Tuesday poem #269 : Laura Theobald : Dear Birds,

 

You complain that I throw rocks but they’re only baby little ones. Back home we would call them pea rocks. The ones spray painted orange we would call “from the moon.” There’s a silver one with flakes I have not yet attempted to identify. There’s an unfinished house. Nature seems more brutal against its columns. I shared my cape with you and we rode the car up on two wheels.

Laura Theobald is from the Florida Keys and has lived in various places in the South. Her first full-length book of poetry is What My Hair Says About You from the Montreal-based small press publisher Metatron (2016). Her chapbooks are Edna Poems (Lame House, 2016), The Best Thing Ever (Boost House, 2015), and Eraser Poems (H_NGM_N, 2014). She completed her MFA in Poetry from LSU in 2016, and has served as an editor and book designer for a number of small press publishers. She is currently a book designer for BOAAT and OOMPH!, and a freelance editor and book designer. Her recent poems have appeared in The Wanderer, Sink, Hobart, Pinwheel, Witch Craft Magazine, The Atlas Review, Everyday Genius, Black Warrior Review, and other places. @lidleida // lauratheobald.tumblr.com 

 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #268 : Kerry Gilbert : untitled [when i lived in kungnung]

when i lived in kungnung—south korea

i was respected because of my ability to teach his son

english—a powerful language to know for a boy

 

he was kind and polite, but late at night, i would hear him

piss in the street and yell in broken english for her to come

i could hear her weighted steps above me hurry shuffle down

down the steps and in korean say sorry, sorry, sorry

 

he would smash a bottle against the brick wall

that separated him from me, grab her by the dark hair

and rub her face in the spot on the road where he pissed

 

then i would hear the weight of her being dragged up

up the steps and in korean she would say sorry, sorry, sorry

and after a short pause i would again hear the chorus of frogs

from the rice field across the street, sing me to sleep

 

Kerry Gilbert grew up in the Okanagan. She has lived on Vancouver Island, in South Korea, and in Australia. She now lives back in the valley, where she teaches at Okanagan College and raises her three children with her partner. Her first book of poetry, (kerplnk): a verse novel of development, was published in 2005 with Kalamalka Press. Her second book of poetry, Tight Wire, was published in 2016 with Mother Tongue Publishing. Most recently she won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Award for Best Suite by an Emerging Writer 2016/2017. The winning suite is the spine of her next book, Little Red, due to come out with Mother Tongue Publishing in 2019.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #267 : Callie Garnet : BELIEVE ME

I remember the day all
This whistle talk
became just solid dog

A regular morning, my own boogers
Under my feet
as I heat the milk

Look at photos of Hatchet Face
Kim McGuire, who died at sixty
Skeletal

She self-published
A book about Katrina,
her skin a shade of teeth

Hey do that ugly
Face again Kim.
Photos of people doing the face, drawings

Related to Hatchet Face
Why I don’t know, dart outside the lipliner
Smiling at a party, cartoon blood

Johnny Depp, it’s News
John Waters says Leslie Van Houton is well read, intelligent
It’s okay to remember feelings first, then thoughts

Then what happened: OSU student said I choose love
It won’t be easy. Tomorrow is a day of
Trepidation

Callie Garnett is the author of the chapbooks Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), and On Knowingness, new from The Song Cave. Her poems have appeared in Prelude, Company, jubilat, and elsewhere. She works as an Assistant Editor at Bloomsbury Publishing and lives in Brooklyn.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #266 : Lance La Rocque : Golden Towers

I can formulate plans

Like a tv pope or a grown man

Wrapt in invisible storms

Just because I’ve got no patience

All their heads will spin unearthed

There in the tv that goes and goes

Around my globe

The endless homeruns in real languages

That speak and tweet to

 The power of my fabulous fingers

All the whys of the world

Broadcast through the tunnels of my nerves

 A flock of panicked birds swell my skin

Like gold like god

In a silver cloud I never thought

I’d talk so much about him

And now how his words rattle around my tongue like crickets

Lance La Rocque lives in Wolfville, NS. With Lisa, Emily, and Max. He has published in Hava LeHaba, Industrial Sabotage, and The Northern Testicle Review, and has a book of poetry, Vermin, by Book Thug.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #265 : Kimberly Quiogue Andrews and Sarah Blake : The Sea Witch Takes A Walk

How long does it take to work through a new linguistics of breathing?

She feels weightless, and she read Kundera once.

She knows the absence of a crushing force can feel like sadness.

She could propel herself to the top of a house.

Instead, she wraps herself around a neighbor’s porch railing,

allows the terrible horizontality of movement to shift her hair, slightly.

A small dog yips at her and the eels hiss. She stands

in her god-form for a second, and in a back yard, a few houses away,

a boy tastes salt water; everything looks wet, threatens to exude.

She corrects herself so dry it won’t rain for weeks.

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is the author of Between (Finishing Line Press), winner of the 2017 New Women's Voices Series chapbook prize. Her work in various genres appears or is forthcoming in The Shallow Ends, The Recluse, RHINO, The Normal School, West Branch, BOMB, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ASAP/J, Textual Practice, and elsewhere. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Washington College.

Sarah Blake is the author of Let's Not Live on Earth and Mr. West, both from Wesleyan University Press. An illustrated workbook accompanies her first chapbook, Named After Death (Banango Editions). In 2013, she was awarded a literature fellowship from the NEA. Her debut novel, Naamah, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. She lives outside of Philadelphia with her husband and son.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan