Tuesday poem #437 : Alexander Joseph : "I wake to another broken morning"

 

 

I wake to another broken morning
in the second shattered year
this time ten dead
where I used to buy deodorant 
and shampoo
and cheap candy 
and all the other plastic bottles
the health food store didn’t carry

there are so many poems lamenting
this sort of sickness
there is almost nothing left to say 

other than that I’m sorry
about all the young men
just a little unluckier than me
those with nothing left to lose
those who never had anything anyway

I’m sorry that we are all so close
to lancing the infection of our lives
of our hate
of this tainted inheritance
of all these empires of dry and poisoned dirt
onto whomever we happen to find

I’m sorry that it has come to this
and that it will come to this again
that there will be so many more mornings that start with bad news
under a sun hidden by clouds
and gun smoke
and forest fires 
and all the other ugly bright we hold in our hands

 

 

 

 

It's said in the Talmud that there are three ways to be a good Jew: study, prayer and acts of loving kindness– Alexander Shalom Joseph think of his writing and work as a teacher as a mix of all three. Alexander's poetry chapbook, Buttons and Bones, was published by above/ground press in 2021. His Novels and Short Stories have been short listed/finalist/ or semi-finalist in the 2021 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Fiction, the 2020 Orison Fiction prize, the 2020 Paper Nautilus Chapbook Prize, and the 2020, 2019 and 2018 Faulkner Awards for a “Novel in Progress," have been published by Tulip Tree Press, The Wall, Zodiac Magazine, Lotus Eater Magazine, Bombay Gin and in Clover: A Literary Rag, and have received four honorable mentions in New Writer Competitions for Glimmer Train Magazine. Alexander is the host of the podcast American Wasteland, and writes a weekly prose poetry column in The Mountain Ear Newspaper in Nederland, Colorado. Alexander has an MFA from The Jack Kerouac School, and lives in cabin in the woods of Colorado with his girlfriend and hundreds of books.

the Tuesday poem series is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #436 : Jaclyn Piudik : Synthese)

 

 

gone, that kick of the soul that fondled light
in pseudonym

maudits quote the breaking deluge
home-grown wars encumbered bilingually

a florilegium: jaded synchronicities –
ferocious pastels boxed in by ennui
amid a commune of fossils 

apropos of bones   abhorred ruins:
remorse trails in long verses
two days’ death fans out like a rose sure of its pale

we’re lagging in solipsism
the words just uttered, impatient to become history,
                                   linger

to hear the eye open –

let’s talk of things we don’t remember
feel the body biologique          (so cramped by the body politic

let’s low univocally at the heights of surrender

 

 

 

Jaclyn Piudik is the author of To Suture What Frays (Kelsay Books 2017) and three chapbooks,  the corpus undone in the blizzard (Espresso Chapbooks 2019), Of Gazelles Unheard (Beautiful Outlaw 2013) and The Tao of Loathliness (fooliar press 2005/8).  Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including New American Writing, Columbia Poetry Review, Burning House and Barrow Street.  She received a New York Times Fellowship for Creative Writing and the Alice M. Sellers Award from the Academy of American Poets. Piudik  holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the City College of New York, as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #435 : Lesle Lewis : Reading William and Gertrude

 

 

 

“The feeling of bare time is the least stimulating experience we can have,”  he said.

Empty space too.

She said, “ A sentence is not why they were worried.”

That’s why we write them.

This is our easy time.

This is our hard time.

Winter is a spider in a jar with only lettuce to eat and  the lettuce to be eaten.

Dave comes to fix the garden shed door.

Shadows of the spoons make us swoon.

We dig into consciousness.

Heart.

Duration.

We invite a lonely word into our home and cook it a full sit-down meal.

Are we using your mental categories or mine?

Some things we remember once and once is enough.

Discontent or discomfort.

Fog or frog or both.

Well-worn or virgin  paths. 

When William’s and Gertrude’s minds met it was all the stars and moons.

We want them to meet again.

And to be a little wanting is all right because to want and then to get is so great a possibility that to be without desire would be sad.

 

 

 

Lesle Lewis' collections include Small Boat (winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize), Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006), lie down too (Alice James Books, 2011), A Boot's a Boot (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014), and Rainy Days on the Farm (Fence Books, 2019). Her chapbook, It's Rothko in Winter or Belgium was published by Factory Hollow Press in 2012. She has had poems appear in American Letters and Commentary, Northern New England Review, Hotel Amerika, Mississippi Review, The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Barrow Street, Mudfish, LIT, Pool, jubilat, notnostrums, and Sentence. She lives in New Hampshire.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan