Tag: 2016 poetry collections

Poem for the Day: November 20th, 2021

Chorus Attempting to Interpret Unearthed Fragments of Their Play by Carolina Ebeid 

Can you let go the concern
for how it began      what happened

Here the word house remains
A reddening (      ) near house

To describe the sounds
coming in      A human voice
barks through the window

the same voice      like horsehair
stretched along the bow drawn
across the strings

Where the action is missing
we place (      ) A girl pours out

water from a pail flung up
so that the water      arches
into a sickle in an instant
of daylight

The word swallows      as a complaint
of swallows raiding the air
suddenly thick with gnats

When you notice the ash
you will mutter ash
& it will appear again: ash
on everything, behind the ears ash

Maybe this shadow belongs
to the house at 4:30
Shadow is a length of gauze
loosened over the garden

It began with blizzards
for nine hours

A cleft on the ceiling
or a cleft in the chest
No matter, a cleft let
the weather in

Here is a description
of a face in anger
a weather of arrows 

Instead of counting sheep
the injured man folds clothes
in his head into heaps

Separate what is missing
from what’s disappeared

(here has been eaten by silverfish)
We are left to think of (      )

as the space between falling
asleep & waking up
Swallow can be a passage

the gullet, throat,
a grave in the ground
We’re surrounded by swallows

that open (      ) so fluent with bodies
nobodies

Here there was a story
& we were part of the after-
waves in a disaster

braiding wreaths of roadside flowers

The violet ones we’ll call purple daughters
The white ones: asylum lights

© 2019 Carolina Ebeid. Today’s poem originally appeared in the July/August 2019 issue of Poetry Magazine.

Ebeid earned her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and is pursuing her Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Denver. She currently lives in Colorado where she teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. She also serves as poetry editor at The Rumpus and edits (with her husband, Jeffrey Pethybridge) Visible Binary, an online journal specializing in experimental poetics and avant-garde expression. She has been published in numerous journals both in print and online and has been awarded multiple fellowships, among them fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior by Carolina Ebeid

She is the author of the poetry collection You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior, which was published in 2016 by Noemi Press and is available to purchase through Small Press Distribution.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Poem for the Day: October 24th, 2021

Resting on the Ground with My Love in the Rattlesnake Habitat by Alice Lyons 

She pronounces Chama the name of the milky green river
with a richness in the ch I cannot muster, puts a hard d
on the end of her ands. anD. anD. anD. Like the river
she is asking to be endless anD shifting. To stream.
I’d scouted the knoll of oaks for rattlers, being beyond the bounds
of Coverage having no means to learn their habits.
So I lay down with her on the ground. Their ground. AnD
I willed to forget the cares of my later-in-life job search. Job.
Which is also Job, a man in the Bible. Which is a book.
The oaks of the knoll were leaning into the Chama like girls
washing their hair in basins. I thought of EB shampooing Lota,
of Frost’s birches, of Plath’s Wych elms which I’d like to have
googled. Did snakes favor oak knolls? Did Georgia O’Keeffe worry
about health insurance costs in Abiquiú? AnD beside me my love
streaming, her poodles distantly nosing the chamisa. Standards.
I thought I had them. Put art at the front of the queue
wych is different from quiú. AnD now this. Biblical
the proportions of this breaking-back-into-a-country-I’d-
locked-myself-out-of phase. Was it scenic? I liked
the pachysandra, branches of oak taking all that space
from the sky. But then everybody disappeared to their offices.
Three times I wrote work work work when woke
was what I wanted to write.
Miniature is the acorn
I fingered in the soft flour-sack pocket of my jeans.
Acorn smaller than East Coast or indeed Irish Oak varieties
wych she handed me anD how hungrily I pocketed its little body.

© 2018 Alice Lyons. Among other accolades and recognitions, Lyons has received the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary, and was a Fellow in Poetry at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute from 2015-2016. Her most recent collection, The Breadbasket of Europe, was published by Veer Books in 2016 and is now available to purchase wherever books are sold.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.