Susan Laughter Meyers
What falls from the sky is not always rain
or any kind of weather. Call it precipitous.
I'm fooling myself, of course. Wearing sorrow
is nothing like skin shedding water.
It's more like the weight of a cloak of crows.
from the book
Self-Portrait in the River of Déjà Vu /
Press 53
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 18, 2019
Aracelis Girmay
But to be perfectly clear,
my enemies are not hungry.
They are not standing in lines
for food, or stretching rations,
or waiting at the airports
to claim the pieces
of the bodies of their dead.
My enemies ride jets to parties.
- November 17, 2019
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.
- 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.
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