Traci Brimhall
It's the garden spider who eats her mistakes
at the end of day so she can billow in the lung
of night, dangling from an insecure branch
or caught on the coral spur of a dove's foot,
and sleep, her spinnerets trailing radials like
ungathered hair. It's a million-pound cumulus.
from the book
Come the Slumberless To the Land of Nod /
Copper Canyon Press
What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In our first series, The Poems of Others, we invited our editors to pay homage to the poems that led them to write. The Poems of Others II is a reprise of that series, opening the invitation to twenty-four poets from among our readers.
- June 1, 2020
Gwendolyn Brooks
Carried her unprotesting out the door.
Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can't hold her,
That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her,
The lid's contrition nor the bolts before.
- May 31, 2020
Paul Batchelor
One funny thing about a university education's
the unexpected opportunities it will afford you
- May 30, 2020
Nate Marshall
family, this is my name
& a myth that i don’t own alone. i never even meant
to have this name this just a happy accident of birth,
an unhappy coincidence of intersecting histories,
an abbreviation that became law.
- May 29, 2020
Susan Mackervoy
I walk out from the tutorial. There
are rooms with people reading, conversations.
Mountainside, glimpsed through a window. I feel
ancient, the oldest one here.
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