I just love the whole process of it. Beginning in emptiness. Wanting nothing. Recording brief flashes in the head, mixing that with some thing in my vicinity, flowing back and forth, slowing down, catching the wave of a memory or something completely imagined or dreamed that arrives like a movie projected into the mind.
Shot and left to die on a lonely city street in the twilight hours of a Sunday morning. No witnesses. No leads. An instant cold case. “She didn’t know,” some students whispered as I absorbed their version of events. But I wiped away tears to teach because I believed that the value of my student’s life more than her death made painstakingly clear how poetry could matter to my first-year composition students.
I’m a compulsive note taker. I think all writers should develop that as a habit. When I get into that wonderful place of creativity, it can feel like I’m a kid again, running through backyards on those never-ending summer evenings, chasing ideas and observations like fireflies.
And each line I breathe I find myself again, as people judge my poem as me and believe the poem is the way inside me, to my head and my being. I confess and I do not want to confess, but I express emotions that are far detached from what I am
Featuring: Fiction by: Serena Johe, Eric Gier, Douglas Cole, Andriana Minou, Andrew Hamilton, Jim Naremore, Molly DiRago, Rose Wunrow, Philip Dean Brown, Katy Mullins, Ashley N. Melucci, Julia Blake, Hannah Suchor, Jay Vera Summer and Lucas Flatt. Poetry by : Ian Kappos, James Croal Jackson, Mahdi Ahmadian, Olga Dugan, David… Read More »Issue 12 is live!