Poetry sale: ‘Looking-Glass Lover’

My poem ‘Looking-Glass Lover’ will be appearing in Niteblade’s June issue. Yay! I’m so pleased that strange dream-inspired piece has found an awesome home.

Sunday recs: inkscrawl

inkscrawl is a delightful online publication dedicated to minimalist speculative poetry. The poems in it never fail to delight, and since I loved the newest issue (#7), I wanted to give it a shout-out.

Poems I especially enjoyed (but please do read the whole issue – it sings so well as a collection):

Queen of Cups by Adrienne J. Odasso – destiny and Tarot imagery, beautiful.

Bone Song by Mari Ness – a bone’s lament, a story in eight lines.

the explorer by Ross Balcom – this one is like a jolt of electricity to my heart.

Sunday recs: A bunch of lovely poetry from Goblin Fruit

I had so many poems from Goblin Fruit marked as “rec this” that I thought I’d put them all in the same goblintastic post. They’re from the newest issue as well as a couple of the older ones.

The Vow of Frozen Time by Alexandra Seidel, from the Winter 2014 issue. The language in this poem is simply gorgeous. The French adds a layer of magic and the attention to word-magic gives me that special kind of shiver that only poetry can accomplish.

The Right of It by Seanan McGuire (also from the Winter 2014 issue) is a great feminist reimagining of Snow White.

Learning My Way Around by Neile Graham, from the Autumn 2011 issue. A gorgeous call to adventure.

Lexicon by Kristin Gulotta, from the Spring 2013 issue. More word-magic – a delicious dictionary-poem.

Lastly, fittingly for the month, there’s April by Nita Sembrowich, also from the Spring 2013 issue. Such a breathtaking evocation of the wonder of spring – and those last lines! “treading on dragons / that time has turned to stone”… Magic.

Whan that Aprill…

I’m not participating in NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) in any official way, but I have set myself a writing goal for April: to write something new every day, whether it’s poetry or prose. Shitty or good, three words or three thousand – it doesn’t matter, as long as I write something.

The first three days, it’s been poetry. I’ve opened up something in myself again – poetry feels easy as breathing right now. It’s not always good poetry, of course not; but then again, not every breath you take is amazing. Sometimes you don’t breathe deep enough, sometimes you inhale someone’s cigarette smoke. But every breath means you’re alive.

Same with poetry (and other writing too): in first/zero drafts, there will be shitty lines, unfortunate word choices, ideas that just don’t work. Some of the problems can be eliminated when editing, and sometimes a poem just isn’t meant to go further than the initial word-blargh. But it’s all writing, and that makes it valuable. When I write, when I’m all a-flutter with word-wonder, it’s worth all the stilted sentences and unviable ideas, as long as I keep on going. All that is gold does not glitter in the first draft!

I’m going to share today’s poem here because it’s just a silly little thing, born out of my frustration at the changeable weather. It’s also a homage to those two famous April poets: Geoffrey Chaucer and T.S. Eliot. April invariably makes me start quoting The Canterbury Tales and The Waste Land to myself. :)

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Fool April

April, you old trickster
pouring rain-sleet-snow
long after we thought
we were done with all that –
no shoures soote these!
You batter us with change,
teasing us with dreams
of sun-warmth and spring

and then, cackling,
you pelt us with winter’s
foulest leftover scraps.
Cruellest month, indeed.

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