Tuesday poem #73 : Arielle Greenberg : Pastoral: Baking

You take all the goodliness:

            the flour from the flowering stalk

            the cocoa from the small dark bean

            the eggs from the laying hens

            the sugar cracked from the hard cane

            the salt and its licking

Put them in my bowl

and muddle

Afterward, I am shining with plant life

skin scratched to newness

flush with animal protein

in my throat

and hair

and os

and cheek

and cervix

and eyes

I am tilled and plowed and heated through

and I come out delicious

Three hours later, you muddle again, harder

That’s one of the things I like so much about you

Arielle Greenberg is co-author of Home/Birth: A Poemic; author of My Kafka Century and Given; and co-editor of three anthologies, including Gurlesque. She lives in Maine and teaches out of her home, in the Maine community, and in the Oregon State University-Cascades low residency MFA, and writes a column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #72 : Tsering Wangmo Dhompa : Home

Rain was sorrow, when it came. Rain was what we waited for.

We imagined he was still drunk, or that he had a second family.

We knew he had skipped out of town when mother

did not rebuke us for singing about rivers. The gardening

tools became indoors what they could not be

in the dirt: bed for the baby, walking stick, and hammer.

Everything is here, we said, stacking empty boxes to build

a house that would still favor us in the morning. His letters promised,

he was on his way. We memorized words that corresponded

to particular stages of the imagined, we held back

from interpreting happiness as something real, like the oracle's trance.

We kept cool. We voted for names for this nation

of three. Lines of sweat ran down our calves at midday.

We looked into the sky, cursing, then begging, for him

to knock on our door. To make it even. We imitated

clouds, followed their path as they slid sideways across the sky

like turtles lazy in a pond. We grew up fast, far from home.

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the author of three collections of poetry: My rice tastes like the lake, In the Absent Everyday and Rules of the House (all from Apogee Press, Berkeley). My rice tastes like the lake was a finalist for the Northern California Independent Bookseller’s Book of the Year Award for 2012.  Dhompa's first non-fiction book, A Home in Tibet was published by Penguin, India, in September 2013. She lives in San Francisco and is pursuing a PhD degree in Literature at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #71 : Sarah de Leeuw : Outside, America

i

Once, slugging Kentucky Bourbon

from these impossibly

thin-walled clear plastic

glasses             4:13am in an LA

McDonalds’ parking lot

our knees touched.

Somewhere along

the Drive Thru curve.

Freeways evaporated.

ChevyFordHondaBuick

everything on four wheels

decomposed, a new

thick moss.

Satellites clapped for

every metal becoming fog.

ii

Then, somewhere in the vicinity

of four years and 31 weeks later.

I am alone now watching out

my living room window.

These two Flickers

land in the Engelmann Spruce

across the road.

If it weren’t for the three feet

of snow, they’d have landed

on my lawn, the damp

soil easier to pull insects from.

Watching me from the same

branch, mated for life.

Sarah de Leeuw is a creative writer and human geographer. A two-time recipient of a CBC Literary Prize for Creative Non-Fiction, she is the author of three books including Geographies of a Lover which, in 2013, won the Dorothy Livesay Award, a BC Book Prize granted annually to the best book of poetry by a BC author. With a PhD in cultural-historical geography from Queen’s University, de Leeuw is an associate professor in the Northern Medical Program at UNBC, the Faculty of Medicine at UBC, where she teaches and undertakes research in the areas of medical humanities and health inequalities. She holds an endowed research fellowship through The Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (the first in Northern British Columbia) and in 2007-2008 was a Fulbright Fellow with the University of Arizona. Her literary and academic work appears widely in journals, anthologies and textbooks. She lives in Prince George, British Columbia.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #70 : Stan Rogal : WHEN THE NIGHT IS STILL

Siv Cedering Fox

            “But the angel of death is somewhere,

            watering my flowers”

Ever.  Ever.  Ever

between the light light & the dark dark

indeterminate dusk insinuates

          its juggled act of balls & breasts

performs its awed acrobatic

picture a stalked figure caught just so

not another tall cool glass of water

stood unaffected at the echoed edge

rather, a body wrapped ecstatic in pallid leotard

the back arched & (as if in the very throes) 

the head tossed back, the hair let down, the milky neck

exposed to whatever night shade

the tempered chest swollen

     slight; slightly

               barely nippling the fabric

arms are bent stems creeping toward filigree fingers

which unfurl in the shape of wings

a vase of narrow hips bone the sunk belly

the flat ass

the crotch images a narcissus bulb

struggling to surface

within this upset frieze

who would desire to slip its tight skin

is burned at both ends

below, a tattoo of hands grip the calves & root the legs

above, what might be taken for a black glove clapped

across the hungered mouth

          is a shadow leaned liquid from the flowered curtain

pouring itself either

                         into or out of

the petalled lips

Stan Rogal was born in the mythic city of Vancouver and now resides in concrete Toronto. His work has a appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Canada, the US and Europe. He is also the author of 19 books: 4 novels, 4 story and 11 poetry collections, though only a select few are aware of this fact. His latest book is a collection of short stories titled, Obsessions, with Leaping Lion Books. The poem(s) in Dusie are from a collection of poems and prose poems titled, "after words."

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan