National Poetry Month – Archive

We kick off National Poetry Month with a 2024 individual artist fellow in the field of poetry. Joyce Enzor Maust reads her poem, ’Stitches of Silence and Strength,’ 2024.

The Twin Poets (Delaware’s Poets Laureate), with composer Mark Hagerty, conductor, and soloists, discuss the making of United Sounds of America, a collaboration that places urban poetry on the concert stage. Learn more about this project here: https://www.twinpoetsusa.com/

Daisy Wang

Scholastic Gold Key Winner

What does poetry mean to me?

I build my poems on the foundation of memories, which itself is inseparable from subjectivity. Nonetheless, for me, poetry is not only the expression of the self through creativity and imagination, but also another form of remembrance and reflection. “Ragged,” for instance, features my grandfather, whose presence appears in every corner of my childhood. Especially as I grew older, I began to understand the hardships he went through during the Cultural Revolution in the ‘60s and during his ongoing attempts to adjust to China’s rapidly progressing society. In my memories, there has always been the breakfast buns that my grandfather makes, the way he laughs, the stories he would tell with a teacup in hand. All in all, poetry is my way of meditation and reflection.

Ragged
I’d wake up to the smell of steamed pork buns.
Half sleepwalking I’d find the kitchen’s sliding door
Cracked open and see my grandfather’s hunched-over
Back as he hovers and busys himself over the kitchen
Counter. Under the warm orange kitchen light, steam
Takes shape and I’d distinguish his worn-out white vest,
Same old pair of navy blue knee-length shorts, heavily
Bruised calves and black socks stitched-up at the heels.
My grandfather has walked and starved on the
Ragged road of history, the bruises on his legs are
His marks of martyr. He used to show me how when
He presses down these greenish gray spots, they’d
Sink into his skin and, like a broken trampoline, the
Springs slowly but never fully recover its elasticity.

When he comes out with the buns, I’d be scrutinizing
The city map pressed under the plastic cover on the
Dining table. I’d then look up and see his smile. Deep
Lines of wrinkles layer around his gray eyes and his
Pale white hair seems soft and light. No one else in my
Family has his misty gray eyes. Sometimes I think they
Might have aged with him too, like his hair that did.
I feel like I have never seen my grandfather in rage.
Because whenever he is mad, he just seems sad. The
Corners of his mouth, without the strings of muscle that
Hold them up, drop. He would just seem disappointed
And exhausted and lonely, and I hate it to see him like that.
It always conjures up the same image in my head: a barely
Distinguishable tiny black dot slowly marching along

A curvy, ragged road.

Emma Coley, 12^th grade, Newark Charter School

Scholastic Gold Key Winner

What does poetry mean to you?

Emotions are something that I often wish I could simply convey to other people, without all the superfluous words and descriptions attached. It would be so much simpler if I could just telepathically transfer whatever I was feeling instead of trying to label and categorize it with the limits of language. Poetry, for me, is what pushes that limit. It tests the boundary of language and emotion, of “making sense” and simply expressing, because expression and emotion don’t fit into the little categories we humans attempt to place the world around us into. That is why I appreciate poetry; it’s the same reason I appreciate music and the same reason I appreciate art. Poetry is a space unlimited by the conventional rules that we’ve imposed on our own communicative creativity, and this freedom in expression is invaluable as we face new levels of technical and emotional complexity throughout our lives.

Walk

As I walk quietly in between the whispering trees

I feel myself start to soften

My thoughts whisked away by a tranquil breeze

 

I feel the flaming panic gradually ease

Into a gentle river of thought, something I don’t feel often

As I walk quietly in between the whispering trees

 

Finally a rest from the frenzied sprees

From the tumultuous anger and and the irrational caution

My thoughts whisked away by a tranquil breeze

 

Finally the noisy thunder of my thoughts freeze

Now calmly drifting cloud-like from option to option

As I walk quietly in between the whispering trees

 

My mind is at peace and my body agrees

The twisting, bitter itch of anger now forgotten

My thoughts whisked away by a tranquil breeze

 

It sometimes feels scary to let go of the unease

But the cool dewy grass brushes away the precaution

My thoughts whisked away by a tranquil breeze

As I walk quietly in between the whispering trees.

To close out National Poetry Month we’ll hear directly from Delaware’s 2024 Poetry Out Loud state champion. Maiss Hussein is a senior at Paul M. Hodgson Vo-Tech. She is currently in the dental program and plans to attend Dental Hygiene school. Maiss loves poetry and has always had an interest in literature. Recently, she has started to write her own poetry. Maiss works with her school’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program which correlates with her interest in literature and culture. Maiss has a great pride in her Palestinian heritage and loves to find connections between her culture and poetry.

Below is an original poem by Maiss, submitted to the competition’s original poetry contest.  Good luck Maiss!

O Mother Land (2024)

O Mother Land,
How the trees blossom only on your soil-
The soil that preserves the footsteps of its ancestors with every stride-
Growing off its leaves are the olives that the children pluck
They come down falling into their wooden woven baskets
falling,
falling,

Falling into the hands of the oppressor who takes what is not theirs
Who rejoices at sweet motherland’s soil taken by bloodshed
Every stride taken by arrogance only to be overpowered by resistance
The children, yet clinging to heart & hope,
Remain to pluck the olives of their stolen trees

O Mother Land,
When all is upon its rubble & pieces, the army of resilience remains firm
Yet your sons remain planted on their feet, articulating your motherly tongue
To them O Mother Land, they say “You are the soul of my soul”

O Mother Land,
The bodies of your kin do not breathe,
Yet their hearts remain pumping, leaving them alive even in the grave
With the last look to be of the olives, the last words are only to utter
“O Mother Land”

We decided we couldn’t get enough of poetry month and have added one more bonus post. On May 9th, Maiss Hussein and Joelle Canternor joined the University of Delaware’s Poetry as Activism Festival. They each performed pieces from their Poetry Out Loud competition and learned from their peers statewide.

We decided we couldn’t get enough of poetry month and have added yet another bonus post. Today’s bonus is L.J. Sysko, an 2024 Established Fellow in Literature: Poetry. Sysko received her English degree from Lafayette College and an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from New England College. In 2000, Sysko joined her native-Delawarean boyfriend (now husband) in Wilmington, where they have raised their children and where Sysko taught high school English for 14 years. Now, in addition to her poetic practice, she serves as Director of Executive Communications for the president of Delaware State University, Dr. Tony Allen.

Sysko’s poems have been published widely in over 30 publications, including Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, and Best New Poets, among others, and she has published two books of poetry. Her latest, The Daughter of Man, praised by Publisher’s Weekly as “a whip smart … playful celebration of feminine power,” “traces the Heroine Archetype through the American suburban battleground from the 1980s to today.”

During the pandemic, Sysko found that her artistic practice “accelerated, deepened, and became more committed,” and she has begun to work “more concertedly with ‘music’ and sonic effects . . . deploying rhyme, syntax, and alliteration, especially.” She plans to use her Division award to continue on a new work-in-progress.

This week we welcome Anne Yarbrough, 2023 Individual Artist Fellow, Literature: Poetry, as she recites her poem, “After Peak Oil.”

This week we welcome Chris Penna, 2023 Individual Artist Fellow, Literature: Poetry, as he recites his poem, “Snapshot.”

This week we welcome Nathan Zhao, senior at the Charter School of Wilmington, and a 2023 Gold Key winner for his poetry portfolio in the Delaware Regional Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.

Nathan, what does poetry mean to you?

To me, poetry takes advantage of language’s innate connotations, crafting metaphors and ideas that cannot be replaced by any other art form. Because unlike movies, music, or painting, poetry allows the reader to fully imagine every scene and create meanings upon their own experiences. Writing poetry, poets express an abstract, distilled version of themselves that no one can judge.

Untitled 2

After waking, I readily managed

to write the last few remembered

moments of one night’s dream.

Like any other accident

on the TV, a single pure-white

car perfectly upturned and smoking

in its glorious nature. & before

anyone else came, enveloped

by fog and a ring

of suburban townhouses

and opened windows, I finally

reached the middle of the railroad tracks

to witness: a man, perfectly

lifeless, with his body neatly torn

open and presenting his delicate

and almost-living innards –

an authentic

mannequin. He was aged as if

he were my father’s father,

or at least similar to any other

Chinese fatherly figure

I met once

or twice

or a few times

in Shanghai

in a childhood

I cannot exactly remember.

& I reached between two slices

of his fragmented half

of a rib cage

to hold a shard

of a side-view

mirror placed upon his heart.

I stared at it.

Not because of a self

-obsession, but because I

felt convinced it was necessary.

Until I woke, my face

deformed into a flesh

I could not recognize.

Like the childish

impression of a brightest sun.

Yet before waking, I spotted

in the corner of my vision.

How his head was crushed

by some God’s grand temple.

 

Many times, I think of this dream

and often need to set my head

down. I try to remember

how everything appeared,

but nothing can replace

the intricate architecture

of the man inside. The anatomy

at the front of biology

class, the photographs I’ve searched

of car-accident casualties,

and the surgical measurements

I imagine real scientists possess

fall short of the faded

memory of the man inside.

It is all so static now. Still,

I am forever lucky

since I wrote a few descriptions

the morning I awoke, since

by reviewing, I deduce the details

that I may have missed,

write them,

& read them

again.

This week we welcome Maiss Hussein, senior at the Charter School of Wilmington, and a 2023 Gold Key winner for his poetry portfolio in the Delaware Regional Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Maiss Hussein is a junior at Hodgson Vo-Tech, where she is a part of the dental assistant program. Maiss plans to major in and pursue a career in dental hygiene. She is passionate about her field of study and has competed in the Health Occupations Students of America competition. She is active in her school community and is a leader and board member of multiple diversity & equity groups. 

Watch 2023’s Poetry Out Loud competition below!

What does poetry mean to Alice Morris?

This week we welcome Alice Morris, 2022 Individual Artist Fellow, Literature: Poetry, as she recites her poem, “That Day.”

 

This week we welcome Caleb Curtiss, 2022 Individual Artist Fellow, Literature: Poetry, as he recites her poem, “Ice Age.”

This week we welcome Linda Blaskey, 2022 Individual Artist Fellow, Literature: Poetry, as she recites her poem, “Velpecula: Little Fox Constellation.”

This week we welcome Natalie Kim Ramos, 2022 Poetry Out Loud State Champion, as she recites the poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth.

This week we welcome Jack Mackey, 2021 Individual Artist Fellow, Literature: Poetry as he recites his poem, “The History of Rock & Roll.”

This week we celebrate Christine Chen, a Scholastic Art & Writing national medal student winner in honor of National Poetry Month!

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April 15 – Christine Chen, a senior at St. Andrew’s School

Self Portrait as a Lungfish
I wish I can survive droughts
burrow myself away and wait out
each time the world decides
I’m not worth it anymore
hug myself into a ball of
wetness like in my mother’s womb
and shut down
Nothing can hurt me now
My body my own shield
my energy source
even in the darkness
I can wait for years
if that’s what it takes
But when the rain comes
I’ll rise again
even if they’ve forgotten me
left me behind in a puddle
of mud to die
I will be there
biding my time
feeding on my demons
till I’m all I have left
Maybe I am a lungfish
in the desert
caked in mud and
trapped in a brick
gulping for air
reaching out my fins
for water to return again
even if it will drown me
even if I have to stop living
to stay alive
I’m not giving up
I will survive

April 12 – Christine Chen, a senior at St. Andrew’s School

river song

This week we welcome Jane C. Miller, 2021 Individual Artist Fellow, Literature: Poetry as she recites her poem, “Margot,” published in Riddled with Arrows.

“Poetry is both a lifeline and a lifetime.” Jane C. Miller talks about the importance of poetry in her own life:

This week we celebrate Julie Griswold, a Scholastic Art & Writing national medal with distinction student winner in honor of National Poetry Month!

April 28 – Julie Griswold, a senior at The Tatnall School

Prayer to St. Cupid

Here mom avalanches
shrieks like ice snapping, I recoil

because we watched “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”
and I thought her heart would thaw

like the Warlock if I gave her my train, but no
because someone special is in the hospital, okay?

someone no mountain of trains
can melt, so, oh, grant me sanctuary

among your woodland creatures
the ones I sculpt from snow and seal

with ice, their faces drip like iv bags
and I will not come home

until the sun melts their wings, so
take my prayer beads, candy-coated, and

oh, baptize me and blue my skin
shoot arrows through my sobbing parka, and

oh, please, let my eyelashes sew me shut
my hands shatter, my bones freeze

let them find my corpse come springtime
blooming icicles instead of veins.

April 26 – Julie Griswold, a senior at The Tatnall School

to my mother, spinning

my mother sewed music between my lips
records to lawn chairs, to love, to dancing

stumbling like fireflies under kitchen lights
when the bulbs went out, we shivered

to moonlight. my mother never accepted
i did not dance. i grasshoppered here

cricketed there. i chirped and jumped
and god, i tried. i used the record needle

to unzip my shell so my bones could fall
freely. movement shed rhythm and rhythm bled

music. my mother stitched lullabies
into my antennae, the hems of my skirts

the groove of her smile, every one of her eyes.
but what will i do when you are gone?

she flapped her wings, pulled me close
six legs pulsed. record sung, go dancing

On the last day of National Poetry Month, we hear Rebecca Wisniewski recite “I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain” by Emily Dickinson. Wisniewski was named the 2021 Poetry Out Loud Delaware State Champion at the state finals held virtually on March 2, 2021.

Rebecca will compete in the pre-recorded National Semifinals of Poetry Out Loud on Sunday, May 2 starting at 12 p.m. Good luck, Rebecca! Watch the Semi-Finals at https://www.arts.gov/initiatives/poetry-out-loud

This week we welcome Caroline N. Simpson, 2020 Individual Artist Fellow, Literature: Poetry as she recites her poem, “Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand.”

Check out our Instagram for additional content: “The Cicada Wasp Killer“; “Poetry is Important“; and her quote.

4/9/2020

This week we celebrate four Scholastic Art & Writing national medal student winners in honor of National Poetry Month! Poems on our website by 10 a.m. each day, starting tomorrow, Tuesday, April 14.

April 14 – Iris Hwang, senior at St. Andrew’s School

Sounds with No Letters

“If I close my eyes and listen to you, I can tell

You’re not American, you know?”

The white boy at camp said,

Like he’s telling me I have dust on my jacket.

For the rest of camp,

I over enunciate each word

Stressing each syllable

stac-ca-to.

The Korean creeps up my throat to coat my r’s,

To twist the crisp ‘th’ in ‘the cat’ to ‘duh cat.’

When my v’s regress into ‘b’s,

My tongue can’t grasp the geometry of these new sounds

That my first language has no letters for,

My voice crumpling, folding underneath the weight

Of the half-languages in my mouth.

This is also a study in shame.

When I mark that English is my first language

On every white box

Of every standardized test.

When my aunt gives birth an ocean away,

And Google’s translation comes out stilted, mechanical, and

My joy falls from me in stale Korean

Another distance between us.

My friends snicker at the waiter

Who asks if they want “duh chicken”

In halting English, and I

Examine the menu,

Afraid to mispronounce my anger.

April 15 – Christine Chen, a junior at St. Andrew’s School

Raining Leaves
At eight in the morning
four ginkgo trees
still dressed in summer green
rained their leaves
on this breeze-less November day
all at the same time
as if they agreed to it
in a secret ginkgo meeting.
Did they tap each other
on the roots as a reminder
of this important moment?
Did they whisper on a breeze
before the dawn could break
about their plan to shed?
Or did they make pinky promises
many a summer ago
with their tender tendrils
curled together, holding each other,
to enter the winter all at once,
four of them all as one?
The ginkgoes stand tall and watch
the leaves part their bodies
and embrace the ground,
their mother, once more.
If you listen closely,
you can hear them crying.

To the couple in the kitchen across from my window
How I envy you
Bathed in the fluorescent light of your apartment kitchen
On a rainy November afternoon
When the city is a muddled ball of wet and cold
You are warm
In the company of each other
And your orange cat
The little tigress of the household
Marching on the snow-white counter
Under the bridge of your arms
Arched in the creation of a hearty meal
Fit for this wet winter day
Made long by work and rush-hour traffic
And the endless wait to finally be home again
With your cat perched on the window sill
Staring at the rain in a trance
Waiting for you too
To fill this space together
To make it a home together
To be the sun for one another
In this season without a sun
I hope winter stays
So each day you can feel the spring in your bodies
In your summer love
I hope you love each other for a long time
I hope you remember to tell these stories to the kids
Your kids
Your grandkids
While you still cradle each other at seventy
But first look
Dinner is ready

April 16 – Samantha Oliver, a sophomore at Sussex Academy of Arts & Sciences

On Birdsong and Love: An Abecedarian

An epiphany:

Birds nest on the rooftops of cathedrals.

Chicks snuggle against the lining of the nest and into the wings of their mothers.

Dining on scraps of the people below, they survive on other people’s garbage.

Even as they walk the ground, they soar through the air.

Freedom.

Great thinkers say that the mind is like a bird, but I believe that it is the soul that takes flight.

Hymns are to humans what warbles are to birds.

I wonder if it was the birds who first sensed the fire. If they saw the sparks usher the ancient structure to a collapse.

Just like that, it becomes a house of matches.

Kindness from strangers is the beginning of love.

Love is like a birdsong: it sounds ordinary but it’s noticed when it’s gone.

Murmuration is the collective noun for starlings.

Not much is left of the Cathedral.

Overthinkers: People whose thoughts are higher than others.

Pilgrims who come to cathedrals leave their bread behind for the birds.

Questions unanswered become prayers.

Riots in the streets surround the fire stained walls.

Scar: A shadow of a hurt. A burden left behind.

Today it seems as though the City of Lights had turned gray.

Until the pulse of the city is heard throughout the streets. A heartbeat.

Very few stop to listen, but when they do, they hear the birdsong.

When it happens, when the fires come, you must remember the birds on top of the cathedral. Eventually, they come home.

X is a variable, a signature, a place, a destination, a person, a hope.

Your heart is approximately the size and weight of a bird. It beats its own birdsong.

Zephyrs: soft breezes that blow everything back into place, winds that bring everyone back to life.

April 17 – Julie Griswold, a junior at Tatnall School

Aegotheles savesi
(the New Caledonian owlet-nightjar) Click images below to read.

This week we welcome Kari Ann Ebert, 2020 Individual Artist Fellow, Literature: Poetry as she recites her poem, “This is the Poem Where I Rewrite your Story.”

Check out our Instagram for additional content!

4/22/2020

 

Spring Can’t be Quarantined

By Mack Wathen

The sun rises early

The birds awaken and sing

The new warmth brings growth

The Daffodils shine atop tall green spires – Yellow and White

Crocuses join in harmony with a contrast of stunning purple

Like fireworks, Forsythia and Cherry Blossoms explode in the sky in bursts of yellow, pink and white

Spring has come in all its glory

Bask in the new Spring

Spring can’t be quarantined

Power of the arts

Let’s return to the place where humanity starts
Using the power of the arts
To place joy in hurting hearts
To help heal the trauma
To build our armor

To find atonement
To rescue us from this moment

Let’s close our eyes to the world’s lies
Open our ears to the world’s cries
Escape to a place where we don’t have to hide
A sanctuary
Where the arts are alive

Let’s take the power of the arts across every border
Place it in the hands of the world’s sons and daughters

From poets on city streets
To distance learning art teachers
Visual artist lined along our beaches
Into our detention centers and prisons
Where the power of the arts unleashes

Artist helping our world to heal
Art therapist helping others to rebuild
Art showing veterans
The power of me
The power of we
Art overpowering PTSD
Silencing the cries of anxiety
Using our inner gifts
To overcome hardships

The power of the arts
Is free
Freedom from hatred
Freedom from division
Every man, woman and child
Free from the demands to conform
The power of the arts
Creatively making a new norm

Our efforts to change the world starts
With our unity
Collectively leaving our mark
With the power of the arts

Twin Poets
Al Mills & Nnamdi Chukwuocha
State of Delaware- 17th Poets Laureate

April 29, 2019

Al Mills

Delaware Poet Laureate

Wilmington Our City

Wilmington our city big and small – in the middle of it all – for the love of the children let’s dare to dream of a city so grand & regal – it’s adored by its people

A city with the strength and humility – to place pride and hope -where there is crime and dope

Wilmington the best city in Delaware
Big enough to make a difference, yet small enough to see who really cares

Look at the love, the commitment on their faces as they drive-by or stare out the windows on the Dart bus – there is a desire to do better in the hearts of each of us – you’ll be hard-pressed to find another city like ours across this nation – so big / yet-so small we can fix things without the red tape or procrastination

Wilmington our city in the middle of it all so big / yet so small – that it could flood with love and burst it seams – a passionate place pushing children and teens toward their dreams – in Wilmington where the problem solvers unite –
where you see all sides of life
from 5th & Madison to the fancy mansions on Greenhill from the Riverfront to Riverside to Eastside to the Westside –
Pictures of faith & great people of grit as the teens say or city is lit
Wilmington a place for seniors & teens and everyone in between –
Wilmington our city so big so small Wilmington has it all
Kind residents / good people who want to plan to harvest & build gardens
just smile as April showers
bring forth the May flowers
Wilmington a city with flare
You can can go have a beer in Trolley Square
Or visit the Riverfront to dine
Or go relax at the IMAX with a glass of wine
Wilmington a city who’s entertainment is tough knotched
Where you can visit museums see some art or catch a-game with the 87ers, Blue Coats or Blue Rocks
Wilmington the wonderful city
so big so small
in the middle of it all
Wilmington just trust and believe we have no idea – how great our small -big city can be

By
Twin Poet
Al Mills

April 22, 2019

Iris Hwang

2019 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Gold Key Medalist

Glass Boxes

Here in the glass boxes on the third floor
Of a university gallery

 

Black glitter encloses photographs
Of Asian bodies America harvested from across the Pacific

 

To sow train tracks
Into hundreds of miles of its flesh.

 

The museum tour plays over again and again like a prayer,
and my body no longer recalls the feeling

 

Of train rails snapping into place
With immigrant bones that stretch from coast to coast.

 

Because the only difference
between memorial and exhibition

 

is the softness of the body,
Displayed for prying eyes.

 

The very first yellow-rumped warbler who couldn’t sing,
A spectacle, an oddity, an other,

 

Wait until it stiffens and rots into the history
into the past tense, never present

 

Until the only blame is swallowed by
Dead wood floors and glass boxes

 

bound by the ghosts of black glitter.

April 15, 2019

Chet’la Sebree

2019 Artist Fellow in Poetry

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April 8, 2019

Karen Hurley-Heyman

2019 Artist Fellow in Poetry

 

April 1, 2019

Sophia Zhao

2019 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Gold Key Medalist

My Poem:

This past year I visited a Chinese orphanage. The building itself was quaint, speckled with greenery and hand-painted murals, divided into libraries and miniature classrooms. It was surprisingly pleasant.

I asked an orphan if she liked it here. She twirled back and forth on her two slippered feet, then ran away.

 

Qingsong Children

At daybreak, daffodil and gerbera lip the concrete wall,

one line whole, curled up stemless beside the oaken tree.

The children awake rootless, old husks still

worn and stepping barefoot onto chilled mulch. They

 

spread across in the sandbox, retracing dampen soil into

fimbriate frames; unearthing names that were once

eroded away by a fateful wind. A gallery: where the

 

daughters and sons siphon off nectar from

the whiteness of lilies– indefinite and incised,

unmangled by the insects when hung to dry.

They devour peaches as devotions, then

 

search for another ripeness in their phased blossoms;

outside rosy fringe, escaping from its heart

pure soreness, slowly dripping. The pavement stains,

 

bitter branched rivulets flowing from serrate veins into

unfillable fissures; yet ground remains arid and

hooked to earth. Cicadas chirr the still forest.

In the warmth of dusk, the children

 

shadow into segments. They creep to the meadow,

crouching into supple bulbs, arms elbow-deep in

rigid dirt. Like rough gardeners– unburying themselves

 

as the seedless: a kindred order decaying

among the golden buttercups.

---

轻松 (Qīngsōng) [adj.] – relaxed, relieved.

This week we introduce Gemelle John, 2018 Emerging Artist Fellow in Literature: Poetry

Artist Statement:

I write often about the ways we manifest our grief. I think we’re in a particularly taxing time where we have to learn to feel these constant agitations, personal or perspective-based, but we also need to disconnect from it or we won’t survive.  It’s a constant balance of feeling empathy and allowing it for ourselves.

How the living go slowly

This grief

 

A love, knowingly flesh toned

until dust

sours the way your lips

borrow air

 

You swallow like

consumption has ever made

made you less afraid

of losing everything

 

color photographs in

with hollow songs

and fingerprints

laugh a memory over a sob

and often

a shiver is your sigh

 

you wait for it to lay cracked and

callused like

your knuckles soft and smelling of heat

your other friend eats

salad for three days straight

 

maybe you’ll tell her how nothing

she changes is that seismic

how fear isn’t that contemplative

how dying is

 

never as tense

as the resting palms

 

that another word for

this cycle is lust and

that lust has never

coated a bone

enough to make a lung

—

See former Poet Laureate, JoAnn Balingit’s full length column on Gemelle John here.

This week we introduce David P. Kozinski, 2018 Established Artist Fellow in Literature: Poetry

Artist Statement:

Each poem makes its own rules. The poet’s job is to find it, shape it so it moves on sturdy legs and speaks with confidence, and then send it out into the world. Someone said, “The poem is the arm, the poet the sleeve from which the arm emerges,” or some such. It doesn’t always work that way, but that’s pretty good.

My Theory of Relativity

This is about the kindness

of a dog and how a human should be,

a little about cruelty,

but mostly about scale    – how vast

it all appears; the indifference

of the bluest fields

and the nearest, newest moon.

 

Friends, when I say this is about

I mean history; the day and night, sleep

and travel, tenderness and the grinder.

In another hour the sands might still,

the glass stopper itself; hands

gesture to nothing

 

but nothing unstopped stays the same.

The silo empties as regularly

as a lab rat’s feeder.

Whatever first lifts us up

from then on pulls down – the perpetual

drizzle, the unsolvable

argument of a trench seen from space

and the chasm so deep under water

where every story runs in its own time.

 

Meet David P. Kozinski and Shannon Connor Winward, 2018 Emerging Artist Fellow, Fiction at their upcoming reading at the 2nd Saturday Poets series in July!

This week we introduce Sophia Zhao, 2018 Scholastic Writing Awards Gold Medalist, Poetry.

Artist Statement:

Poetry is a register of my thoughts, liberated. It allows me to share stories through unconventional, sometimes paradoxical language where death can be more meaningful than life and gardens outlive their growers. It is where I can celebrate my culture or critique my history, pushing me to speak and study with hard consideration and empathy. It is a deep foxhole blurred at my corners of reality and fantasy, memoir and fiction– where the real is unreal, driving me to depict not the truth, but a perspective.

revolution

there was
once
a field
of mandarin oranges and
mandarin ducks on the
cold, naked
ground–

where grandma’s
apartment is.
the way
baba tells it, larks flew there
as if searching
for paradise. their

heavenly kingdom;
velvet leaves–robes on branches–
for royal reality,

disguised
longevity.
saccharine smiles.
bona fide oak and maple and
orange. no
roots, just tart sugar. with

fingertips in barkholes,
pencils
skewered,
fervor crushing copper rush–
roaring pulp an
unaccomplished
truth,
unripe boys and girls
tanned, left in
sticky dust.

he tells me to imagine
my fingernails stained.
something like
honey
that hurts–
loosely
staunch.

i imagine

baba’s eyes,
as acrylic as his country’s
vermilion rind.

---

devotion

at the cusp of integrity a deaf goddess asks:
what do you make of it?
naked boars amongst wild boys,
and girls who clutch gala–

trailing with fake momentum under eternal
gravity, to sideways freefall. there
is a dead beagle on the highway’s edge,
sunken into calcium and

hoping that vultures are prey.
mangled. collapsed into slippery
sleep and factory smoke.
listening to truth– the consummation

of invisible petroleum and flying
cicadas. if we believed in the healer,
dead hearts powering dried blood,
barbed wire would be laced with camellias,

countryside twine to encapsulate
noble dogwood. young people should go
beetle-hunting ghostly, so as to skip
celestial sundays. for those cold

peals of his windchime: unsettled
against stagnant wind, an
overwhelming flood purging the
palace’s fake divinity.

This week we introduce Dominique Kendus, 2018 Scholastic Writing Awards Gold and American Voices Medalist, Poetry.

Artist Statement:

Poetry is what forces me to find the beauty in everything, no matter how small or mundane. It pushes me to turn normal, everyday occurrences into something much larger and more profound. It is a tool that helps me to better appreciate life and relationships I’ve formed. It is a part of what makes me who I am. So what does poetry mean to me? Absolutely everything.

Light and Dark

all we have to separate the mind from the body
is light and dark, the stretching of god’s hands

 

over the world and ourselves. sometimes I imagine
that even the sun asks to be tucked in at night because she

 

doesn’t want to fall asleep alone either. and there lies the
ultimatum. her fears versus ours. but how could we expect god

 

to refuse another bed time story: a chance to be heard,
a chance to say “I know exactly why you exist, I know

 

why you need to be touched just to make sure
that you are still here.” he knows we are not all light.

 

I know a boy so empty his father’s fists
pass right through him as if punching the dust

 

from his ribcage. his broken breath a reminder
that he still has something to lose in this world.

 

and I know a father broken and praying to a god
he cannot recognize as his own,

 

holding the darkness in his church-shaped hands
which soften in daylight.

 

he kisses the blood off his stained glass knuckles
and prays for morning. his god is heavy with

 

the weight of history, with the burden we know as genesis.
but how could the body, graceful and vulnerable, refuse to touch

 

darkness. how could the body not repeat its own muscle
memory like a communal prayer, the repetition of beliefs

 

that course through its folded hands. and how could the body,
almightily dark and wholly light, refuse to know that it is still here.

This week we introduce the Delaware Poets Laureate, also known as the Twin Poets.