Chad Abushanab
There are things you can't learn over the phone,
like how each day your mother's losing weight.
Her hug has turned to a burlap sack of bones.
You imagine it sharp and cold. Her heart beats
jaggedly. There's dark beneath her eyes.
from the book
The Last Visit /
Autumn House Press
What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In the newest series, The Poems of Others II, twenty-four poets pay homage to the poems that led them to write.
- November 16, 2019
Martha Silano
when pigeon guillemots gulp
Doritos bags, there's no room
in a gut for a mollusk, a morsel
of crab. Punches holes
in their organs. Strips parts. Scraps
scripts. When birds chew Blowpop
wrappers, guzzle Glad bags,
courtship desists.
- November 15, 2019
Jake Skeets
He is headlights; two boys quickly push off each other. Commas dangling like
belt buckles from their ankled jeans as they run out to the brushes.
- November 14, 2019
Liu Tsung-Yuan (translated from the Chinese by Red Pine)
A thousand mountains and not a bird flying
ten thousand paths and not a single footprint
an old man in his raincoat in a solitary boat
fishes alone in the freezing river snow
- November 13, 2019
Martha Collins
another beach, the last one we walked
together, hand in hand in the August sun,
and I walked on while you rested there, and now
it is winter and I am here with almost the last
of you in my hand
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