#verse daily

[peggy-sue-reads-a-book]

[bostonpoetryslam]

I draw sky charts by hand to find you. I look for you in every darkness.

Julia Koets, “Eros as asteroid,” via Verse Daily

[these-summer-nights-in-december]

Verse Daily has featured my poem "Peel the Black Walnut Bark Like Small Fists in Our Fists" today!

I'm delighted to share that the always wonderful Verse Daily has featured my poem today: "Peel the Black Walnut Bark Like Small Fists in Our Fists." Thank you to J.P. Dancing Bear and to the Colorado Review for first giving the poem a home.

[rabbit-light]

Field Notes on Loving a Girl in Secret

There's a danger in comparing her to things. Her prayer, a stall of horses. Her anger, the beak of a bird. Her sleep, a sun-bleached fence. Her sadness, a yard pile of firewood.

A patch of pines is all I remember of a field. Quiet, she says. Her stick-shift sedan, her trouble with mathematics, her car radio turned up all the way. I write her questions

on a sheet of paper so no one can hear. Late at night in my blue car, we drive back roads, the only place we speak openly. The field's full enough tonight, I think, to break into a thousand wings.

Julia Koets

[slapkiss]

At the End of My Marriage, I Think of Something My Daughter Said about Trees, by Maggie Smith

When a tree is cut down, the sky's like finally, and rushes in.

Even when you trim a tree, the sky fills in before the branch

hits the ground. It colors the space blue because now it can.

[link from verse daily]

--

After the Divorce, I Think of Something My Daughter Said about Mars, by Maggie Smith

Once you go, you can never come back. If you returned to Earth,

the gravity would turn your bones to noodles. I mean your skeleton

would sort of melt. So if you go, you have to stay gone.

[link from twitter]

--

[mortalpractice]

I deserve nothing & yet here I am, full of a somethingness called love, called grief, called Cecilia. --- Nico Alvarado-Greenwood, from “Poem,” published in Verse Daily

[lifeinpoetry]

Wasn't I the stripe in a tiger's eye? The dapple in the flanks of an Appaloosa? In daylight, how could I possibly explain: A heart hunting after a body?

Jenny Johnson, from “Late Bloom,” published in Verse Daily

[thismtnsoul]

Reckoning        

Wind in the blue cedars, the soap smell                                                                of lupine giving way to the bite of smoke and wet stone. Now crickets, frogs, the first far                                        call of a coyote—

Today, I have walked many slow miles up this creek, and caught not one silver trout. So

while the last light goes on spilling over the mountains,                                                        I stand in the rank weeds, gnats slamming my ears. There's nothing to be done for it.

                                       I lean my pole against a pine, wing my shirt over my head, pull off my boots

                                                     and pants. All my dimpled skin a pink shock in the coming dark,                        I wade out into fast water.

                                                                       Now, here, on the backs of these cold ones, these brothers of my own bones, the river stones, I lay my whole self down:                                        let creek water stream

across my belly, my chest, my throat— on into the cathedral of the nostrils,                                                        for it is no matter. There is breath enough for rock and trout, lung and water, blue cedar, smoke, and skin—

all these and more. The world is good.