Category: Poetry

You’ve been vandalized by a rummaging god. She’s become a compacted star in your cosmos, the rings through which you become, like Saturn, denser than before—heavy with shame and longing.

I give unto you the failure of the oracles I cast in the palm of spilling dust / I give you the failure to abrogate our dropping of possibility / in how even dust climbs into the wind…

Today I condensed the universe into a ball / A small, red ball that I could pick up and bounce / And balance on my head / And shove my hand through

Each salon was a zone of concentration, an improvised omphalos, and each had a life of its own. Each participant contributed their breath and presence to the spontaneous generation of its body.

Questions for “Mr. Iboga,” the spirit of ibogaine; a poem written following a retreat experience with this potent psychedelic, with live video recording.

A longpoem response to the mining at Foulden Maar, with Dramatis personae including The Soil, The Poet, The Fossil Beetle, The Corporate Entity, et al.

Nostalgia enters the breath, its smell, its long arms of comfort… they stretch beyond those early years to blush across my skin, into my soft centre, and coil silken tendrils at the nape of my neck.

In Maía’s poems, there are worlds inside of worlds, the metaphysical hidden in the physical, the mythic hidden in the mundane, the political hidden in the personal.

A poem contemplating Icarus’s flight, intertwining ancient themes with modern pathos. This is complemented by images of the sculpture that inspired the poem and an audio performance by the Editor.

I wish I had been a child then // long, slender / circular years / peeled years / sloshing around / in the fluids of my thinking

My song is simple / Because I am simple. / I need no complex language / To sing my truth / No adjectives or adverbs / No alliteration, / No similes or rhyme / I speak directly to your being / I use the voice God gave me / To sing His praise.

In this essay, I explore the Somali lullabies from a close reading of their texts. While singing their love to the babies, Somali women also express their sentiments towards social issues that reflect women’s traditional roles in the pastoral society.

“AI, will you write this poem for me? / AI, will you give me a hug? / AI, will you read my daughters a bedtime story?”

The danger of cynicism is getting what you believe in:  Nothing.

Strange, the power of the past—how our spiritual ancestors become our future masters.

Never mind poetry or prose, good literature is the art of friction.

In the age of information overload, our guides are curators.

Anything freed from the marble is an angel.  Never cease chiseling…

A working definition of Love: we started talking and never stopped…

Birds don’t use their wings only to fly but, also, for balance―just like us.

Art for art’s sake is a dead end; art for heart’s sake is the way out.

Prediction—or personal pose: / In the Age of AI / Poetry will be the last refuge / Of human language.

Now that #ai is colonizing / #writing, my mind goes back / to studying theory in the ’90s:

“Think outside the box,” they say. What if your box is doing the thinking? Where does your thinking end and your box begin? How many boxes does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer may surprise you.

What does Space mean to you? Do you have enough of it? Too little, too much? How do you make space… for Space? This piece was composed for an evening of Poetic Alchemy held in Boulder, Colorado, in the spring of 2019.