National Poetry Month, Week 4 Wrap-Up
It’s been an astounding month of insightful, creative and beautiful poetry. If you missed this last week of National Poetry Month, here’s what we ran here at Wild Violet. “The Confluence” by Alima Sherman — A luminous memory of a trip with her mother “The Plankhouse Revisited” by Shelby Stephenson — A look at family history through a house “Possession” by Holly Day — A daughter’s struggle to come to terms with her mother aging “Step by step the nights” by Simon Perchik — Using ocean imagery to...
Read MoreApril Fog
The wind picks up the day it’s supposed to rise into the upper sixties. Clouds boil. The pond goes pewter. Ripples dark as basaltic lava. You can measure light. by what’s gone, throwing corn past crushed berries, the only light and the bellies of geese tipped to dive for those gold beads
Read MoreOur New Given
For Paul and Maxine It is the precise moment between the given and the unknowable— the slip of time that, like an island, juts into view, announcing its strangeness before we know what is to come. We sit, the four of us at a table in a crowded restaurant on a clear spring day and in the pause before the words tumble fast from my friend’s mouth, I feel a sudden pull toward an inevitability that must be someone else’s, and yet is not. The brief silence before words is when the true knowing occurs— amid the gleam of sunlight on silverware, the white of the starched tablecloth, a...
Read MoreSunday Phone Call
All last night I held conversations with you. You stubbed out your cigar, striding barefoot into my dream and went on sparring with me though your last month in the hospital was silent. How do I make this a normal Sunday evening? Make a plate of spaghetti, walk up the dirty road with the dog, rent a foreign film. Instead I down Jameson neat by the woodstove. When the phone rings in the kitchen, I forget that it can’t be you. Remember Christmas Eve of ’68 when you drilled me to repeat that new telephone number over and over in the passenger seat, just in case I got lost among the...
Read MoreEmily as if It is Mercy
Bucket fair, as in as much fairness as one bucket can hold, the parts of me that slosh around have been contained by Emily & her strength of arm, her patience above the well, to not dip or dump the bucket in the returning dark, is verse, is hymn, is mercy. If she would only back away from the narrowing liquid that once took my...
Read MoreShifting
Something shifts underfoot as the train jolts and slides in a long screech of wheels braking too late. You and I sit, presents on our laps, and stare at our watches, adding up how late we will be. A man across the aisle slams his paper down and sighs. Then the lights flicker out and the train hisses, a final breath escaping. We are still, stopped blank as a clock, in the middle of somewhere too dark to see. Outside, flashlights zigzag, throwing off light like lines being cast haphazardly into the black pools of night. In the glancing chaos we can make out hunched bodies,...
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