creative writing

A poem of mine appears in burntdistrict. Written in couplets of roughly eight-syllable lines, this poem began as a parody of the absurdly specific submission guidelines issued by some poetry journals. I felt that some of these guidelines had rather strange implications for the act of composing verse. Here is the poem:

Submit Seasonal Poems Two Months in Advance

I am writing autumn poems
in June, Doctor, my liver hurts,

I have started thinking in words
I don’t recognize, please help me

catch up. I love the summer
and what the fall inherits,

trees, the clarity of nighttime,
it is fall during each season

separately, but especially
during summer, which sometimes begins

two months in advance, and sometimes
earlier, the chicks melt, sometimes

summer begins in other countries,
in advance, indiscernibly,

one day it is clear to people
through and through.

A sequence of four of my poems appears in Cricket Online Review. These poems are drawn from a book-length manuscript entitled The Short Century. They use lines of mostly six or nine syllables to explore textures, anticipation, and the juxtaposition of large and small. The poems are untitled. Here’s one of them:

it pummels the surf, it is not meant
so the phoenix wrangles its cracked skin
always the last time/ whether on
or in, it is a view you can’t get
possible response runs the table
(then actual response) like a gun
waits in the stocking like a catfish
brighter than life and incredibly
small

Update, 12/14: artist Marcy Erb has drawn a lovely illustration for one of my Cricket Online Review poems. Now I will always think of the illustration in connection with this poem: