Chloe Honum Q&A on form
Chloe Honum talks about the villanelle form, including her poems, “Come Back” and “The Tulip Flame.”
Chloe Honum
Chloe Honum Q&A on reading her work aloud as she writes
Chloe Honum talks about reading her work aloud as she writes.
On the Stairs Outside the Psychiatric Ward
I stand with the boy with the twisted body while the smoke from his cigarette signs its slow signature. He leans on his cane and the cane shakes. It is late afternoon, almost dark. We are day patients and soon will go home. The boy says, I got into some trouble in Texas, which […]
At America’s Best Value Inn in Crossett, Arkansas
The mist is the rain gone under cover at the end of summer. Standing on the iron fence around the swimming pool, the pigeons have the gray sheen of underpaid men. Sparrows sing the night in question into question. Sense is not a place I want to linger, like […]
Breakdown in April
Alone in my bedroom, I sob, and the wardrobe steps forward, like a coffin-mother, to embrace me. Later, standing at the back door, a coyote crosses my vision on a wave of snow. This is intimacy: once, in a supermarket, you slid up behind me, covered my eyes, and said, guess who? […]
The Tulip-Flame
My sister’s painting this: a hill, a lane that winds around the hill, and a wide field of tulips with a centered tulip-flame. She rolls her brush through gray and adds the rain in tiny flicks, glinting arrows of cold. My sister’s painting this: a hill, a lane. Last year our mother died, […]
Spring
Mother tried to take her life. The icicles thawed. The house, a wet coat we couldn’t put back on. Still, the garden quickened, the fields were firm. Birds flew from the woods’ fingertips. Among the petals and sticks and browning fruit, we sat in the grass and bickered, chained daisies, prayed. All that […]
Fever
Alone, which has grown to mean without you, I sweat in our old bed. In the bay, the storm’s orchestra tunes. Thunder, and my next expression is one of yours. As if in need of something lost, wind tears through the garden. It checks all my blooms. Rain […]