Poetry by Greg Sellers

 Occasionally, I find poetry that I'm particularly taken with...like the work of Greg Sellers. Not only does he write poems, he has one of the best literary blogs around ( see below ) where he ferrets out and posts remarkably good art. Scores of us addicted to his site find we need to visit daily to read, view and listen to the poetry, prose, paintings and music he posts for us to enjoy.


Weltschmerz

     

Between these limbs, an emptiness

branched blue above the center of this

abandoned orchard, the afternoon

sky adrift like a dreamer’s thought,

if not for the blunt, occasional thud,

drawing attention to the ground

and over-ripened peaches the color of hurt.

No matter how still the moment, how deep

one retreats into the wooded row & column

of neglected fruit trees, there is always a reminder

that somewhere, someway, someone

is feeling a presence that has no feelings.

Each weighted limb, a burden of wrong,

each momentary tremble, a wind’s memory

of suffering. Sunlight softens the dark

stigmata along a gray trunk’s wound.

Flecks of insects glint like mica in granite, bits

of everlasting light among this amber ache.

Published in the Zócalo Public Square

Elegy for Those Not Yet Departed

This much I'm sure. It is hard to believe

in another morning's gift now that the evening

lawn has learned to grieve. Tonight moonlight

keeps sending its condolences, as if forgotten

whites on the line at the far end of the yard

can no longer bear a body's absence, and

that faint slant of lost light from a kitchen

window is not enough to bring anyone back.

Yet no one has left to forget that familiar way

home, those simple names of neighborhood streets:

Elm, Oak & Maple. Outside this window empty 

   trees

keep rehearsing a sadness I wish I could ease.

Restless curtains ghost about as if they have

   some

other place to go. The once sure shadows 

   have

now grown weary of their own quiet visits. Still

this room tries to hold onto everything it can.

Dresser mirror shines. Full moon shifts

to leave itself upon the polished floor—spent 

   soul

too tired to find its body. But this is not a 

   scene

where the sheet is slowly drawn over the 

   head, or

the doctor helplessly closes his black leather 

   bag.

The lawn has no reason for its plain, dark suit,

this solemn night—its one pale 

   chrysanthemum.

Soon daylight will slip between the limbs,

begin to soften the lonesome, walled sorrow

of shadows. Even the last geese

that shall rise across this endless, gray longing

will not make much of what they leave behind

—

no winter song for lifeless trees

nor grief given nights in the glove-quiet 

that a pallbearer wears, finding

what it's like to touch & not feel.

Published in the Clackamas Literary Review

For more about Greg and more of his poetry. 

Check out Greg's blog:

http://memoryslandscape.tumblr.com

3 Father Poems by Meg Pokrass

Meg is a friend of mine. Her recently released book, Damn Sure Right is getting brilliant, rave reviews and is available from Amazon and leading bookstores everywhere. She is one of the brightest, most creative people I have ever read... or known.

Father Poems

by Meg Pokrass

no proof exists

my dark father
was human though
no proof exists

his photographs
were torn in two
then four then eight
his face in the trash

pieces slipping

near each other
becoming
who I wanted him to be

my father never loved us but I loved him madly when I was three

riding his shoulders
grabbing his hands

seeing from above
how breakable
we really were

Before Dusk, Autumn

The two kites went up
into the late afternoon.
One of them, then the other.

I was locked in the car
while Dad and my cousin, Mamie
swirled the field.
Mamie, watching her shadow grow,
looked embarrassed.

I watched through the window-
The kites were leaves,
wind picking them up,
grabbing them.

As shadows spread
Dad must have remembered
that I was his daughter,
that it was my birthday.

Piggy Back

“Let's go
for a piggy back ride!”
He
draped me
over him
like a sweater.
Shouldered safely
I let my hands
explore
his face
and found
two caterpillars.
He told me
to feel his chin,
how it was
like sandpaper.
Everything
was
BIG,
HAIRY,
TERRIBLE
(laughing high above his face).


___

My friend, Meg told me, "Fathers really are a rich source. My mother and I left my father when I was five, I never saw him again, so I had many years to think about the memories."

About Meg:

Meg Pokrass writes flash-fiction, short stories and poetry. Damn Sure Right is her debut collection of flash fiction. Meg serves as Editor-at-Large for BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review) and before that, for SmokeLong Quarterly. Her stories, poems, and flash fiction animations have appeared in nearly one hundred online and print publications, including Mississippi Review, Gigantic, Gargoyle, The Nervous Breakdown, HTML Giant, Wigleaf, The Pedestal, Keyhole, Annalemma, Smokelong Quarterly, elimae, Prime Number, Women Writers and Joyland. Meg creates and runs the popular Fictionaut-Five Author Interview Series for Fictionaut and consults with Writing MFA programs about online publishing. Meg lives with her small, creative family and seven animals in San Francisco, where she edits and teaches flash fiction privately.

Poetry by Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly, an OA contributor, reads at The Oxford American magazine's 10th anniversary Southern Music Issue release party at Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Miss.

In my opinion, Beth Ann Fennelly who teaches at Ole Miss — along with her husband, novelist, short story writer, Tom Franklin — is the best US poet of this decade. Her poem, The Kudzu Chronicles, is the best contemporary Southern poem (and I have read a lot of them) out there.

First Warm Day in a College Town

Today is the day the first bare-chested
runners appear, coursing down College Hill
as I drive to campus to teach, hard

not to stare because it’s only February 15,
and though I now live in the South,
I spent my girlhood in frigid Illinois

hunting Easter eggs in snow,
or trick-or-treating in the snow,
an umbrella protecting my cardboard wings,

so now it’s hard not to see these taut colts
as my reward, these yearlings testing the pasture,
hard as they come toward my Nissan

not to turn my head as they pound past,
hard not to angle the mirror
to watch them cruise down my shoulder,

too hard, really, when I await them like crocuses,
search for their shadows
as others do the grounghog’s, and suddenly

here they are, the boys without shirts,
how fleet of foot, how cute their buns, I have made it
again, it is spring.

Hard to recall just now
that these are the torsos of my students,
or my past or future students, who every year

grow one year younger, get one year fewer
of my funny jokes and hip references
to Fletch and Nirvana, which means

some year if they catch me admiring
the hair downing their chests, centering
between their goalposts of hipbones,

then going undercover beneath their shorts,
the thin red or blue nylon shorts, the fabric
of flapping American flags or the rigid sails of boats —

some year, if they catch me admiring, they won’t
grin grins that make me, busted,
grin back — hard to know a spring will come

when I’ll have to train my eyes
on the dash, the fuel gauge nearing empty,
hard to think of that spring, that

distant spring, that very very very
(please God) distant
spring.

This poem opens her 2008 book of poems:

UNMENTIONABLES

The Kudzu Chronicles — Poetry of the South

By Beth Ann Fennelly. She and her husband, Tom Franklin, a short story writer, both teach at Ole Miss. In my opinion, Beth Ann Fennelly is the one of — if not the— best poet writing today. Her poems of the South and her life in Mississippi are simply captivating. This video is of her reading an excerpt from "The Kudzu Chronicles", a rather long poem. Contained within the complete poem are references to Faulkner, the Neshoba County Fair and her home in Oxford.


Missionary Work — few folks really like poetry. Some say they do. By clicking on here, you may either read "The Kudzu Chronicles" or, if you prefer, listen to her reading it and discover her for yourself.

The Kudzu Chronicles

Another one:

Souvenir

Click on for more of this superb writer:

Essay



The University
of Mississippi
Department of English
Beth Ann Fennelly

Associate Professor of English

Office: Bondurant W104
Telephone: 662-915-7914
E-mail: bafennel@olemiss.edu

A Favorite Poet

Triolet *

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?
Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?

by A.E. Stallings

I really like her stuff.

*A Triolet is a poem consisting of eight lines with a rhyme scheme of abaaabab in which the first, fourth, and seventh lines are the same, as are the second and eighth lines.