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!