lasers it into your retina’s screen on the spot,
impaled in you for as long as you live:
Two Poems
Rule number one is to lay it on thick
for anybody that asks about what you do.
This way you’ll seem brooding and dark,
like you maybe know something that they don’t
Tethers
Kaya was risk averse. While our older dog Sappho bloodied her nails scrambling up scree and once gashed her ears tailing an elk through barbed wire, Kaya stayed at our sides with four paws on the ground. She walked off leash for most of her life, rarely enjoyed running, and endured 4th of July fireworks by standing with her head stretched under a coffee table.