Tuesday poem #553 : Brandon Shimoda : Girl in Mirror

 

 

Sitting in front of a mirror
Last night,

I became a woman

young, but she was
middle-aged

all the stress was in her hair

She was once a dough
in a protective forest

now she was old
with saints
seasoning her wounded looks
and gray, unfamiliar head

I recognized her sadness in
the lines around my mouth

 

 

 

Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, 2023), from which "Girl in Mirror" is an outtake. He is co-editing, with Brynn Saito, an anthology of poetry on Nikkei (Japanese American/Japanese Canadian) incarceration, which is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in 2025.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

 

Tuesday poem #552 : Alina Stefanescu : Poem for Rob on the Last Day of It

 

 

I know it's a bad title but I'm giving it to myself as a gift on a day nearly canceled by sunlight.
                 -       David Berman, "Self-Portrait at 28"

 

Late August, it is. Endless purple
hydrangeas, the wild of. Promiscuous
ducks all over the end of. A season whose
paint blisters on plaster. That hot-or-not beige
in the husk of sold houses. The urgence of
anything at its finest. The air was so, the
asphalt etc. A fog hanging like theory
over our foreheads. And my notebook
unpacking its baggage at the train
track. As in how much vacation. As in
I hope you did all the things Derrida disavowed
in those postcards. As in manifest and overcome
the latent etc. Per current trends in discourse.
Rob, your book is the finest. My head said.
My head is also for anything goes
until it comes to the unfinished
manuscript. That world one is whole in.
The whole only-writing of it. Of living so
single-thrall. But August, is also. The bruise
of pink chalk in the fist of the daughter
meeting sidewalks in the feet of the son.
And we draw ourselves into a hopscotch.
As if explicitly. My dog Radu eats the rock of.
Barks to mark the stop of. The hops ceasing
like theory missed the pocket it called. And
maybe each game we play is scripted to be
the pseudo that totally changes us, like a chicken
pox scar in the blank spot and my doggerel
in the margins of. Did I mention how analogic
the ghost ball was? And the green so etc.
The vastness all hot & not scented. The self
of the draft v. the draught. And me at its finest.

 

 

 

 

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #551 : John Levy : Note to Leslie from La Jolla (9/9/23)

 

 

 

What do I see here, at 9:40 a.m., from a room
overlooking the Pacific which is obligingly

across the street? Surfers

waiting for waves on a fairly calm ocean, and,
further out, two small starkly white boats (the starkness

because of the deep blue waves

stretching to the vague, greyer, blue horizon).
But you’re not here.

I wish you were. There is a little boat further out,

not as white, plus
a yellow kayak and a blue kayak that look, from

here, less than an inch long apiece.

Now a seagull way out there, white, a little

closer to shore than the kayaks. You're
not here, but you're close

in my mind and, as they say in Spanish,

my corazon. I prefer "corazon" to "heart,"
for what it's worth. What you're worth

is constantly

what fills my life with with worth. Ah, a
typo, the doubled with, as if one with isn't enough

when I'm thinking of you.

 

 

 

John Levy lives in Tucson. His most recent book of poetry is 54 poems: selected & new (Shearsman Books, 2023). He has also published a journal about living in a Greek village for two years (1983-85) entitled We Don’t Kill Snakes Where We Come From (Querencia Books, 1994) and a book of short stories and prose pieces, A Mind’s Cargo Shifting: Fictions (First Intensity Press, 2011).

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan