Carol Cone & James Crews

Revisit by Carol Cone & Telling My Father by James Crews 

From Healing the Divide

Maril Crabtree

Souvenir

From Fireflies Gathering in the Dark

Charles Rafferty

Drift

From The Smoke of Horses

Stephen Dobyns

Cemetery Nights IV

From Velocities

David Bottoms

The Moon My Mother Shot For

From Otherworld, Underworld, Prayer Porch

C.J. Hanzlicek

Egg

From Against Dreaming

Malena Mörling

Click to enlarge.



From Astoria.

Li-Young Lee

Click to enlarge.



From The Sun.

Jewel

Though I am 8

Though I am 8, my father is 63 years old.
He drinks concoctions of chickweed, garlic, and ordinary
grass
pulled out of the front lawn. He blends it with
a machine that wakes me every morning.
It makes a loud growl. He is worried, I think,
he won’t make it to my high school graduation.

Outside, winter swallows my footsteps
as quickly as they are laid,
which makes me cry.

From A Night Without Armor : Poems

Erica Jong

The Commandments

You don’t really want to be a poet. First of all, if you’re a woman, you have to be three times as good as any of the men. Secondly, you have to fuck everyone. And thirdly, you have to be dead. – Mark Strand

If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should sleep near the moon with her face open;
she should walk through herself studying the landscape;
she should not write her poems in menstrual blood.

If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should run backwards circling the volcano;
she should feel for the movement along her faults;
she should not get a Ph.D. in seismography.

If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should not sleep with uncircumcised manuscripts;
she should not write odes to her abortions;
she should not make stew of old unicorn meat.

If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should read French cookbooks and Chinese vegetables;
she should suck on French poets to freshen her breath;
she should not masturbate in writing seminars.

If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should peel back the hair from her eyeballs;
she should listen to the breathing of sleeping men;
she should listen to the spaces between that breathing.

If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should not write her poems with a dildo;
she should pray that her daughters are women;
she should forgive her father for his bravest sperm.