Helen Wickes Q&A recommends two poets
Helen Wickes, author of In Search of Landscape, recommends two poets.
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Every Other Day Aubade
for Eliot Wilson There is a sky like no sky I’ve ever seen before and I want to hunker down in it. We were caught between a hurricane and what-happens-next. Your modus operandi was Hoping for the Best. Your weapon of choice: Departure. But you knew how to use magic as a verb and lasso […]
Ourselves Woo Yourselves, Pretty Bird
He got into a box of miracles and stole three. With the first he made it so no one would know he had run away. With the second he made himself a human boy forever.1 With the third, he made you, Bird, made good, up for all bad birds before you He’s the Eternal Child, […]
I Don’t Know How Many Souls You Have, My Feathered Fernando
The maestro waves his baton1 Emu makes me sing new notes: a diapason appassionato I feel the blood-pain but can’t see the claw.2 Semiotic bird object-coding Barthes’ bliss einfuhlung abates. Why is it to be happy, we cannot know we are?3 Waking with Emu. Your face the first thing I see. My fine, feathered friend. […]
The Unruly Beloved Emu
Ed note: The author preferred audio only for this piece.
Lucy, Upon Hearing of Charles Schultz’s Retirement and Upon Seeing the Giant Leopard Moth, Drafts a Letter to Charlie Brown
Like nothing we’ve ever known, but then, we haven’t known much, have we, Charlie? It was a slow Sunday, she landed on the newspaper and had I breath, you know, it would have left me. Because God’s drawing left our maker’s in the wake of those wings. Glorious ornate things, the starkest black and white, […]
Shaping the Spoon
This is what she felt: buckle-end of her father’s belt, the dry-smacked kiss of a wooden spoon against her back, her brother’s hands touching her wrong. In a basement, my mother–a splintered girl–would wait thinking of their cold metal bodies in the silverware drawer all night. She’d gather them, knives, forks, spoons, bring them to […]
Fernando Pessoa, I Salute You All!
I want to take off with you, I want to go away with you, with all of you at once. Alvaro Campos* Let’s pinkie promise never to part ourselves out just because we know what it means to be many-ed as a hotel corridor. Each chamber of our hearts contains a different guest, and as […]